Earliest Usage
Following World War II, Alcoa created an internal "Imagineering" program to encourage innovative usage of aluminum in order to keep up demand.
A Time magazine ad from February 16, 1942, titled "The Place They Do Imagineering" relates the origin,
For a long time we've sought a word to describe what we all work at hard here at Alcoa... IMAGINEERING is the word... Imagineering is letting your imagination soar, and then engineering it down to earth.
Other notable pre-Disney usages include an October 24, 1942 mention in the New York Times in an article titled "Christian Imagineering," a 1944 Oxford English Dictionary entry which cites an advertisement from the Wall Street Journal, and the use by artist Arthur C Radebaugh to describe his work, which was mentioned in the article "Black Light Magic" in the Portsmouth Times, Portsmouth, Ohio, 1947.
Read more about this topic: Imagineering
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