Dear Jack:

I recently acquired this porcelain object which is a mystery to me. It is embossed T - H. Co., a familiar name, 3-7/8" long by 1-3/4" wide, white glaze. There are four sets of 2 holes each of which one is larger than the other. It looks like these holes were used to fasten it. 

It seems to me this might be a fuse cover of sorts. Maybe you or some other collector can shed some light on this.
Jeffrey Weinberg, NIA #1926 
Staten Island, New York 

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Dear Jeffrey:

It is tempting to start guessing the probable exact use of this early Thomson-Houston device, but that serves no good purpose. Too often people later construe a wild guess as fact! If one of our readers has one of these with some of the hardware attached, we might deduce the answer. 

Jack

Dear Jack: 

At a local flea market, I bought two rather unusual-shaped brown O-B insulators, and they seem to correspond in size and shape to the MACOMB U-244A you showed in the Nov. 1979 column in answer to Wittstock's question, but these O-B ones have a very slightly extended petticoat. If indeed my O-B's are U-244A's, would they be as rare as the MACOMB items? 

I have several U-114's, from an abandoned line. They have mottled glazes ranging from tan, tannish-brown, reddish-brown, etc. All are more or less crudely made, and the top of the partially glazed pinhole has a small concentric indentation. Could these be Pittsburgs, and is the U-114 considered a fairly good insulator among collectors? Incidentally, would this be considered a toll, signal, or what style? 

An old line in my area, eventually to be restrung, has some two-piece multiparts (about 6" by 8"). The top part is dark brown, but the bottom part is white! Would these be worth getting just on the basis of the contrasting glaze colors of the two parts? 

Finally, a question about a very unusual arrangement of wires on an old line which follows the railroad. One single-groove insulator carries two bare (uninsulated) steel wires, running parallel to each other and tied to the same insulator. The insulators range from Hem-9's, Hem. tolls, Hem-42's, and Brookfield beehives. This railroad is a one-track line with no signals or semaphores. What do you feel was the purpose of this two-wire arrangement? 
William C. Ogden, NIA #1857 
Virginia, Minnesota 

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Dear William:

The U-244A MACOMB is a very special case. These dry process insulators made by Illinois are widely collected, mostly scarce to rare, and the U-244A is the toughest of the lot -- only several known. 

I don't know which of the 58 different petticoat-rest "hat" insulators in the Universal Style Chart would fit your O-B one (if any), but certainly no such style made by O-B would be unusual. It might even be the O-B U-320, a current item. 

Those pretty U-114 you have are indeed made by Pittsburg. Whereas many of the smaller U-113 versions have come down from Canada over the years and are reasonably common in collectors' hands, the U-114 is probably on quite a few want lists -- not an exotic style, but it's a bit scarce. I just presumed from its shape and small groove size that it was meant to be a telephone style, so it's in the Style Chart and the others generally referred to as "tolls".

Those multis with the mated brown and white parts would be a real sensation at a show or an a trade list, and you might have a real winner if you could rescue them if and when that line is rebuilt. 

The double-wired line is an oddity, and possibly some reader has a factual answer for it. I could only make a guess. Possibly it was an important signal circuit, and the redundant wire would keep it in service when one wire failed and until repairs could be made. If the line is still in use, someone connected with the railroad would probably know. 

Jack

Dear Jack: 

I've decided to take a moment to send a word of hope to other beginning porcelain collectors. In recent travels, I've found in power company garbage the following:

These may not be the rarest insulators, but some of them are not seen for trade that often -- and they were FREE! All I had to do was pick them up and pack them away. As I collect only power porcelains, I've left many smaller styles. Anyway, visit power companies. You might be surprised. 

Oh yes, you want to know what power companies? Well, I'm not talking, It seems at one of the companies I visited the linemen were talking about large brown insulators with dates and names all over them! Who knows?
Tom Kasner 
Casper, Wyoming 

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Dear Tom:

You're playing my record, since I've been saying that all along. Nearly all the old goodies are now duds for quality, color, style, groove sizes. Just think of all the jewels our some 11,000+ utilities pitch out in a year's time. 

When visiting the Square-D porcelain plant years ago in Peru, Indiana, I noticed some white U-317 Square-D insulators on the street light poles in front of the plant. Naturally I later visited the local utility company a few blocks down the street, and they were tickled pink to have me go through a couple of wooden crates and haul away those "old good for nothin' white insulators". How sweet it is.

