Sylvania emerged from the end of the lumbering era, beginning in a building owned and used by the C. B. Howard Lumber Company after lumbermen C. B. Howard, Henry Auchu, and Robert Kaye purchased the St. Marys Company and moved it to Emporium. It began as the Novelty Incandescent Lamp Company, or Nilco, and when radios became popular by the early 1920's and demand for radio tubes surged, a separate company was formed because tube manufacturing was very similar to making light bulbs; that company was called Sylvania. The first case of tubes was shipped on Thanksgiving Day in 1924, and by the early 1930's Sylvania radio tubes were being sold worldwide. The company expanded during World War Two as wartime demand for radio tubes used in equipment from walkie-talkies to radar units increased the need for laborers. With most men in the military, women from neighboring towns and states came to Emporium for the well-paying jobs, and briefly during the 1940's women outnumbered men eight to one, leading one national magazine to call Emporium "Girl's Town." After World War Two, advances in television tubes made them the mainstay of production, and in 1950 Sylvania began manufacturing televisions; by the early 1960s it had made advances in color TV. Sylvania dominated the local workforce until closing in the 1980's.