Sorry. I can't help it I'm a machinery geek. And when it comes to machinery, size definitely matters!

 

 

This is a Holly Triplex Steam Pump that I photographed at Christmastime in 1962 in the Columbus waterworks. It was one of three installed in 1908, and each had a capacity of about 1 million gallons per hour at 76 rpm maximum speed. The part that you see towering three stories above the floor is a three-cylinder, triple-expansion Corliss-valve steam engine. The pump cylinders were beneath the floor, in the basement. These massive engines were almost completely silent in operation, except for a rhythmic click-pop, click-pop made by the valve mechanism.

 

See what happens when I stay up too late? :-)

Lawd...

How on earth was it almost silent?  That's tremendously huge!

How on earth was it almost silent?  That's tremendously huge!

 

For one thing, the massive amount of cast iron dampens vibration; I'd guess the flywheels weigh thirty to forty tons each, and I'd hate to even try to speculate on the weight of the entire machine. It sits on a solid concrete footing that may be ten to fifteen feet deep, or even deeper.

 

The machinery is well-balanced and the speeds are relatively low. Corliss-valved engines usually operate slower than 100 revolutions per minute, and these had a maximum speed of 76 rpm. Even at that speed, though, a machine of that size has a lot going on, and when you stand close to it (you can walk between the uprights and the flywheels) with that much iron moving around you, the perception of power is pretty awe-inspiring. I like to try to imagine the foundry and machine shop operations that built these.

 

Engines like this are designed to fully expand the steam, extracting as much of the heat energy as possible, and they usually exhaust into condensers that recover the water and feed it back to the boilers, so there's no exhaust blast like there is with a steam locomotive or farm traction engine.

 

Many engines of this type worked in industry and municipal power plants and waterworks for fifty to seventy-five years before the labor costs associated with maintenance and boiler operations brought about their replacement by diesels and electric motors. The massive amounts of metal and the low operating speeds, combined with meticulous attention to detail in manufacturing and setup, let them run continuously for long periods. With proper operation and rigorous attention to lubrication and on-the-go adjustments, sometimes they ran for ten years or longer without being shut down.

Love them big machines.

 

Grow up in the Detroit area and inevitably you go on a field trip to the Ford Rouge plant. Nowadays, the tours are pretty slick. But back when I went through in the 70s, we were well aware of the clear and present danger that only 1 trillion tons of machinery can serve up.

 

Blast furnaces. Tipping cauldrons of molten steel. Tampers. Rollers. Cams. Cranes. Belts. Welders. Ratchets. Impossibly large objects swinging crazily along tracks above your head, a healthy fall to the factory floor one false step along the catwalk. Everything tied into chain drives, messes of gears and ancient powerplants. Awesome. I can still remember the heat. The noise. And oh, yes: the smell.

 

When I drive back home up I-75, I live for the moment when we crest the top of the roadway as it crosses hundreds of feet above the massive Ford/Marathon ultra-industrial zone. The Detroit skyline lies long and lazy across the entire horizon, but below you and all around you, it's heavy industry as far as you can see, all knitted together into one endless machine. Think of the machine city at the end of the last Matrix. Then think bigger, scarier and ten times more beautiful.

 

(sniffs, wipes away tear)

Hey Rob.

Was that 1962 Waterworks along Dublin Ave? (obviously near the Olentangy or Scioto)

Hey Rob.

Was that 1962 Waterworks along Dublin Ave? (obviously near the Olentangy or Scioto)

 

I think so. Would that have been on or visible from US 33?

 

I was there only for a couple of days, being driven around by a friend who lived there. It was pretty late at night when we got to the waterworks. We had spent a lot of time in the areas south and east of Columbus visiting some oil wells and small pipeline stations out in the boonies that were still running with early-1900s engines and machinery. Maybe I should dig up some of that and post it in the Great Peak Oil Thread.

Dublin Ave is (now it's a western extension of Nationwide Blvd from Neil Ave to the river) the next street north from Spring St (US 33).  So any buildings along the southside of Dublin Ave would be visable from US 33.

(My bittersweet memoir for Dublin Ave. -http://www.roadfan.com/dubavebr.html)

 

Speaking of oil wells in Ohio...

Maybe if Ken would ask Chris very nicely, ColDay will go and check the following out from Orton Library (since Thompson is going to be in shambles for the next 5-10 years)

http://library.ohio-state.edu/search/d%22Morrow+County%22/dmorrow+county/1%2C16%2C19%2CB/frameset&FF=dmorrow+county+geology+ohio+history&1%2C1%2C

 

 

Blast furnaces. Tipping cauldrons of molten steel. Tampers. Rollers. Cams. Cranes. Belts. Welders. Ratchets. Impossibly large objects swinging crazily along tracks above your head, a healthy fall to the factory floor one false step along the catwalk. Everything tied into chain drives, messes of gears and ancient powerplants. Awesome. I can still remember the heat. The noise. And oh, yes: the smell.

 

Oh, yes! That description revives memories.

