Beauty In The Sky

Beauty in the Sky         

   I vaguely remember my Aunt telling me years ago that my great grandfather Sanford Speaks was said to have invented one of the insulators you see on telephone poles but never took out a patent on the invention.

   Sanford lived in Linn County, Kansas and as the story goes, he was traveling by horse back in the mid 1880s to Kansas City so he could apply for a patent on his invention when he decided to stop at a tavern for something to eat and drink.  Too many beers loosened his tongue and he started bragging about his insulator and how he would soon be a rich man. With his belly full and his ego sufficiently inflated, he continued his journey. Just twenty miles down the dirt road two armed thugs from the tavern caught up to Sanford and took his invention and any future rewards it might have brought his way.

   My Aunt didn’t hear the story directly from Sanford. It was handed down to her from an older relative when she was a child and we all know how stories can change each time they are told. I do however; have a photo of my great grandfather taken about 1885 that shows him holding up an insulator with a wire some how attached to it with out being tied on so there must be something to the family legend.

    I recently learned that my old friend Jim Mummaw has a collection of approximately sixty five glass insulators. I asked him if he thought there could be any truth to the Sanford Speaks story. “I’m just a beginner in the hobby.” Jim said. “You really need to talk to Charles Brandon out in Overland Park who has one of the largest glass insulator collections in the country.”

  It was as though I had descended into the treasury room of King Tut’s tomb when Charles and I entered a large room in his basement. Literally hundreds and hundreds of beautiful glass insulators filled shelves from the floor to the ceiling on three walls.  Sunlight from a near by window poured over and through vividly colored insulators in a glass cabinet magnifying their beauty. They certainly wouldn’t have looked out of place sitting among King Tut’s gold and prized possessions I thought as we slowly made our way around the room pausing every few feet to closely examine the insulators that looked more like a work of art than a simple component once mass produced by the thousands from the 1850s to the 1950s.

“The insulator is designed to keep the wire off the pole.” Charles said when he noticed the puzzled look on my face as I stared at an oddly shaped one. “You don’t want the wire to come in contact with the pole because the current will bleed off into the ground.”      

     For a hundred years the efforts of inventors to improve the insulators ability to keep the current loss at a minimum and protect them from vandalism created some interesting shapes that resembled every thing from Trojan helmets to salt shakers, ginger bread men, bat ears, Mickey Mouse ears, Pluto the dog, mushrooms, bee hives, bullets, castles and even a giant screw. Some were constructed with pleated glass or copper skirts to create a longer path of resistance for the electrons to follow down the pole to the ground. It was also hoped that the pleated skirts would cause the insulator to break off in small chunks when hit by a bullet or rock instead of completely shattering.

     I noticed that the insulators came in several different shades of blue, green, white, black, purple, amber and gray. “Why is there such a big variation in the colors?” I asked Charles. “They just sit on top of power poles so what difference does it make?”

  “The Power and Telephone Company’s could order insulators in what ever color they wanted.” Charles explained. “The various colors really didn’t mean any thing. The glass manufacturers used what ever glass was left over at the end of the day to make the insulators. Although, in some cases the power company might designate blue to the neutral line going through town and the amber ones for the other two legs. One utility company here in Kansas City used Electric Blue Mickey Mouse insulators with milky swirls embedded in the glass exclusively for the DC cable serving the trolleys running along Brookside into the Plaza area. It’s the only place they were used in the entire country.  Some insulators were clear when they were made but over a period of time the sun turned them purple because of the manganese found in them. They never made red insulators because it took a small amount of gold to make red glass.”

      The vast majority of Charles’s 4,300 insulators are about four inches in height and approximately three inches wide with a few smaller ones about the size of a quarter. The grand daddy of them all proudly sits in a corner of the room. The green giant weighs in at a whopping 57 pounds and measures 18 inches in width making it the biggest insulator ever found in the world.

   I asked Charles what got him interested in such an unusual hobby. “I grew up on the out skirts of St. Joseph, Missouri.” the 52 year old mechanical engineer said. “I was a distance runner in high school back in 1971 and did a lot of my training in the country since it was so close to my house. I especially enjoyed running along the railroad tracks. I’d see signal lines and poles with insulators still attached to them lying off to the side of the rails. I thought they looked pretty cool and unscrewed a couple of them. I figured that carrying one in each hand as I ran would build up some muscles. They were every where and came in so many different sizes, shapes and colors that I started collecting them.”

    In addition to the unusual shapes and jewel like colors, Charles would learn that there were a couple of other key miscues glass manufacturers inadvertently did that attracts collectors.

    The manufacturers weren’t too worried about creating perfect insulators so iron and other impurities were often in the glass when they were made. This would sometimes cause slight imperfections such as milky swirls and other flaws that would make them quite valuable to collector’s decades later. Embossing errors such as backward letters will earn an insulator a spot at the front of a display cabinet.

  Charles showed me a thread less insulator from the 1860s that was simply jammed over a wooden pin on the cross arm of a pole after soaking the pin with oil. Storms and vandals would occasionally knock them loose, so some one designed a plunger in 1871 to swirl out threads as the insulator was being made so it could be spun on to the pin to keep it in place. Drip points at the base of the insulator to help get rid of moisture that could build up from temperature variations and lesson the insulation properties was another clever improvement.

    

  

 

    With inventors constantly upgrading the workability of the glass insulator during the hundred years they were in production, I’m beginning to think the story about my great grandfather might have some truth to it.  I asked Charles what his thoughts were on the Sanford Speaks story.

   “He was obviously proud of what ever his involvement was with that insulator.” Charles said. “Having been in the hobby for 35 years, I don’t recall seeing any photos of some one posing with their insulator. The fact that you don’t see a tie wire holding the wire in place shows more than a remote chance that he devised a new way to hold the wire in place. I would say he was involved in some way.”

   People are still finding the old insulators in places such as abandoned railroad tracks, garage sales, in mines, on trees, on buildings, antique shops, newspapers and from collectors like Charles who sells and trades them as a member of the Missouri Valley Insulator Club.

       It seems the collectors bug has bitten me as I now find myself subconsciously glancing skyward every time I’m in the country. Perhaps I’m hoping that some day I will be driving down a desolate gravel road and suddenly see a long forgotten row of ancient glass insulators high atop a power pole glistening in the morning sun like beautiful rare jewels and I’ll know exactly how Charles Brandon feels.