Iran 

A trip to the Bakersfield Show October 6 and 7 inspired the topic for this month's article on Iran, giving you information on a pretty little glass insulator from that country, that many of you already have in your collection. Many thanks go to Grant Salzman, of Sacramento, California, who was at the Show, for supplying information on this one. He in turn gives credit to a fellow worker of his, and a native of Iran by the name of Kazam Attaran, for interpreting the Arabic symbol on the insulator. 

Grant had several of these on his sales table along with some Russian insulators, both glass and porcelain. He said the original source of all of them was a tribesman who frequently crossed over the border between Russia and Iran. (If you're interested, Grant's address and phone number are in the Crown Jewels -- NIA directory.) The Bakersfield Show, by the way, was super! Please see "Letters to the Editor". 

The insulator in question is CD 816 and is shown below. 

It is just a tad under three inches high and measures 2-1/4 inches across the base. The color ranges from a lime green to more of a yellow green or citron color. The surface of the glass is rough and crude, resembling frozen limeade concentrate or a wet gumdrop! It has a very shallow threadless pinhole measuring one inch at the base and narrowing to 1/2 inch as it points toward the crown of the insulator. I say "threadless" because the faint lines circling the pinhole can scarcely be called threads. Maybe a better word would be treds (sorry!!). 

It was made in a three part mold, the two mold lines on the skirt reaching just to the base of the crown of the insulator. The crown piece of the mold was put on at any angle that it happened to suit the glass maker at the time. No two are exactly alike. Looking down on the insulator from above, some of the conductor grooves line up exactly centered between the two mold lines on the skirt -- like 6:00 -- and some head off at a more rakish angle like 2:40!

The only embossing is an Arabic character, on both front and back of the skirt, from the Persian dialect called "Farsi". It is not an M, as you may have thought. Farsi reads from right to left -- just backwards from the way we do. Breaking it apart we find the following:

So we have the letters M E H R, pronounced like Mare, only you must roll the R! Mehr is the family name of the glass maker -- in Farsi dialect. I am told that the glass industry flourishes in Iran, but is all under private ownership, which would explain the use of the family name. Let me now quote directly from a typed sheet of information that Grant let me read: (The following information concerning this insulator was obtained through an interpreter.) 

"The insulator was made in a hand operated iron mold that manufactured one insulator at a time. The molten glass was placed into the mold by an assistant (usually a child), and the master molder determined when the glass was ready to come out of the mold. Many of the insulators are crooked or lopsided, due to being removed from the mold too soon by an over-anxious master molder! 

"It is also normal for small chips to occur at the skirt bottom on the seam ends. These chips were made when the mold was opened and the insulator was removed. The rim around the pin hole also is deformed and chipped in much the same way. 

"When the insulator was put to use, the handmade metal pin was inserted into the pin hole, and molten sulphur was poured around the pin. The pin is then securely fastened and can be removed only by tapping on the metal pin, which breaks up the sulphur, causing it to fall away as chips and dust." 

At this writing we cannot be certain, but because of the rather sparse settlement of Iran and the long distance between towns, it is Grant's and my guess that this is a telegraph insulator. 

Let me now give you some background information on Iran which may help you better understand a few points .... 

Iran (Persia) is a kingdom of western Asia bounded on the north by the U.S.S.R. and the Caspian Sea; east by Afghanistan and Pakistan; south by the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman; and west by Iraq and Turkey. Teheran is the capital. In 1935 the Iranian government asked foreign governments to use "Iran" as the name of the state instead of "Persia". Although on October 25, 1949, the Iranian government stated that it would no longer insist on this, "Iran" remained in common use.

Since 1968 Iran has been divided into 14 large provinces (ostans). Fars, which lies to the southwest, is one of these provinces. 

The languages of Iran are Persian, Kurdish, Luri, Turkic, Balochi, and Arabic. Of these languages, by far the most important is literary Persian, as found in Persian literature and among educated speakers. Modern Persian contains numerous Arabic and Turkish elements. It is written in Arabic characters. There has been a tendency (as in Turkey) to expel Arabic words and forms; but devotion to the early literature, which contains them, hampers such efforts at "persianization". 

Dialects, parallel to literary Persian, are used in most Iranian towns and villages. Webster's dictionary defines the word dialect as "a local or regional variety of language distinguished by features of vocabulary, grammar, and pronunciation from other local or regional varieties and constituting with them together a single language of which no one variety is standard." 

In reference to language, you may hear the word Farsi used inter-changeably with Persian, because Farsi is the dialect most closely related to literary Persian having had the same roots; but, strictly speaking, Farsi is the local variant spoken by the inhabitants of the southerly province of Fars, whereas Persian is the broader term and includes several dialects.

Before I close I would like to add that a couple of years ago I asked my brother-in-law, who was living in Teheran at the time, to see if he could bring me back some insulators. It seems that he sent the yard boy to the straw market with instructions to buy any and all that were different from each other. This is, apparently, one of the "gettin' places" for such things. The fellow came back with eleven insulators, ten of which were porcelain, and the other one was glass. The markings on the porcelains indicated they originally hailed from Bulgaria, Japan, China, England and Germany! The glass insulator proved to be a CD 113 Whitall Tatum -- full of desert sand! Looks like Iran probably didn't bother with the manufacture of porcelain insulators. It is also a fact that electric power in Iran falls far short of meeting the demand and costs are high. Maybe it proved to be cheaper to import their porcelain insulators. The mystery is the Whitall Tatum!