Most of the color is in a few of the styles, especially in the signal insulators that carried railroad signals. They were offered in colors by the factory, you could specifically order blue , amber , or green , which would be helpful if you had a pole with a lot of insulators on it, for marking certain circuits with certain colors. To make insulators they used a lot of cullet, or recycled glass, and every batch of glass has some form of cullet in it because it was a lot more workable.
He got a truckload of green gin bottles and melted them down and created a batch of insulators. Later on the manufacturers decided clear insulators were more practical because they attracted fewer bugs and heated up less. There were a few exceptions later on, when porcelain started taking over for insulators and they tried to duplicate the colors.
But those were made later on and essentially those were just black and white to match the porcelain. The most popular color among collectors is Colbalt blue.
But they are so popular they are all snapped up immediately, everybody wants them. Macky : The biggest and best was Hemingray. They produced the most different styles and were in production for the longest time. They made color insulators on purpose. They were also the makers of the Hemingray 42, the best selling insulator of all time, produced in the millions. Another popular manufacturer was Brookfield in New York.
But no one has any idea of who actually made them. There were plants all over the place, transportation and fuel were a big factor. You had to be close to a fuel source because of gas and the railroad and that was the market. The molds were engraved so the letters were dug in.
There are a lot of unembossed insulators out there, but at the turn of the century there were a lot of engravers and glass makers and cast iron was very big so people were making a lot of molds, and embossing was very big.
As the years went on, there were fewer engravers available and the embossing started getting simpler and simpler. Macky : The very earliest insulators were lightning rod insulators. One of the interesting things about insulators is that they parallel the development of electricity.
Before people were making electricity, insulators were being used to support grounding rods, just channeling electricity to ground, protecting houses. Later on when the telegraph was invented, suddenly there was a need to run wires on poles for many miles and to develop insulators. They started out small because there was typically only one telegraph line on a pole.
Then telephones took over and got popular, and there was the Rural Electrification Act, which tried to provide power to all these farm people. So there was a big insulator boom in the early part of the century, they were producing them by the millions. This was during the open wire days. They started tapering off after that. When I lived in San Mateo a lot of the old glass was still up in the air.
There are some very thrifty companies out there, and insulators lasted and they just kept reusing them over and over. For the power, they almost exclusively use porcelain. For new construction they will only sometimes use glass on the high power pylons. The glass ones are used a lot more in Canada than here. The transition to porcelain started in the s and by they were pretty much done. Macky : The earliest design was used on the Morris telegraph and was called a bureau knob because it looked just like a knob on a dresser, just a knob with a groove in it.
They discovered very quickly how important weather proofing was. One of my favorites is from Chicago. Somehow they thought this was better insulation because the wire contacted the glass less, which was ridiculous. There were many designs like that, that made no sense at all. Hemingray was very big on their drip points. At the bottom of their insulators they had these little raised points that were said to help the water drip off faster, so the insulator would dry off faster.
After a while they got a bit more scientific with insulator designs and found out what exactly was important and became more standardized. It worked well and they mass produced it. Every year someone comes up with a few new rare pieces. The best thing about glass is that it lasts a very long time if you take care of it.
The rarest insulator I own is a Fry Glass insulator. There are very few of them, but they come in a fantastic opal color. I come across a lot of rare colorations. My father gave me a Micky Mouse insulator in a milk electric blue. The guys who made it got permission to run a batch of Cobalt blue insulators, mostly for collectors. They got the machine set up and got something called frit, or concentrated pieces of glass used to get color into the new glass.
They added that to the clear glass melt, but forgot to turn on the stirrer so they had clear glass with Cobalt splotches. It looks cool and people want them. I also have insulators on the site where someone got the mold, but not the press, so they took the mold and poured glass in it and just got a solid lump of glass. Macky : The very first designs they tried were threadless insulators , and they had to suspend the insulators with the hooks and the bureau knobs.
Then they got the idea to put a wood pin in the cross arm and have an overturned glass on top of that, but at the time the hollow inside the insulator was smooth, there was no thread. So it was hard to get it to stay on the pin, they would glue them on. National Insulators Association that puts on a national show once a year and regional shows once a year.
There are also local clubs which host shows and activities at their houses. All images in this article courtesy Ian Macky of Glassian. Insulators embossed with a 5-pointed star were made by various manufacturers under contract with General Electric. They were made in large numbers, so most are not too rare or valuable, but they do come in nice colors within a limited palette of mostly aquas and greens , so a star collection is an affordable way to get started collecting.
I love it so much thank you. My neighbor came over to tell me that last night during a storm he saw an insulator that is very close to my house glowing and fading. Can you please tell me exactly what this could mean? Thank you Deb Wright. So I hastily said goodbye got off the phone…. Great memory of him. I have eight glass insulators, all in good condition. No charge. I will even pay for shipping. Just let me have your mailing address. Dana Moran, Saratoga, CA.
I have a brown ceramic insulator with no markings. It is threaded and has the notch on the top. Perhaps this introduction might help? For years i have been hunting for a purple one. I was at a friends house after she had knee surgery. I walked back to her bed rokm ans it smacked me in the face, a purple one.
She let me have it. I never knew there are red ones and orange lookong one. Now i am on tbe hunt again. Odd colors are desirable. A multitude of grays, greens, blues, yellows, and cobalt's can be found. Like glass pieces with snow or swirling, many porcelain insulators have very unusual mottling , drips, or color mixing on an otherwise common colored piece. These all command a premium. Certain styles are relatively common in one color but very rare in another, for example Fred Locke's M with a white top is the only known specimen.
Uniform chocolate brown or modern "sky glaze" insulators are usually less desirable unless they are of an unusual style. Many of the earliest dry process and wet process insulators are white or off-white in color.
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