Copyright © 2006 Samuel Knight Chapter of the Society for Industrial Archeology.

The Newsletter is published in April, August, and December with special issues when they are needed.

The Chapter web site was hosted by the SIA headquarters site:

http://www.sia-web.org/chapters/knight/knight.html

Chapter News

Planned Events

USS-Posco Plant Tour, January 25, 2007

Although most of our members have received advanced notice, there is still time to sign up for a unique opportunity to visit a working steel mill. Chapter President Tony Meadow has arranged a visit to the USS-Posco Industries (UPI) steel mill in Pittsburg, CA. This state-of-the-art mill produces cold rolled, galvanized and tin mill products from hot rolled steel. The original plant on the site, now long gone, was established in 1910. The plant was a major supplier of steel for Bay Area projects, notably the San Francisco Bay Bridge. MORE

The current plant is a joint venture between United States Steel and POSCO (formerly Pohang Iron and Steel) of the Republic of Korea established in 1986, which took over the aging plant and completed a major upgrade in 1989. It employs over 1,000 workers. It is a steel finishing mill, taking steel coils cast overseas, and transforming them into mill products for a wide variety of products.

Contact Tony Meadow for details on the event. If you are able to attend, you must sign up in advance, and abide by UPI safety and security requirements.

Caltrans Carquinez Bridge Dinner Meeting

We are working to set up another dinner meeting, this time with a speaker from Caltrans discussing the Carquinez Bridges. Almost as exciting as the construction of the new Alfred Zampa Memorial Bridge (discussed in Newsletter 14, April 2003) is the deconstruction of the 1927 bridge, currently underway. The date for the meeting has not yet been chosen, stay tuned!

Previous Events

Chapter Annual Meeting, Western Railway Museum, 7 Oct 06

Chapter members got to experience a gorgeous Fall day in the Delta when the Annual Chapter Meeting was held at the Western Railway Museum outside Rio Vista. If you haven’t been out there in a while, it’s worth a trip (maybe after the winter rains cease…). There is a new Visitors Center, with some excellent interpretive materials on the Key System, which was the original target of the Museum. A LOT of the East Bay transportation infrastructure follows Key System rights of way, e.g. much of BART, CA 24 to Walnut Creek. Members rode the restored trolleys down the tracks of the old Sacramento Northern Interurban line almost down to the waters of Carquinez Straits. Along the way, we passed a brand new wind farm, whose owners have donated to the Museum. The Museum has received a grant from the State to expand their covered storage/shops and bring elements of the collection into a more controlled environment.

All ABOARD!

A meeting or a picnic?

A short business meeting was held, minutes are available from Jay McCauley. The Chapter is in good shape financially, and has a reasonably solid core membership. We discussed ways to increase Chapter membership. Chapter President Tony Meadow has been working on a brochure that could be dropped off at related sites like Historical Museums to inform potential members about the Chapter. One potentially interesting item was authorization for Jay to begin preliminary research about the possibility of the Chapter hosting a National SIA event.

Dinner Meeting with Betty Marvin

On November 16, we had another dinner meeting, this time featuring Betty Marvin. Betty works as a planner for the City of Oakland's Community and Economic Development Agency. Betty oversees the Oakland Cultural Heritage Survey (OCHS) that has surveyed every visible building in Oakland and estimates a building's age, possible historical or architectural interest. The survey also includes detailed research and evaluation for many specific buildings and neighborhoods. The OCHS staff within the Planning and Zoning Division maintains an extensive library of information on historic properties and districts in Oakland, as well as maintains the Oakland Historic Properties listings.

Betty gave a fascinating talk about West Oakland. This area has a rich history of its built environment. The current alignment of I-80, which replaced the collapsed Cypress Structure, runs through a Southern Pacific yard, and was roughly the edge of San Francisco Bay mudflats before major construction started happening in the late 1800’s. The Wood St. Southern Pacific Station, visible from I-80, was at the edge of the water. So, much of the industry is actually first generation, built on reclaimed land, rather than being the result of destruction of existing housing. There is a great deal of transition happening in the area, as former industrial buildings, such as the Mazda Lamp factory on Campbell at 16^th, are being transformed into loft apartments. Other sites are being torn down to be replaced with housing and shopping. There are lots of interesting houses still extant. Betty passed out a flyer from her office that gives some basic guidance on how to estimate the age of your house from the architectural details. (I’ll try get a copy on the Chapter web site after this Newsletter is published.) There are resources available at the Oakland Library to help determine the history of buildings in Oakland, including historical maps, tax rolls, etc.

Betty gave us a copy of her slides, and we’re starting to discuss how we could make them more accessible, perhaps with a mapping mashup as described in Issue 21 of the Newsletter.

Thanks to Betty, I can’t go through West Oakland on BART or drive I-80 without noticing some of the buildings she described! An excellent evening!

