A Conversation with WILLIAM L. BROOKFIELD

Reprinted from "Crown Jewels of the Wire", December 1999, page 6

Recently Carol McDougald visited my wife Jean and me at our home in Shell Point Village, Fort Myers, Florida. We had a long conversation about the Brookfield Glass Company and this is the gist of what I told her, plus a bit more.                                                                                                                                    

Cover Photo

When I was a child my father would take me down with him to see the Brookfield Glass plant. He had a broken glass dump that was enormous. A steam shovel was used to move the glass around. Since I was the president's son the men at the plant were nice to me. They taught me everything, let me work the steam shovel and showed me how to make a barrel. At that time insulators were packed in straw and shipped in barrels. The plant made its own barrels. I remember the factory very well.

My great grandfather James Brookfield was a glass blower. He was a frugal man and saved his money. He married a lady who was fairly well off. He took his savings and some of his wife's money and in 1853 built a glass plant. It was successful from the start. After seven years, in 1860, the utility dam at Honesdale, Pennsylvania broke taking with it his factory, his home, and all his possessions. He could not pay the interest on the mortgage and had to go into bankruptcy.

About this time there was a brewer who lived in Brooklyn by the name of Kalbfleish who made beer. The bottle makers were charging him so much for his bottles that he could not make a decent profit. He heard about the terrible catastrophe at Honesdale and contacted my great grandfather, James Brookfield. He asked James and his son William if they could build him a bottle plant and they said they could. 

Mr. Kalbfleish agreed to take a sufficient mortgage to pay for the plant and gave the Brookfields the common stock. He told them the plant was theirs after the mortgage was paid. All he wanted was a sufficient supply of bottles at a decent price. He said the Brookfields could make additional products if they wished. After two or three years the mortgage was paid and the plant belonged to the Brookfields. My grandfather was so pleased that he named one of his sons Herbert Kalbfleish Brookfield.

One day when my great grandfather and grandfather were out to lunch, the clerk was left in charge of the office. When they came back the clerk told them a crazy man had tried to sell him a patent to put a thread in an insulator. My grandfather said he would like to talk to the man but the clerk didn't know where he lived. My grandfather told him to find the man or he would be fired. 

After a couple of weeks, they located him. His name was Cauvet. He had visited the other glass makers but none were interested. The reason nobody would buy was because insulators at that time were stamped out like ashtrays and there was no profit in making them. Money was made out of bottles, window glass, objects of art, etc. My grandfather bought the patent. James Brookfield made a machine to put a thread in an insulator, my grandfather made a faster one and my father made one that was automatic which operated day and night. The man who sold him the patent was given a lifetime income. However, he couldn't stand prosperity and after a couple of years he died so the patent did not cost very much. 

After the Cauvet patent was purchased, the manufacturing of insulators became an engineering job so a lot of the glass companies did not want to touch it. However, the demand for insulators kept growing; first the telegraph, then the telephone, and then the power needs. Everyone began to want the patent. The Brookfield Glass Company couldn't keep up with the demand so they farmed out the business on a royalty basis which gave them enough money to always keep ahead of the game with new improvements.

Before threaded insulators, this is the way insulators were installed. Wooden pins were placed on a cross arm of a pole. A man would come along with a bucket of water and some newspapers. He would soak a gob of newspapers in the water, stick it over the wooden pin, and hammer it down with a mallet. In the summer, everything was fine - the lines would sag, but in the winter they would shrink and the insulators would pop off. Also, objects might fall on the lines and off would go the insulators. The result was there had to be linesmen walking the lines all the time putting the insulators back. Thereafter the thread became very important. 

The company my great grandfather and grandfather started was called the Bushwick Glass Manufacturing Company, sometimes referred to as the Bushwick Glassworks. Besides bottles they made insulators for quite a while. After the mortgage was paid off and the Brookfields owned the plant, the Bushwick Glass Manufacturing Company was gradually dropped and the Brookfield Glass Company name substituted.

The bottle blower's union kept giving Dad more and more trouble so finally he decided to move the plant to Old Bridge, New Jersey, giving up making bottles and increasing the capacity for insulators.

I knew the plant, I knew the employees, and, of course, I talked with my father. He told me a number of stories about the plant. 

One day he received an order for 100 barrels of insulators to go to a company in Puerto Rico - that's a good order. The barrels were to be marked one to a hundred (1 - 100). They wanted them shipped in two weeks' time. A week later he received another order from the same company for another 100 barrels but they wanted them shipped on the same boat as the first 100. The second batch was to be marked one hundred and one up (101 - up). That was a very short time but Dad insisted that the factory produce them and get them to the same boat in Jersey City. 