 

I never visited the Ford plant, but I grew up with stories and occasional visits to heavy industry. My dad worked for General Electric, and made frequent trips to industrial clients. When he came home, he always had vivid narratives of the spectacle. He visited steel mills and Lima Locomotive when they were building massive steam locomotives, and fostered a love of heavy industry in me.

 

As an apprentice machinist-toolmaker at General Electric in the late 1950s, I went on field trips to Fisher Body at Marion, Indiana, where they stamped body panels for GM cars and trucks, and Joslyn Steel in Fort Wayne, a producer of specialty stainless steel alloys for products like jet engine turbine blades. We saw the whole process at Joslyn, from melting in electric-arc furnaces, to casting to rolling big coils of rod from ingots. The images are still vivid in my memory of white-hot ingots moving slowly into the first set of rolls, and the speeds increasing as the rod was rolled smaller and smaller, until it became a glowing snake that seemed to fly out of the final stage. At each end of the rolling mill, men with tongs manually flipped the rod over and headed it back through the next stage; a slip could have resulted in a worker instantly losing a limb or being sliced in half.

 

Perhaps the most spectacular trip was to the International Harvester plant in Fort Wayne. In the forging shop, a cavernous dirt-floored World War I-era brick building, brightly-glowing steel billets were shaped into suspension and drive-line components for heavy trucks by towering steam-powered drop hammers. With each blow of the forging hammers, the floor trembled and sparks flew. The noise was deafening.

We saw the whole process at Joslyn, from melting in electric-arc furnaces, to casting to rolling big coils of rod from ingots. The images are still vivid in my memory of white-hot ingots moving slowly into the first set of rolls, and the speeds increasing as the rod was rolled smaller and smaller, until it became a glowing snake that seemed to fly out of the final stage. At each end of the rolling mill, men with tongs manually flipped the rod over and headed it back through the next stage; a slip could have resulted in a worker instantly losing a limb or being sliced in half.

 

I have this exact memory. My mother's father ended up stranded in Detroit when he ran out of money on his way from NY to California. He lived at the YMCA and quickly found work in one of the steel plants. He worked there happily until he watched a buddy get crushed by a roll of steel. He left the plant and went on to carve out quite a successful career selling steel.

 

The notion that captures the imagination of children--and adults who never forget how cool giant machines are--is that you could pull a freighter full of ore up to one end of a plant, and a car could come driving out the other.

 

That's a sobering legacy. That was the work of gods. And that's why I think it's so hard for the Michigans and Indianas to segue out of the manufacturing era. I mean, where do you go from building the physical manifestation of the American dream?

 

Tourism?

 

That was the work of gods. And that's why I think it's so hard for the Michigans and Indianas to segue out of the manufacturing era. I mean, where do you go from building the physical manifestation of the American dream?

 

Tourism?

 

< :speech: > Man, does that prompt an elegy/tirade. I dare not even start it here, nor undertake it until I have a lot of time. I'll just say here that almost all the "economic growth" cited by everyone from politicians to new urbanists is an illusion. The perceived rebirth of the cities, with expensive condos and neighborhoods populated by people whose wealth derives directly or indirectly from the manipulation of financial instruments, will ultimately collapse because the people who are spending the nation's wealth are doing so without contributing to the generation of real wealth.

 

Too many people are living high and running up debt on the backs of workers. They've looted the nation's industrial base for short-term gain and set us up for long-term decline into third-world status.

</ :speech: > (for now)

I concur completely.

American debt is fine right now and look at all of the foreign investment we have. Japanese citizens have twice as much debt as us on average and they're the second richest country. I have no idea what this has to do with old ass machinery though :[

Before I opened it I was guessing it was gonna be an Amtrak train!

"<  :speech: > Man, does that prompt an elegy/tirade....."

 

  Whoa...

 

  This should be interesting.

 

  I'm all ears.

...  I'm all ears.

 

Not now (don't have time), and probably not here. I'm saving that one for a magnum opus on my web site, possibly with photos.

 

If I were to post that rant here, it might trigger a flame war that could get me banned. I have too much fun here to risk that. Man, do I need a life, or what? :? :roll: :-D

hmm, interesting turn to this thread.

 

before we all overly wax elegic over our midwestern industrial heritage, i wonder how many of you actually lived next to a a huge factory like a steel plant? i did. here's the reality: orange sky & shooting flames of hell glowering over you all day and night, cleaning orange soot off the house and car, everything dirty all the time, burning sulfur smell you can't get rid of and love/hate because it means money, asthma, injuries, work cars, late shift out in full drunken force by the time you are walking to school, a workforce that won a decent quality of life for awhile over a hundred years of unionism & then ruined it all by power-mad & corrupt over-reaching, not to mention weak management and poor reinvestment.

 

bah! it's over and good riddance. let the koreans and chinese have it. sure we can marvel at the amazing machinery, but i'll take silicon valley over horribly unhealthy 19th century dickensian work environments any day.

 

I lived in the shadows of several manufacturing facilities for years. A little soot, a stinky breeze and the clash of coupling trains was a small price to pay for decent wages for my neighbors. But then, from the sound of your description, you must have lived inside a blast furnace.