SIA National Events

2006 Fall Tour, Youngstown, OH

The 2006 Fall Tour explored the Northeast corner of Ohio, centered in Youngstown. Youngstown was an early iron and steel boomtown as the all the necessary ingredients (iron ore, charcoal/coal, limestone) were found locally. But in the now classic boom and bust cycle, the local steel industry collapsed in the late 1970’s and 1980’s, victim to changing economics, short sighted investment priorities and other forces. There is still a modest steel presence in Youngstown, but the ruins far outnumber the active plants.

There will be more complete coverage in the SIA Newsletter, but here are some personal impressions.

The tour began with an early bird tour of the Erie, PA area which eventually brought that group of participants together with the rest of the tour members for the opening reception held at the Youngstown Historical Center for Industry and Labor (“the Steel Museum”).

Pattern for Roller Profiles at McDonald Steel. Thousands of other patterns are hanging in the background.

Turning a Roller

Raw Materials

Rollers before Machining

The Friday and Saturday tours were separated into two different itineraries, with some common sites. One of these was the McDonald Steel works, a former US Steel rolling mill that can produce a wide variety of rolled steel shapes. Of particular IA interest was their pattern shop containing the profiles for the multiple rollers used in creating a complex shapes. Some of these date back to the origins of the mill in the early 20^th century. Due to a scheduling glitch, the tours were only able to drive by the WCI Steel Mill, the last operating blast furnace in the area. The tours both made stops at smaller survivor industries which have adapted, even thrived in the changing industrial landscape of the area. One of these was Flex-Strut who manufactures steel struts, and a tool and die shop which supports them. Both tours ended up at Tod Engines, a bold attempt to restore a huge steam engine that powered part of a rolling mill in the early 1900’s. The Saturday tours went farther away. My bus went all the way to Ashtabula, OH where we visited the Pinney Docks, the largest privately owned port on the Great Lakes, and the Ashtabula Maritime Museum, overlooking the very busy coal port.

Rick Rowlands describes the Cylinder and Valve Gear for 1914 Tod Cross Compound Steam Engine

Looking at the Crankshaft

The Sunday stay over tours included a walking tour of downtown Youngstown, including two notable buildings by Albert Kahn. We went on another, eclectic, tour which included worker housing built by Youngstown Sheet & Tube as part of a “social experiment” in paternalistic capitalism. We then headed out for a fascinating exploration of the over 200 beehive coke ovens at Cherry Valley Park. It is difficult to imagine what this site was like in operation, Dante’s Inferno is a good start… We ended up visiting a reconstructed grist mill at the falls on the Mahoning River and walked over to a marvelous chain link suspension bridge. JM

Some of the more than 200 Beehive Coke Ovens at Cherry Valley

Laddle Cars Moved Molten Steel between Processes

2007 National Conference, 7-10 June, Philadelphia, PA

The 2007 SIA National Events are shaping up nicely. The National Conference will be held in Philadelphia, on Jun 7-10, 2007, hosted by the Oliver Evans Chapter. The conference hotel is the Crowne Plaza at 18^th and Market in the heart of Philadelphia, with easy access to public transit. SIA members will be receiving information about the Conference in the future. Plans include a boat tour on the Delaware River to view waterfront industrial sites and the aging liner United States. Philadelphia has a rich IA legacy, so do plan to spend some extra time in the area if you are attending the Conference. A call for papers was issued in October with a 15 Feb 2007 deadline for submissions. If you have something that you’d like to share with the SIA community, do submit an abstract. Check the National SIA web site or Jay McCauley has details.

2007 Fall Tour, 27-30 Sept., Ely, NV

The Fall Tour will be to Ely, NV, hosted by the Nevada Northern Railway on 27-30 September 07. Recently named a National Historic District, this is the best preserved steam/diesel railroad in the US. If you can find a copy, the October, 2006 issue of Trains has an excellent article on the NNR. We’ll be getting an in depth look at a working railroad, and insights into the rich history and current rebirth of mining in the area. The team is also looking at IA related activities in Las Vegas and along the way to Ely. JM

Notes and Tidbits

A Bookstore on Your Way to Ely

By Tony Meadow

I was recently in Las Vegas, NV for a tradeshow. One of my favorite things to do when traveling is visit used bookstores. The appeal of the internet has greatly increased the number of "virtual" bookstores that sell books on the internet, but have no physical store that can be visited. The internet has also reduced the number of physical bookstores. It was with great pleasure that I found the Nevada Mineral & Book Company about half an hour from downtown Las Vegas.

Walter Lombardo, who has worked as a geologist for some years, left the employ of the State of Nevada and started a bookstore that focuses on geology and mining. He has purchased the libraries of several large mining and exploration companies as well as those of geologists and mining engineers. His store has most publications from the USGS and Bureau of Mining and many state geological publications. He also has general geology and mining books and some issues of journals and magazines.

I purchased several items on iron and steel in the West for my book on Kaiser Steel that I've been looking for as well as the hard hat of the former superintendent of the Eagle Mountain Mine, Kaiser's primary source of iron ore.

Highly recommended!

