U.S. industrial designer born in Minneapolis, Minnesota who studied at the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts, the Art League of Minneapolis, and the Minneapolis School of Art from 1927 to 1929, after which he worked at the advertising agency of batten, baron, Durstine & Osborn. In 1931 he opened an industrial design firm, J.M. Little and Associates in Minneapolis.

        While managing his office, he accepted professorships in the field of industrial design at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and later at the University of California at Berkeley. In 1936, he joined the industrial design firm of Van Doren & Associates in Toledo, Ohio. When Van Doren left to establish a second office in Philadelphia, Little remained in charge of the Toledo Office.

       After World War II, as a member of the Society of Industrial Designers (SID), Little lectured on product design at an SID Product Design Conference at Lehigh University in 1949, and continued to lead the Toledo office of Van Doren & Associates until 1957, when Van Doren passed away and the Toledo office was closed.

  Excerpted from “Designers of the Machine Age” by Carroll Gantz, to be published 2014 by McFarland & Company, Inc.

           U.S. industrial designer born in Russia and as a child, immigrated to the U.S., where he attended the City College of New York and New York University. He later attended the Art Students League in New York, and served in the U.S. Army during World War I. He was hired as an advertising copywriter, and eventually promoted to director of advertising.  In the late 1920s, he established the firm of Design Engineers in Manhattan, which developed patents to be sold to manufacturers.

           In 1930, he designed the Beta Chair, a modern design using steel, chrome-plated tubing, for the Howell Manufacturing Company. He was a member of the  American Union of Decorative Artists and Craftsmen (AUDAC) formed in 1927, and displayed his designs at  its 1931 exhibition, Modern Decoration and Design, at the Brooklyn Museum. The Beta Chair was also exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art’s 1934 Machine Art Exhibition.

           In 1947, he designed a wristwatch with a round, black face without numerals, symbols, or lines marking hours or minutes, with only a single gold dot marking the 12 o-clock position, manufactured by a Switzerland firm. The design was copied by Zenith Movado without credit or compensation to Horwitt, a prime example of design piracy. It would take 27 years until Movado finally settled with Horwitt for $29,000 in 1975.

           In the meantime, the watch was included in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in 1960, and became known as the ‘Museum Watch.’ In 1969, Horwitt  used the design in wall clock  No. 4601 for the Howard Miller Clock Company.

     U.S. industrial designer born in Vienna, Austria, who was a member of the Weiner Sezession (Vienna Succession) early in the 20^th century. He studied architecture at the Berlin Polytechnic, and immigrated to the U.S. in 1914, settling in New York. By 1922 he had established Frankl Galleries on 48^th Street, and by 1924 had a showroom, Skyscraper Furniture, on Madison Avenue, selling furniture of his own design, generally combination desks and bookcases, but also lamps. His designs, starting in 1925, resembled the New York skyscrapers, in that they were tall and narrow to fit small New York apartments.  They became a sensation and resulted in instant fame. He wrote several books, including New Dimensions: TheDecorative Arts of Today in Words and Pictures (1928), Form and Reform: Practical Handbook of Modern Interiors (1930), Machine-Made Leisure (1932), and Space for Living (1938).

          He was among the members of American Union of Decorative Artists and Craftsmen (AUDAC), formed in 1927 to oppose copying of designs, and to exhibit their work in exhibitions and publications. In 1934 he relocated to California, becoming an interior decorator in his gallery on Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills in a style that would be called, ‘California Modern’ designing for movie starts such as Fred Astaire, Katherine Hepburn and Alfred Hitchcock.

       He later applied his talents to posters, greeting cards, and theatrical sets, and selling imported objects from Europe. But his fortunes shifted from prosperity to poverty, and he suffered from depression and emotional insecurity late in life.

 Excerpted from “Designers of the Machine Age” by Carroll Gantz, to be published 2014 by McFarland & Company, Inc.