A special thank you to Otto Boll

Many of you are aware of the Research Service that I have been offering for some time now, which I started in an effort to share with others my accumulated published knowledge about our hobby. A number of you have already taken advantage of this service in an effort to gain more knowledge about a particular aspect of insulator collecting that you are interested in, and/or to enhance an insulator display that you are working on (using advertisements and patents).

Another feature of this service is to preserve the history of insulator manufacture by providing collectors, who have acquired historical material. an avenue to ensure that their historical materials will be preserved for future reference (in the form of either copies of their items or donation of their original items). I will accept donations of original historical materials to the Research Service with the guarantee that such material will never be sold. When I am no longer able to maintain the Research Service, these donations, along with all of my research files (which includes all of Jack Tod's files and drawings), will be passed on to someone in the hobby who will continue this service, and who will likewise preserve the research files intact.

I am pleased to announce that the first major donation to the Research Service was recently accepted from OTTO BOLL, of Appleton, Wisconsin. Otto donated several important historical items, along with several insulator catalogs. You may remember the announcement of M-4343 in the January, 1993 issue of CJ. This insulator was made by the Locke Insulator Mfg. Co. based on a patent granted to Mr. H. H. Brown for the metal crown. Otto donated an iron crown for these insulators, and a museum quality unipart specimen (which has a pretty rusty brown glaze color) that matches the Brown patent drawing. This insulator specimen is the only example of this experimental unipart style. It was made of porcelain with a bright brass crown cemented into the body of the insulator.

Perhaps more important. Otto also donated his two-inch thick folder of original historical documents about the Brown patent. I haven't had a chance to digest all that this folder contains, but it does include many photographs of experimental Brown patent insulator designs, test data. original patent. and many letters, detailing the correspondence between Mr. Brown and Locke. On the following page is a photograph of the experimental unipart insulator and iron crown that Otto donated.