 

Good or bad, it'll all be gone soon enough. I just hope Korea and China share some of the wealth.

a little soot??? that's like saying lebron plays a little basketball.  :laugh:  manufacturing facilities and old school steel plants are two very different animals. true scrubbers did eventually fix the orange soot problem thankfully. too late for me growing up tho, just my luck.

 

re the wages: it's those very wages that helped bring on their own demise. living wages are one thing, but when they got to be much better than decent you knew the end was near. of course there were many other factors coming together in big steel's demise, poor reinvestment, weakened management, world economy, etc., but wages were a big one.

 

today most factories have since modernized and perfected themselves so well that it is to the point where consumer demand will never again be able keep up with the pace of whatever it is they want to so efficiently crank out. this is a major flaw in our modern american capitalist economy. also it may be a reason why we need the constant boost of a wartime economy. but now i better get off the soapbox  :speech:

By a little soot I mean "don't sit on that porch chair until you wipe it off with this filthy rag which was clean this morning the first time I wiped off the chair" amounts of soot. But yeah, nobody ever said it was desirable to live near a factory, but for those willing to make the sacrifice, the wages made it worth their while.

 

As for the toxic endgame of wages, I'd say the lethal factor for the car industry was not the billions the workers were walking away with, but rather, the billions management spent lobbying Washington to set back CAFE standards and secure tax breaks and trade perks.

 

Long after the back of the union had been broken in the 80s, management racked its brains with a vengeance for new ways to fatten their own paychecks while building ever more irrelevant automobiles, even if it meant mortgaging a future or 400,000 to do so.

 

Put another way, a city like Hamtramck, MI was built around the Dodge Main plant, which in its day probably spewed more than its share of unscrubbed pollution. The population of the city at its peak was 50,000 (in 2.2 Square miles, mind you), and obviously, the major employer was Dodge, and these thousands of workers walked home every day, their pockets fattened with wages, and the town flourished in ways today unimaginable.

 

In the late 70s Dodge closed the plant, and things couldn't have looked darker, until a land giveaway was structured between Hamtramck, surrounding Detroit and GM to build a new plant on the footprint of the old Dodge Plant.

 

This, of course meant demolishing much of an historic neighborhood, and the plant was built as a self-contained compound with its back to Hamtramck with no pedestrian access, and the workers were mainly transplants from other closed GM plants, but hey: a new modern factory!

 

Needless to say, Hamtramck has struggled, and in the uncertainty brought by globalization and the steady bleeding of manufacturing jobs, this intact, liveable, centrally located city struggles for its very existence in an absence of well-paying jobs.

 

Sure, the air might be cleaner, but so are the insides of people's wallets. I think there was on old industrial revolution saying, "Black skies mean full bellies." Nobody wants black skies, but great little towns in Michigan and Indiana and Ohio are struggling, and there's nary a contingency plan in place, and in the end, I have a hard time blaming the workers for living well while their bosses and community leaders were making one short-sighted, boneheaded planning decision after another and another and another.

 

As for the boost of the war time economy, about the only industry it lifts is that of political fortunes. I've seen figures that address modern warfare's affect on manufacturing, and it's nothing compared to the WWII era.

 

Now if you were involved in a company like Halliburton...

 

Help! I've fallen from my soapbox and I can't get up.

 

Hello sweet, sweet worker's comp: daddy's home.

funny how just like factories even the wartime economy has perfected itself since ww2. today it does not boost the whole economy, it just boosts individual corporate earnings. how tidy!

 

anyway good examples, well put. to be sure there is enough blame to go around for how the midwest rustbelt earned it's moniker.

 

i don't miss the hellfire views, the smell and the soot. however, curiously i seem to have merely replaced that with constant manhattan construction dust, noise and auto fumes. it's a wonder i never took up the smoking habit. why the hell not? heh.

 

True 'dat. In fact this morning as I was heading out of town, soaking in my sweet panorama of the Columbus skyline, I noticed something, or a lack thereof: No construction cranes. I think there are a few condo projects here and there down there, but nothing like the armies of long-limbed beasts that are constantly working over downtowns like NYC and Toronto. Enjoy the racket now; you won't be able to afford to live there when they're finished building.

i'll stay here until they pry our rent-stabilized apt out of my cold dead hands.

 

err, of course they're working on that....

hmm, interesting turn to this thread.

 

before we all overly wax elegic over our midwestern industrial heritage, i wonder how many of you actually lived next to a a huge factory like a steel plant? i did. here's the reality: orange sky & shooting flames of hell glowering over you all day and night, cleaning orange soot off the house and car, everything dirty all the time, burning sulfur smell you can't get rid of and love/hate because it means money, asthma, injuries, work cars, late shift out in full drunken force by the time you are walking to school, a workforce that won a decent quality of life for awhile over a hundred years of unionism & then ruined it all by power-mad & corrupt over-reaching, not to mention weak management and poor reinvestment.

 

bah! it's over and good riddance. let the koreans and chinese have it. sure we can marvel at the amazing machinery, but i'll take silicon valley over horribly unhealthy 19th century dickensian work environments any day.

 

 

But refineries look interesting at night....as long as you can drive by them at 70 MPH (which means you can't photograph them)