Life — May 8, 1913 — page 3: what you’re looking at

What you’re looking at

# Analysis This page is **primarily an advertisement**, not satirical content. It's a full-page ad for the B. F. Sturtevant Company of Hyde Park, Massachusetts, promoting their "Sturtevant Electric Generating Sets." The ad emphasizes portable electric power generation for rural and remote locations. The surrounding images show diverse applications: farms, ships, lighthouses, construction sites, and country estates. The central generator engine is displayed prominently at the top. The pitch targets customers without access to municipal power grids, advertising "light and power for every purpose in every place" using gasoline, kerosene, or gas as fuel. The ad promises "unfailing operation at small cost" and directs readers to catalog No. 20518. This reflects early-20th-century American electrification, when independent power generation was still commercially significant before widespread grid infrastructure.