My father used to go to the office fairly early but the chief clerk was usually ahead of him. The boat was to leave Thursday morning on the tide.

On Wednesday morning the clerk said to him, "Do you know what that blankity-blank plant has done?" 

Dad said, "No, what?" "They've marked that second batch 101 up. I was just checking to see if the barrels had arrived at Jersey City pier."

Father said, "That's okay, that's what I told them to do."

The clerk said, "You don't understand. Each individual barrel is marked '101-up'." 

So father, Uncle Frank, and a painter all went down to the dock and marked the barrels properly. They were loaded on time to make the boat. 

My father was the President of the Brookfield Glass Co. He was a Harvard graduate with a degree in chemistry. He took charge of the plant and its production although his office was in New York. My Uncle Frank Brookfield was the sales manager and, between them, they did very well. However, the war came along and Uncle Frank wanted to go to war. So father, as his war effort, said he would handle both jobs. Well, it was awfully hard work and some dreadful things happened.

First, saboteurs [My father told my they were German agents. That's all I know.] set fire to the railroad yard, the packing plant, and a whole train load of insulators waiting for an engine to pull them out. They were ready to go to the allies (this was, of course, WWI). The plant was rebuilt right away but it was costly. 

Second, the Morgan Shell plant blew up and shells from it landed in the vicinity. Practically every window in the factory was smashed and the concussion of the shells knocked things about. 

Postcard photograph of The Brookfield Glass Works in Old Bridge, New Jersey, 
courtesy of David S. Sztramski. (See CJ, January 1996 "New" stuff from "Old" Bridge.) 
Note crane and bucket moving white sand to left of the buildings.

Third, it takes a lot of coal to make insulators. There was no air conditioning in those days so they would have to make the entire year's production between October and June. Then they would shut the furnaces down because it was too hot for the men to work. During the summer, the company would be selling. Coal was in short supply and Dad was not on the preferred list. He had to shut the plant down in January instead of June because he had no more coal. However, there was such a demand for insulators abroad where they were fighting that Dad finally made the preferred list but by that time the plant could only run a month or so and I don't think they started until the next fall. At any rate, they lost nearly one-half year of production.

The factory started up again and began to make a profit. Then Uncle Frank came back from the war and didn't want to work anymore. Unfortunately, my grandmother had died and left him some money. Although my father received an equal portion, it was not enough to buy Uncle Frank out.

So father had to find another partner. My Dad owned 51 % of the stock and Uncle Frank 49%. Dad found a wonderful man named Wilson Fitch Smith, an engineer, who had built the huge Valhalla dam for the water supply system of New York City, and he was willing to buy the 49% ownership. However, he got pneumonia and died just as the deal was being completed. 

Father had been carrying the whole business while Uncle Frank was away and, with all these troubles, was able to keep the business going, but it was too much for him. I was only 14 or 15 at the time. Dad said if I had been four or five years older he would have tried to obtain a loan to keep the plant going. In 1922 the plant was sold.

The buyer was a refrigerator company. The glass company owned a dock on the Raritan River where barges could bring in steel and all kinds of things necessary to build refrigerators and there was a railroad siding as well so it was a pretty good place for a plant. Father never sold the patents or copyrights because he'd always thought he would go into business again but that never happened. The reason the Brookfield's sales went so well is because many of the buyers had engineering departments who thought that they could make a more efficient insulator by changing its shape. Both my grandfather and Dad catered to those people and custom made insulators for them. After the turn of the century the plant employed about 600 men. A lot of things were done by hand in those days when they did not have much automatic machinery.

Dad made the glass insulators for F.M. Locke Co. They were going into the porcelain business and asked father if he would make a porcelain insulators for him. So Dad added a larger new wing to the plant for this purpose. A small porcelain insulator could carry 10,000 volts with ease whereas it would take a big heavy piece of glass to arrive at the same insulating ability.

I saw the new plant with the porcelain furnaces, and I talked with the superintendent. He told Dad he had run through several batches of porcelain insulators on a test basis and everything worked well. This was around 1920 or 1921. I don't know what, if any, marking was on these insulators but if you ever find one with "Brookfield" or "B" on it, it could be worth a fortune. 

