SPECIAL POST: The Gabriel Williams Company

on

SPECIAL POST: The Gabriel Williams Company - With Input from Relatives of Its Founders

Gabriel Williams 1950s patterned metal box bag, possibly aluminum, with a golden finish. From the collection of The Vintage Purse Museum.

The Vintage Purse Museum acquired its first Gabriel Williams metal handbag a number of years ago. At that time, there were no newspaper archive services and we were stumped by this maker name as it wasn’t one with which we were familiar. 

We thought it could be of limited manufacture, but filed it away for future research as we were working on other articles. Years later, one of the members of a vintage purse share group (that our curator administrates on a social media site) posted their nearly identical bag. This once again sparked our desire to learn more about this maker. We dug in and found that The Gabriel Williams Company was featured in the June 1946 issue of Mechanix Illustrated magazine. The article said Gabriel Williams Company of New York was a “research laboratory in the fields of electronics, physics, color design and internal combustion engines.” According to the article, Gabriel Williams opened its first lapidary workshop the prior year, and later had plants in Pennsylvania and on the West Coast. (Gabriel Williams founders' family members with whom we communicated said that additional plants seem unlikely.)


Article about The Gabriel Williams Company, Mechanix Illustrated, June 1946. Screenshot from the nonprofit Internet Archive.

The owners of the company, brothers Matthew and Daniel Rosenthal, created a synthetic mineral called “hemetine.” The process for making the hard, scratch-resistant silvery-black hemetine was discovered by Daniel, the company’s research chemist, while experimenting with hematite (a common black-red mineral composed mostly of iron oxide) to potentially find new materials for war use. 

According to the website Gemstonebuzz.com (excerpted), “Hemetine…is a mixture of steel with sulphate of chromium and nickel. (It) is much more magnetic than hematite.” (Note: Hemetine is also sometimes mistakenly spelled “hematine,” a word that was used as early as the 1890s with a different meaning.)

Very interesting information, but once again we set it aside… until we acquired another metal handbag made by the Gabriel Williams Company in the style of “bird cage” bags. (“Bird cage” is what they were called in old advertisements; they are often referred to today as “egg basket” handbags.)
And so we began our investigation anew. We were fortunate to connect with a Rosenthal relative who kindly shared some family history, and gave us additional contacts within the family for more information, which we’ve included in this article. (All family members' names withheld for privacy.)

First, here’s what we know about the Rosenthal family based on genealogy records: Elizabeth “Lizzie” Rosenthal was a 43-year-old widow, born in Russia, and living in New York in 1920 with her four children, all born in New Jersey or New York: Matthew (b. 1902), Abraham (nicknamed “Abby,” b. 1905), Dorothy (birth name “Sadie Dorothy” b. 1910) and Daniel (mistakenly called “David” in the 1920 US Census, b. 1912). At age 17, Matthew was working in the jewelry business. 15-year-old Abby was working as a clerk, having dropped out of school to help support the family after his father’s untimely death. Ten years earlier, according to the 1910 US Census, Lizzie’s husband and her children’s father, William (b. 1874), either owned a jewelry store or worked there as a jeweler. However, a relative told The Vintage Purse Museum that William was a peddler (traveling salesman), and passed away from tetanus around 1918 after spending a night in a barn, somehow injuring himself and causing the fatal disease.

Lizzie, 52, and her four children, ages 28, 25, 21 and 18, were all still living together in New York in 1930. Per the 1930 US Census, Matthew was a salesman at a trucking company, Abraham was a salesman at a jewelry house, and Dorothy was a dressmaker.

By 1940, Matthew was a cosmetics’ manufacturer and living with his mother. She likely passed away between 1940 and 1950, as the 1950 US Census shows that he lived alone and was president of a manufacturing firm that made something we could not discern from the record. (We’ve noticed that earlier Census records were much more legible than the recently publicly released 1950 US Census.)

The family was surprised that their patriarch was also known as William because the children and grandchildren only referred to him as Gabriel. However, we can safely assume that the Gabriel Williams company was named for the father of its founders, Matthew and Daniel Rosenthal. It should be noted that many immigrants Americanized their names, so William and Lizzie Rosenthal’s original first names were likely changed when they arrived in the US from Europe. (We found an 1892 ship’s manifest showing the arrival of a 19-year-old Gabriel Rosenthal to Ellis Island; however, we can’t be sure this is the same Mr. Rosenthal.)

The first newspaper article we found about the Gabriel Williams Company is dated December 1944. It lauds the company’s founder Matthew Rosenthal for hiring veterans to work in their “gem polishing and cutting firm.” Matthew, said the article, was a former US Marine who served at Guadalcanal, Bougainville and New Caledonia. Another article was published in March 1945, explaining that “Mat” and his brother “Dan” run the firm, which only employs veterans, and makes “hemetine,” a “semi-precious stone” used for rings and industrial purposes.

