G Felsenthal & Sons

Brown text on a blue background with an oval window around a thermometer

Early in his career, Gabriel Felsenthal was a watchmaker, but this would eventually lead him to making jewelry, vanity cases and advertising novelties like celluloid buttons. His company, G. Felsenthal & Sons was established around 1896 in Chicago as a wholesale jewelry company. Soon after he left that company to his brother and started a new company in 1898 that specialized in advertising novelties. With his interest in cameras and his background in watch and jewelry making, he was able to use his skills and knowledge to specialize in the use of photographic images in his advertising novelties like buttons and vanity cases.

Beginning during World War II, the company was a major manufacturer of plastic calculating instruments used by the Army Air Forces and by the Navy Bureau of Aeronautics. This proved so successful that they became known as The Felsenthal Instrument Company and continued to make a variety of plastic items for commercial and technical purposes until 1976.