Shell 'Shellubrication Service' sign. Painted on alloy. Circa 1950s.
Dimensions- 86.5 x 86.5cm (nearly 3 x 3ft)
Shell plc is a British publicly traded multinational oil and gas company headquartered at Shell Centre in London, United Kingdom. Shell is a public limited company with a primary listing on the London Stock Exchange (LSE) and secondary listings on Euronext Amsterdam and the New York Stock Exchange.
It is one of the oil and gas "supermajors" and by revenue and profits is one of the largest companies in the world, ranking within the top 10 of the Fortune global 500 since 2000.
Shell was formed in 1907 through the merger of Royal Dutch Petroleum Company of the Netherlands and The "Shell" Transport and Trading Company of the United Kingdom.
During the First World War, Shell was the main supplier of fuel to the British Expeditionary Force. It was also the sole supplier of aviation fuel and supplied 80 percent of the British Army's TNT. It also volunteered all of its shipping to the British Admiralty.
Name & Logo
The name Shell is linked to The "Shell" Transport and Trading Company. In 1833, the founder's father, Marcus Samuel Sr., founded an import business to sell seashells to London collectors. When collecting seashell specimens in the Caspian Sea area in 1892, the younger Samuel realised there was potential in exporting lamp oil from the region and commissioned the world's first purpose-built oil tanker, the Murex (Latin for a type of snail shell), to enter this market; by 1907 the company had a fleet.
Although for several decades the company had a refinery at Shell Haven on the Thames, there is no evidence of this having provided the name.
The Shell logo is one of the most familiar commercial symbols in the world. This logo is known as the "pecten" after the sea shell Pecten maximus (the giant scallop), on which its design is based. The yellow and red colours used are thought to relate to the colours of the flag of Spain, as Shell built early service stations in California, previously a Spanish colony.
The current revision of the logo was designed by Raymond Loewy in 1971.
source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shell_plc (edited and citations removed).