At a small "company town" mining utility in Arizona, I was shown to their equipment graveyard out back and told to help myself to anything there not made of copper. About the very first thing my eyeballs landed on was a large pile of short angle-iron crossarms, each sporting a pair of the previously unreported U-84 mine insulators. It took me over an hour with several wrenches to liberate all 34 of those jewels. Quite logical for a mining town utility, but later the manager told me they took them down years ago from the street light circuits! Again, how sweet it is.

Jack

Dear Jack: 

Several years ago, because the Coors Porcelain Co. was in my state, I wondered if they had ever made porcelain insulators. I inquired around some and never found out much. At one of our shows I had a table next to a lady whom I found out had at one time been employed at Coors. She said that she had helped make porcelain insulators for them, so I thought that surely they had. I never carried the matter to the company, but I met a man who told me that he would find out. The information was never forthcoming, so I have been in the dark about the matter since. 

In today's Denver Post I found an article about Coors which solves the puzzle. The article reads, in part, 

"... Late in World War II the company was asked to produce a special insulator for a power line.

"They didn't know what it was for, but it turned out to be the 'Manhattan Project'. Coors made the zirconium oxide insulators for only 18 months, but for years was tagged as 'making atomic bombs?, an appellation which still rankles."

So it is doubtful that any name was put on the insulators, this being a secret wartime project, and I suppose that if there are any left anywhere, they would be buried or destroyed. BUT if any collector would ever come across one, I think it would be a rarity -- a real find. 
Gerald Brown 
Two Buttes, Colorado 

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Many thanks, Gerald, for this interesting tidbit. Coors Porcelain Co. (600 9th St., Golden, CO 80401), established in 1886, has family and manufacturing ties with their more famous "Koolaid" business (originally as in-house manufacturer of their bottles), but in modern times it operates as a separate entity. The original product line, and still the more important one, was precision chemical and scientific laboratory ware. However, the company has for many years been a manufacturer of high-alumina, beryllia and special oxide ceramics for much of the electronics industry, so I guess it's pretty well known by numerous design engineers that Coors Porcelain does manufacture "insulators" per se! 

Jack

The above picture is a common sight for all of us who live in the  open spaces of the west, but eastern collectors don't come across these very often. Many thanks to Richard Peterson for the nice telephoto of this pole near Salinas, California.

Dear Jack: 

It seems that I misunderstood Bill Lovely when he told me about the use of transpositions in Canada (see CJ, May 1980, page 28), but I have it all straight now, right from the horse's mouth. Sure want to apologize to you and the CJ readers for goofing it up.

Transpositions were, of course, used in the normal manner, but they were also used the way I told you, and some of the best finds of two-piece tramps were on these special setups. Also, this arrangement was used only when a line crossed over a railroad, and then only when "6-0" iron wire was used. Later use of "9-0" wire did not require this type of treatment. 
Grant Salzman, NIA #1785 
Sacramento, Calif. 

Dear Jack: 

Those new multiparts with both the PP and KNOX markings (see CJ, July 1980, page 35) appear to be marked with one integral handstamp. Both logos are evenly lined up with each other. 
Mark A. Miner 
Longmont, Colorado

Dear Jack: 

I went to visit Frank & Thelma Feher in West Sacramento on July 26th, and we all had a good time. They showed me some of their collection, and I was impressed. They had a question about one unusual insulator (see sketch below), but I had no answer on it. I thought you might be able to tell us what it is. It's a dark chocolate brown glaze. 
Richard A. Peterson 
Oakland, Calif. 

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Dear Richard: 

The Fehers' special spool was once dubbed by collectors as the "pencil holder" for obvious reasons. We haven't run an answer on it since the June 1972 issue of CJ (page 14), so here's a repeat. 

This 8-1-50 patent is #2,517,221, and these were manufactured by Porcelain Products, Inc. (their catalog #11357-B). The insulator is mounted on the customary secondary rack with the through-hole, and the main secondary distribution conductor is tie-wired to the smaller groove of the spool. Individual drop wires are deadended in the four holes, and the ends of those are wrap-spliced to the through-conductor. Since these descending drop wires operate the porcelain in tension, a galvanized reinforcing band is installed around the 5" spool in the flat groove on its circumference.

These were made with both brown glaze and white glaze, and I've seen both in past years. Needless to say, if you have more than 5 pencils, you'll need two of these gadgets for your desk. 

Jack

Dear Jack: 

I have a Pittsburg U-746 glazeweld which has a date stamp marking "MAY 2 1915". 
Paul Colburn, NIA #1348 
Lake Worth, Florida