Returning to the glass business, AT&T had a subsidiary named the Western Electric Company which was the purchasing and engineering ann. Little by little they kept buying more and more of father's insulators. They finally arrived at a point where they were purchasing 50% of the Brookfield Glass Co. production. All went well until there was a new purchasing agent who really tried to put the screws on father. 

Each year when he went to see the purchasing agent he'd come back and practically have to go to bed for a week because he didn't know how he was going to make a profit. He had to make it on the other 50% of his business.

Also that same agent gave him even more trouble. One of Dad's competitors came out with a clear glass insulator. Father's were all aqua or green. The agent told Dad those clear insulators were much better so Dad invited him to visit the Brookfield plant. Father took a number of green glass insulators and put them in a line. Then he placed the same number of clear glass ones also in a line. He put live steam on both sets. Most of the clear glass insulators cracked but not a single one of the green glass ones. He got the order.

I was brought up on the Brookfield Glass Co. Every time Dad made a new insulator he would give me one. However, they were so common that I never thought much about them. When I went to boarding school my insulators were all thrown out. Mother just thought they were dust catchers. A few people used to collect them but I thought they were nuts - like collectors of matchboxes or beer cans. 

Some years later our friend "Woody" Woodward came up to see me. By this time father had died. He came all the way from Texas to talk to me about insulators and the Brookfield Glass Co. He spent a couple of days with me and I thought, gee, maybe I should begin collecting these things. Woody gave me several to start. Then some other people gave me some and I'm finding I have a pretty good collection now. I once had over 500 but now I limit myself to 200 - all different, but all Brookfields.

Part of William Brookfield's insulator collection.

Each is labeled with the code name used by the Brookfield catalogues. Left to right: Brookfield No. 54 Transposition Insulator "Dropa" (CD 196); three No.3 Knobs "Flail" (CD 1104); No.5 Knob "Flame" (CD 1095); NO.7 Knob "Float" (CD 1087.1); CD 226.3; Brookfield No. 74 Circuit Break Insulator "Gater" (CD 1140); Brookfield No, 416 Circuit Break Insulator "Gunda" (CD 1138); Brookfield No. 53 Transposition Insulator "Drift" (CD 205)

You asked me if I had any old papers about the glass business. I have the bankruptcy papers but I think possibly they should be destroyed. James had a rough time when his plant was demolished. My grandfather, William, was on his way to Yale University when he was called back to go to work. James had six daughters who took in sewing, washing, dressmaking, cooking and everything to try to keep the family afloat but no way could they pay the interest on the plant mortgage. They did all this for a couple of years until Kalbfleish came along. He gave James some money to keep him going until his plant was finished. He was a wonderful man. 

My uncle, George Debevoise, was in the paint business, President of the Debevoise Paint Co. He wanted a plant in Brooklyn so my father sold him the Brookfield Glass Co. property when he moved to Old Bridge, New Jersey. A survey of the Brooklyn property was made and it was found that the next door neighbor's property line was only a few inches over into Dad's building. That created a problem. However, Uncle George was a super salesman and he straightened out the matter. I think Dad had to pay something but it was not much.

My father had a huge dump of broken glass, probably 25 feet high and a block long. A lot of people who wanted jobs lived in the neighborhood. He used to give each one a gunny sack and they would pick up all the broken glass they could find. At the end of the day they would dump the sack on the pile and receive a silver dollar for each sack. The broken glass was recycled.

In discussing the colors of insulators if, in the manufacturing, there were imperfections like swirls, big bubbles, streaks, etc., the Brookfield Co. rated them as "seconds". Some they would throw out and others were sent to South America, Canada and so forth at lower prices. The reason some Brookfields are aqua and others green is as follows: when the plant was in Brooklyn most of the insulators were made of Long Island sands which produced an aqua color. When the plant moved to Old Bridge, the Jersey sands produced a green color. Also at Old Bridge a lot of cullet was used which made an even darker green.

One day a man came to father's office to show him some beautiful samples of fine white sand which came from Florida. They were so good that Dad took out his pencil and figured that it would probably cost too much to ship the sand to New Jersey but he was tempted. He asked if there was a lot of that sand available. The salesman said there was an unlimited amount. The place from which it came was Palm Beach before all those buildings were erected down there. Dad could have bought most of the place for practically nothing.

You asked me if Dad sold some peculiar looking insulators (CD 640 "gingerbread boys") to France because some were found in the Brookfield dump. I know Dad did sell some insulators to France but I don't know of any with arms other than the O'Brien which was sold in Peru. However, it is possible. 