By 1945, these hemetine rings, many with a Roman soldier intaglio design, were being marketed to US servicemen as a “male” engagement ring. There was even a “Hemetine Club of America,” allegedly composed of GIs’ wives and sweethearts, who selected the “ten greatest romances of the year.”

1940s Roman soldier intaglio ring similar to those made by Gabriel Williams Co. Ring from the collection of Wendy Dager. We believe this to be hematite as it is not magnetic, but we can't be certain. However, it gives a general idea of what the hemetine intaglios looked like, as does the ad for a similar ring below. 

15 Jun 1946, Sat The Journal Herald (Dayton, Ohio) Newspapers.com

This club was said to have 157 chapters from coast to coast. However, based on the dearth of documentation, we suspect the Hemetine Club of America did not exist other than in 1945-1946 press releases and was a marketing strategy by the Gabriel Williams Company to drum up interest in their hemetine jewelry. The fact that it was targeted toward military personnel and their spouses is yet another clue that this was the brainchild of the WWII veteran Matt Rosenthal and his brother Daniel.

The brothers found themselves in a bit of a pickle in 1948 when the Federal Trade Commission ordered them to stop making claims that hemetine was a natural material and that it was more durable than hematite. There’s no indication who brought this to the attention of the FTC, but we could find no lawsuits against the Rosenthals in online legal archives, so it appears to have been settled without dispute. 

The Gabriel Williams Co. also made synthetic star sapphires using a process invented by Dan Rosenthal, as well as other types of jewelry components. Rosenthal relatives still have some of these pieces as family remembrances.

In 1949, a number of newspapers carried a column filler that said, “Hemetine, newly discovered semi-precious stone, was used in 312,000 men’s engagement rings in 1945.” There is no source cited for this information. By then, the Gabriel Williams Company had shifted gears and began manufacturing other types of items. (Note: We found newspaper ads for hemetine rings as late as 1968, but we don’t know if these were made from Gabriel Williams’ products.)

We can’t say for sure when the brothers manufactured their handbags, but based on the styles of the two in our collection, we believe they were made between 1951-1953. 

Gabriel Williams "bird cage" style handbag, from the collection of The Vintage Purse Museum

Gabriel Williams maker mark at bottom of bird cage bag above.

The “bird cage” handbag came in several slightly different shapes and sizes by a number of makers, but the Gabriel Williams’ mini-bag has distinctive twisted metal detail. We found ads for these with no maker names, so perhaps the Gabriel Williams version was sold in stores during their heyday, from about 1951-1952. However, it’s possible the company could’ve made them after the trend had passed, which is why there are so few with their imprint. It also could be that, because the detail is intricate, they were too expensive to keep producing.

Original 1953 press photo of Miss Irena Sloupova at Ascot, carrying her "black and gold cage" bag, a bird cage style bag lined in fabric. Photo from the collection of The Vintage Purse Museum, gift of Mary Nunn.

Dorset Rex (another maker, not affiliated with Gabriel Williams) "bird cage" bag, from the collection of The Vintage Purse Museum. Note the difference between this one and the Gabriel Williams bag, which is more ornate, with its twisted wire effect.

Similarly, the gorgeous all-metal Gabriel Williams box bag (shown at the top of this article) is a work of art and probably costly to manufacture. These are quite different from other metal bags of the era, which generally were composed of latticed metal strips with plastic tops. In 1954, there was also a very limited run of aluminum handbags made by an aluminum giftware/tableware manufacturer, which may be what inspired the Gabriel Williams bag. Or maybe Gabriel Williams' handbag was the inspiration for the aluminum company!

Gabriel Williams maker mark on bag at top of this article.

Interior view of Gabriel Williams bag pictured at top of article.

Interior view of same bag, opposite side.

Daniel Rosenthal was certainly an innovator. The 1950 US Census lists him as proprietor of a “sack” manufacturing company. A relative told us that Dan developed a disposable trash container for use in automobiles. In 1954, Gabriel Williams was making babies’ bassinets.
In 1955, they announced their intent to produce cellulosic sponge scouring pads with built-in detergent. In 1963, Daniel Rosenthal patented a “mixing apparatus for quickly reactive components,” with Gabriel Williams as the patent assignee. The company’s address at that time was in Freeport, New York. (It is now an appliance repair shop.)

The Vintage Purse Museum was also told by the family that, over time, Gabriel Williams produced gold wire epergnes (table centerpieces), lamps, and novelty glassware for the Libbey glass company.

After his brother Matthew died in 1981, Daniel Rosenthal registered Gabriel Williams Co., Inc. as a business corporation in Nassau County, New York. Daniel passed away in 1989 and the company name was declared inactive by 1990, leaving a long, rich history to be shared three decades later.

This article c2023 by Wendy Dager/The Vintage Purse Museum. Special thanks to the Rosenthal family. The Vintage Purse Museum relies on Google searches for online documents and utilizes services to which we have paid subscriptions, including Newspapers.com and MyHeritage.com. For this article, we also used Archive.org. Please do not use photos or information from our websites without requesting permission, info@vintagepursemuseum.com. 

Comments

Post a Comment