Aerospace Manufacturer Logos

[Noha307]

I recently discovered that, unless they carried a separate copyright notice, magazine advertisements before 1977 are public domain. So, over the past two months, I have been clipping, cropping, and uploading aerospace manufacturer labels to Wikimedia Commons. The initial goal was to add logos to the infoboxes of Wikipedia articles that were missing them. Therefore, I tended to avoid the biggest companies because they were already covered.

However, my intent has somewhat changed over the course of this project. The focus is now more about making as many logos as possible freely available for anyone to use. So, if you need one for a project feel free to use one of these! At the moment I have uploaded a total of 320 logos (in addition to some previously uploaded by others) that have been sorted into one of four categories:

• Logos of aircraft manufacturers
• Logos of aircraft engine manufacturers
• Logos of aircraft propeller manufacturers
• Logos of aircraft accessory manufacturers

The publications I have used include, but are not limited to:

• Aerial Age - Internet Archive
• Aerial Age Weekly - Hathi Trust
• Aero Digest - Internet Archive
• Aero - Hathi Trust
• Aero & Hydro - Hathi Trust
• Aeronautics - Hathi Trust
• Aircraft - Internet Archive
• Aviation Week - Internet Archive
• Popular Aviation/Flying - Google Books

If you would like to suggest a logo, I can try to look it up, but there are a few caveats:

• Unless the logo is simple text or shapes, it must be published before 1977 in an advertisement that does not have a copyright notice.
• Since I am not familiar with the copyright laws of other countries, I am only dealing with logos published in American publications.
• If anyone wants to contribute by providing an actual scan, that's great! However, I need to have the name of the publication, the issue date, the page number, and a scan of the entire page to confirm that it is in the public domain.
  
  • However, even if they do not meet the requirements to be uploaded, examples of logos can still be useful for reference. I am far from familiar with every logo out there, so knowing what to keep an eye out for is helpful.
• I am not including companies outside of airframe, engine, propeller and accessory manufacturers. (e.g. no small parts suppliers) I had to put some sort of limit on what I was considering for my own sanity.
• I have to be able to determine that it is an actual logo used by the company and not just a one-off or design flourish.

A couple other points:

• Paging through the old magazines has been really fascinating because I've come across logos for a number of companies that I've never even heard of before and only built a handful of aircraft (but apparently still took the time to craft a logo).
• All things being equal, of the sources listed above, Aero Digest has been the best to pull from and Aviation has been the worst. This is not due to any inherent aspects of either magazine, but simply because the former was scanned at the highest resolution and the latter was scanned at the lowest.
• The work is time consuming because not only do I want to find an example of the logo, but I want to find the best example. This involves using the search function on the Internet Archive, Hathi Trust, and Google Books to find all of the instances of said logo and then essentially comparing them side by side one by one.
• For the curious - and in a similar style to how I described reproducing aircraft history cards in a post in another thread - this is the process as I listed it on my Wikimedia Commons page:
  

  The sources are searched by using character strings that usually include the name of the company excepting the last word, which indicates the company's type (i.e. company, corporation, or incorporated). An example of each of the search results is opened in a separate tab. They are then compared until the best version is determined according to scan resolution, size, "cleanliness", and other factors. The image is then screenshotted using Windows Snipping tool and saved to the desktop. The file name is the name of the company as represented in the advertisement (which may or may not be the most well known formulation of the company's name) or the name of the specific product. If two or more versions of the logo with the exact same name are present, then they are differentiated by placing the year of the advertisement in parentheses at the end of the file name. If two or more versions of the logo with the exact same name and from the same year are present, then they are numbered sequentially starting with the one earliest in the year. The files are then opened in GIMP where they are edited. The images are cropped to within 4-5 pixels of the most extreme points of the logo according to the most drastic change in contrast between two sets of pixels. If the image includes extraneous markings – such as those from parts of the advertisement that are not part of the logo – they are then hidden with the clone tool. When uploaded the images are placed into one of four categories: logos of aircraft manufacturers, logos of aircraft engine manufacturers, logos of aircraft propeller manufacturers, or logos of aircraft accessory manufacturers. If they exist, they are also placed into either the relevant company or specific product category as well.

I hope these are of use to someone, so please enjoy!

[Cvairwerks]

Noah: Something to keep in mind is that a number of the manufacturers had evolving logos over the years, For example, Fairchild's aircraft side of things had about 5 different ones, some that only were used for a year or two.

