This story is from Collision Quarterly Magazine and talks about the paint booth. I was waiting for a customer to arrive and picked up the magazine to pass the time until the customer arrived. I started to read the article and was so intrigued; I could not put it down until I finished the entire article. I thought it would be a good idea to share it with my readers of the Blog. Hope you enjoy the article as much as I did! Please note, The Auto Body Blog does not endorse nor promote the products listed in this article below.

Anyone in Ontario who has a cottage probably drove by the DeVilbiss plant in Barrie hundreds of times. The huge facilities, expansive parking lot bustling with activity, trucks going in and coming out and the grounds manicured like a golf course were hard to miss. Today the building stands empty, the parking lot is cracked and grayed, windows are broken and the manicured grounds are overgrown with weeds and uncut grass. What happened? Where did they go? Doctor Allen DeVilbiss, who developed a spray atomizer to provide an easier way to apply medicines to patients throats, founded the DeVilbiss Corporation in Toledo Ohio, in 1888. Allen’s son Thomas was an inventor and took his fathers design and re-worked it to develop spray guns and perfume atomizers in the early 1900’s. This was the first big step that would later establish the DeVilbiss Corporation as an innovator in the auto refinishes industry. Thomas’ spray guns proved to be a revolutionary addition to the spray-painting application in mass production environments–automotive as well as manufacturing. The DeVilbiss Company quickly expanded their product lines to better serve the spray guns and the new‘mass production’ manufacturers that began in the early 1900’s. Air compressors and paint spray booths were quickly added to the DeVilbiss Companies product offerings.

Source: Theautobodyblog.com