RADIO ARTIFACT #26

It's just a clear plastic disc glued to a record over the center label of a 78 rpm label. It was made by Penlee Manufacturing in Dubuqe, IA; Box 715. No other company appears to have shared that box, nor did they seem to have any other products. The brand is name Sav-A-Disc. Anyone know anything?

It took 18 years but a reader found an ad for Sav-A-Disc [LINK] in the July 1950 issue of House & Garden. It's nowhere I would have thought to look, but now we have it!  The ad reads  "A thin transparent Vinylite disc for repairing or preventing damage to center spindle holes of phonograph records.  Easy to apply and self-centering! Each packet repairs or protects 10 records. SAV-A-DISC is $1.00 ppd. for a package or 10 discs with SAV-A-DISC cement."

The internet has grown a lot since 2008 so just looking on Google Books now I can find multiple ads for Sav-A-Disc going back to at least 1947.  The ads appear in Newsweek, Popular Science, Mechanix Illustrated among others and I can see they had an exhibit at NAMM in 1948. Also interesting I can see in the Official Gazette of the United States Patent Office that they eventually did patent the trademark as: 527,965. It was originally filed 1946, and finally granted April 24, 1950 for a "plastic centering disc for grooved phonograph records." The phrase made me wonder who was making un-grooved phonograph discs!

The mystery continues though. Who was Penlee mfg? There's no street addresses or phone numbers, and they made no other products under the name Penlee... and it only seemed to exist for about 4 years. The other gap is the patent. I had assumed it was perhaps never granted but I've now seen an image of what must be a late Sav-A-Disc which instead of "patent pending" has a patent number! But it's unreadable!