If you look in Milholland's Bicentennial Edition you will find on page 32 a way to tell the age of most of the Brookfield insulators. Many of them in the early days were marked Wm. or W. Brookfield. When my grandfather died in 1903 the Wm. and W. markings were removed from the insulators. During the 1st World War it was hard to find skilled people to make the molds and, as the company was well known, the letter "B" was used and sometimes nothing at all. It may not be true but I think a number of insulators marked with ampersands (&), stars, etc may have been made by the Brookfield Glass Co. but I can't prove it. The only thing is that a lot of the shapes of the insulators conform exactly to father's.

Family treasures include:

A china coffee set which belonged to Mrs. James Brookfield, 
great grandmother of William L. Brookfield.

A brass insulator pin (duplicate of pin at Bureau of Standards)
 marked on end with "WB" (William Brookfield).

The standard pitch for pin and pinhole threading is four threads per inch, and the diameter for the Standard Pinhole is one (1") inch. This is the extreme diameter at the top of the pin and at the bottom of the pinhole. The standard taper for pin and pinhole is one-sixteenth (1/16") inch increase in diameter per one (1") inch in length. It is important that all pins be in accordance with standard specifications.

Brookfield miniature salesmen samples. 

William Brookfield remembers his father bringing home the small glass samples. Above is the miniature CD 162 style and its full-size counterpart signal. Below is the extremely rare beehive style next to its Brookfield production clone.

The company seal which embossed:

THE BROOKFIELD GLASS COMPANY 
INCORPORATED
- · -
1908 
- NEW JERSEY -

Rare Brookfield Jar marked:
 BROOKFIELD
55 
FULTON ST 
N.Y.

The Brookfield canning jar, according to insulator and fruit jar collectors, Tom and Alice Moulton, is probably one of no more than six known to exist. The jar is cylindrical, aquamarine, applied collar mouth with a glass lid and an iron yoke clamp (thumb screw) and has a smooth base. Most of the clamps considered correct have a six pointed top but the standard eagle non pointed clamp works. The eagle lid was considered to be the correct lid at one time but Alice Moulton's jar has a much different unmarked lid. To our knowledge there is no patent data on record and it is listed as being manufactured from 1860-1880 but that is sketchy at best. It certainly would have to be during the time frame of 55 Fulton Street. Dick Roller's book, The Standard Fruit Jar Reference, says "that it was manufactured by the Bushwick Glass works with the 55 Fulton Street address - 1860's to 1882 (Proprietor William Brookfield). He (Roller) had some documentation that stated that Bushwick was manufacturing Mason Jars in 1869 that were chipped and ground by the workers."

Two framed Brookfield Glass Company shares for common stock. The first was issued to the Brookfield Glass Company for 100 shares at $100 each, dated the 28th of December. 1908 and signed by Frank Brookfield, Treasurer and Henry M. Brookfield, President. The second certificate was issued to Henry M. Brookfield for 300 shares at $100 each and dated the 9th of March, 1922, signed by Frank Brookfield, Treasurer and Henry M. Brookfield, President. The word "Cancelled" was handwritten twice across the face of the certificate.

The home of Henry Morgan Brookfield

The beautiful white clapboard colonial so typical of New England is nestled among a stand of large maple trees along the main road leading into the town of Norfolk, Connecticut. Although no longer owned by the Brookfield family, it elicits fond memories by William Brookfield as he travels by his childhood home during summers spent at the lakeside family camps in the surrounding area.

I am indebted to Dave Sztramski, Cranford, New Jersey for his continued interest in the Brookfield manufacturing company. He inspired me to do what I have always longed to do -- interview William "Brooks" Brookfield. Our Florida conversations were taped recorded and then transcribed by Candy Martino so that Mr. Brookfield could make corrections and additions. 

In the summer of 1998, John and I spent two days with the Brookfields at their Connecticut home. Brooks (as William is affectionately known). and his lovely wife Jean are two of the most gracious people one could ever meet. The calm of the lake, the stillness of the woods, the darkness of the night, the aroma of a home-cooked salmon dinner are memories permanently etched in our treasured hobby moments. 

May God grant you both continued vim, vigor and vitality in the years ahead. Thank you, Brooks and Jean.

Your Editor

The William Brookfields at home.

William Brookfield is a graduate of St. Paul's School and Harvard University. He served on General Omar Bradley's staff in WW II and as a Lt. Colonel under General Patton. He retired as an officer of the New Jersey Zinc Company in 1968.