[Noha307]

Noah: Something to keep in mind is that a number of the manufacturers had evolving logos over the years, For example, Fairchild's aircraft side of things had about 5 different ones, some that only were used for a year or two.

Yeah, I know what you mean. I appreciate that distinction too, because I would like to include an example of each variation.

Would you be able to describe the Fairchild logos or when they were used? These are the ones I know of so far:

(Source: Wikimedia Commons)

(Source: Wikimedia Commons)

(Source: Wikimedia Commons)

(Source: Wikimedia Commons)

(Source: Wikimedia Commons)

(Source: Wikimedia Commons)

I know the last two are technically Kreider-Reisner logos, but I assume that Fairchild kept using them after they bought the company. I also included the Ranger Engines logo for completeness. The one I'm currently curious about is the Fairchild Camera and Instrument Corporation. I assume that they had to have a distinct logo, but the only ones I have been able to find for it so far are for the semiconductor portion.

[tulsaboy]

This was an early variant of the Spartan logo

Spartan Logo.jpg (60.52 KiB) Viewed 8209 times

This one was the most common version of the logo in the late 1920's-early 1930's.

There are more Spartan versions I will try to get for you. I have them, but just have to figure out how to make them small enough to upload here.

kevin

[Noha307]

Those are excellent! I especially appreciate the high resolution! Thanks!

There are more Spartan versions I will try to get for you. I have them, but just have to figure out how to make them small enough to upload here.

If it helps, I use an image manipulation program called GIMP - essentially a free version of Photoshop - to edit images to fit within the parameters to be uploaded to WIX. (For reference, the maximum dimensions are 1024 x 1024 pixels.)

However, I would prefer not to lose any of the quality by forcing you to reduce the size of your scans. If you would like to try them, there are a number of free and anonymous image hosting sites - such as Postimage, Pasteboard, ImgBB - with far less restrictive requirements.

Note: I will need you to provide information about the documents the images were taken from before I can use them. This includes the type of source (e.g. magazine advertisement, letterhead from stationery, etc.) and the date it was created. This is not a requirement of my choosing - Wikimedia Commons more or less mandates images to be in the public domain and it is necessary to confirm that they are not covered by copyright. (This is information I usually like to ask for anyway - since I like to be exact in terms of where the information was sourced from if someone wants to know more - but in this case it is required.)

[tulsaboy]

Email me at univtulsa at yahoo dot com

We can discuss and I can probably email you some different versions.
kevin

[Fouga23]

This is a wonderful and historically important project! Thanks for doing this

[Noha307]

Good news! The project has reached a milestone. A total of 400 logos have been uploaded to Wikimedia Commons! They are broken down as follows (the latter two entries only being separate from the others on my userpage):

• Logos of aircraft manufacturers – 156
• Logos of aircraft engine manufacturers – 38
• Logos of aircraft propeller manufacturers – 24
• Logos of aircraft accessory manufacturers – 70
• Specific Aircraft Product Logos – 104
• Other Aerospace Logos – 8

Since most of the major manufacturers have been covered and the easy to find logos discovered at this point, expect the pace of new uploads to slow down significantly.

On a related note, the National Museum of the United States Air Force posted a video the other day about the re-restoration of their S4C and I was very pleasantly surprised to learn that they used one of the Thomas-Morse logos that had been uploaded as part of this project!

Also, the Spartan logo provided by tulsaboy was touched up and uploaded:

(Source: Wikimedia Commons)

As before, please feel free to suggest or provide other logos that meet the requirements in the original post. For some reason, advertisements featuring propeller manufacturer logos have been particularly hard to find. The remaining major airframer logos that are proving difficult to find good quality, public domain versions of include: the Columbia Aircraft Corporation (Potential Alternate), Globe Aircraft Corporation (Source), Luscombe Airplane Corporation, Rearwin Airplanes, Seversky Aircraft Corporation, Vega Aircraft Corporation, and Vought-Sikorsky Aircraft Division.

[Fouga23]

Wonderful

[ZRX61]

That first link appears to be somewhat short on the various Lockheed logos.

[ZRX61]

[ZRX61]

[Noha307]

Just a quick note that there are reproductions of 18 examples of propeller manufacturer trademarks on pages 210-212 of Appendix H of the book Restoring Museum Aircraft by Robert C. Mikesh.

[marine air]

Thanks for this excellent effort. It will be really useful in the future.

[Spitty]

ROTOL propellers?