A WW2 CLAIM FOR ROGER CONANT’S ‘DESCENDANTS’

 

While researching in university archives, Salem historian Benjamin Shallop came across this 1943 issue of the Sylvania Beam, a newsletter published by the Sylvania lighting business which opened factories in Salem in 1916 and 1936. The cover photo showing the famous statue of ‘SALEM’S FOUNDER’, with the caption ‘HIS DESCENDANTS WORK AND FIGHT’, suggested that some of Roger Conant’s descendants may have indeed worked for the company during World War Two.

Fifty employees of Sylvania lost their lives during the war according to official records. No actual Conant descendant has come forward to back up the claim of working for the company, but as a figure of speech it was an effective wartime message.

The company’s Massachusetts origins go back to 1901, when its founder Frank Augustus Poor, born in Salem in 1879, joined an electrical manufacturer in Middleton MA. He later bought out his partner and started the Bay State Lamp Company in Danvers MA. Recycling proved to be a profitable business: burned-out carbon filament lamps were cut open, refilled with new filaments and then resold.

The company grew as its founder was joined by more family members and switched to making new light bulbs as the Hygrade Lamp Company, expanding into the manufacturing of radio and television tubes. After several mergers, the Sylvania name has become one of the best known in today’s lighting business.

In 1942, as Sylvania Electric Products Inc., the company adopted the wartime slogan ‘Victory Is Our Business’. Some 13,700 men and women were employed in its twelve plants, including in Salem at Loring Street, to manufacture very special tubes in top secret conditions. These were used in what was known as the proximity or variable time (V-T) fuze, a sophisticated device which vastly increased the lethality of anti-aircraft guns and field artillery.

Research into the possibility of such a device had been carried out since the 1930s by Germany and Japan as well as Britain and the U.S., but only with the latter’s entry into the war did effective collaboration between British and American scientists begin to yield results.

The new technology was based on a radar-like electronic mechanism fitted into an artillery shell moving at an initial speed of 2,600 feet per second. The mechanism needed to be capable of detonating seven pounds of high explosive at the moment the shell came near an enemy aircraft travelling at 300 miles per hour.

The device proved its worth on 5 January 1943 when used in shells fired by the USS Helena’s 5-inch guns against Japanese dive bombers off Guadalcanal in the South Pacific. According to the U.S. Navy, as reported in a 1951 issue of the Sylvania Beam, the V-T fuze was the second most effective weapon of World War Two.

Are you a descendant of Roger Conant or interested in his life and times. Join the Roger Conant Club!  It's based in his birthplace of East Budleigh, Devon, UK. Membership is totally free. Just email: conantcourier@gmail.com  with your name. You will receive regular copies of The Conant Courier. It's an online, seasonal newsletter of 30+ pages. Along with local history content the newsletter includes features and news from Salem and Beverly, the cities founded by Roger Conant in 1626.