| ITT is an old American company, International Telephone and Telegraph, founded in 1920. They diversified into many consumer and professional electronic manufacturing activities, and owing to the inordinately high profits that used to be earned in lamps, like many electrical companies they also wished to get into that business.
Their chance came in 1966 when ITT took over a French company that consisted of three manufacturers who had previously joined together : Claude, Paz et Visseaux. They also took over one of the small American manufacturers, Champion, but I don't know precisely when.
ITT grew to become a real global power in a wide variety of electrical businesses, when I was a child we had an ITT television and several other domestic appliances of that company. Later they diversified into completely unrelated businesses like their takeover of Sheraton Hotels and Avis Car rentals. Perhaps at a certain moment the company became too huge, and began to lose its direction. It went through a phase similar to Westinghouse and GTE and which Philips seems to be doing to itself at the moment, selling off various business units and making poor management decisions with the parts of the business that it kept. Like a handful of other formerly giant corporations, this saw the company shrink away to almost nothing. The lighting division of ITT was purchased by Sylvania in 1980. Since ITT was a more powerful brand name than Sylvania in some countries, Sylvania used the ITT brand name for a number of years. In Europe the Sylvania lamps were in fact branded ITT-Claude for many years.
I suspect that your mercury lamp was in fact made by Sylvania in USA, but ITT-Claude also made mercury lamps of the American BT style in the north of France.
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