DeVilbiss and the Atomizer: How a Doctor's Invention Painted the World
Near Toledo, Ohio
In eighteen eighty-eight, a Toledo physician named Allen DeVilbiss had a simple problem: how to deliver medicine to the back of a patient's throat without making them swallow it whole. His solution was equally simple. He combined a rubber bulb, some tubing, and the base of an oil can into a device that broke liquid into a fine mist. He called it an atomizer.
DeVilbiss retired from medicine by eighteen ninety and established a manufacturing company in Toledo to produce the device commercially. The atomizers sold well, primarily as medical instruments and as perfume dispensers. The company grew steadily. Then his son Thomas had a different idea.
It was nineteen oh-seven, and American industry was beginning to grapple with mass production. Furniture factories, railroad car shops, and early automobile plants all needed to coat their products with paint or lacquer, and they were doing it by hand with brushes. It was slow, expensive, and inconsistent. Thomas DeVilbiss adapted his father's atomizer principle to handle paint rather than medicine, feeding it with compressed air rather than a rubber bulb. He had built one of the first practical spray guns.
The consequences were enormous. By nineteen twenty-four, the Oakland automobile, manufactured by General Motors, was being painted with DeVilbiss spray guns and DuPont Duco lacquer. Painting time for a car fell sharply. The spray gun made it possible to produce automobiles in the volume the modern world required.
Toledo, already the Glass City, quietly became something else: the city whose tools helped paint everything that moved in the twentieth century.