Telephone: 702.568.9977
Email: minbooks@aol.com
Website: http://minbooks.net/
Walter is just starting to put his web site together. Look for significant improvements soon.

Address:
Nevada Mineral & Book Company
645 N. Pueblo Blvd.
Henderson NV 89015

The store is about 30 minutes from downtown Las Vegas and is approximately 2.5 miles east of Boulder Hwy on Lake Mead Drive. Be sure to call before you visit. Walter said that he was looking for larger space for the store.

New IA Related Exhibition at Harvard’s Baker Library

THE HUMAN FACTOR: INTRODUCING THE INDUSTRIAL LIFE PHOTOGRAPH COLLECTION AT BAKER LIBRARY
http://www.library.hbs.edu/hc/hf
October 19, 2006 - March 7, 2007
Baker Library Historical Collections
North Lobby, Baker Library
Harvard Business School
Boston, MA

Created in the years between the world wars, the Industrial Life Photograph Collection at Baker Library reveals the colliding-and sometimes competing-messages of art and industry, education and public relations, humanity and modernization. Assembled in the 1930s by Harvard Business School colleagues Donald Davenport and Frank Ayres, the collection was intended to provide students, and America's aspiring corporate managers, with visual data to study the interaction of worker and machine- "the human factor." The introductory exhibition and web site include a selection from the over 2,100 images that comprise the Industrial Life Photograph Collection, featuring the work of such artists as Margaret Bourke-White and Lewis Hine. "The Human Factor" is the culmination of a multi-year initiative to identify, catalog, preserve and make available for research use the rich and expansive photographic collections of Baker Library, Harvard Business School. These collections total over 20,000 photographs documenting the history of industrial production in the United States and in South and Central America. Gallery talks will take place on Thursdays at 4:00 p.m. on January 18, and February 8, 2007.

The on-line exhibit ( http://www.library.hbs.edu/hc/hf ) will
continue to be available after the physical exhibit closes. TM

Public Libraries in California - Electronic Resources

By Tony Meadow

Virtually all public libraries in the state (California, that is) allow any California resident to get a library card. I have library cards from the Oakland, San Francisco and San Jose libraries. Why would I go to the trouble to get more than one library card, especially since I had to get to each library in person?

The answer is that many libraries offer a wide variety of information sources in addition to books and magazines, especially electronic resources. Some are available from your home computer while others may only be used within the library.

The San Jose Public Library http://www.sjlibrary.org/ offers the Sanborn Fire Insurance maps for many California cities. Those who attended our dinner meeting on November 16th had a chance to see some examples of these maps when Betty Marvin from the Oakland Cultural Heritage Survey (OCHS) talked about the history of industry in Oakland.

Sanborn maps were created to maintain a record of the buildings likely to be insured. They are large scale maps that generally show the details of a single block in great detail. They show the outine of buildings, the material used to construct the building (wood, steel, or concrete), how many floors it had, locations of windows and doors, and, of great interest, who owned or leased the building. Railroad tracks in that block are shown.

The electronic version of these maps cover a limited number of cities, and generally provide a few generations of the maps for each city. These maps were updated as often as once a year for larger cities and less frequently for smaller towns. They provide a fascinating and very detailed record of the geography and makeup of the these towns especially if you look at the maps from different years. You can download these block by block maps and study them at your leisure. Sanborn maps for Oakland are available for 1889, 1902, 1911-1912, 1928, and 1951. Maps for Sutter Creek are available for 1890, 1895, 1898, 1912, and 1930. (Knight Foundry appears in each edition.)

The San Francisco Library http://www.sfpl.org/ offers the full text of the New York Times from 1851 to 2003. You can do full text searching for any topic, place, person, or company. The database retrieves possible matches and you can look at the full text of the article or download the complete page on which the article appeared in Adobe Acrobat format. I've used this particular database extensively for my research into Kaiser Steel. I've easily found many articles that would have taken me weeks of time in the library looking at microfilm. Great stuff!

The San Francisco Library also offers full text access to the JSTOR system which contains the full text of many academic journals in many fields (history, science,…). Here's a brief description of JSTOR from their web site http://www.jstor.org:

JSTOR is a not-for-profit organization with a dual mission to create and maintain a trusted archive of important scholarly journals, and to provide access to these journals as widely as possible. JSTOR offers researchers the ability to retrieve high-resolution, scanned images of journal issues and pages as they were originally designed, printed, and illustrated. The journals archived in JSTOR span many disciplines. For more information about the JSTOR collections, please visit Currently Available Collections and Journals.

Originally conceived as a project at The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, JSTOR began as an effort to ease the increasing problems faced by libraries seeking to provide adequate shelf space for the long runs of backfiles of scholarly journals. JSTOR is not a current issues database. Because of JSTOR's archival mission, there is a gap, typically from 1 to 5 years, between the most recently published journal issue and the back issues available in JSTOR.

Among the JSTOR journals are American Economic Review, American Historical Review, Journal of Industrial Economics, Economic Geography, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, and Business History Review. Note: different libraries subscribe to different collections of periodicals, so check each library's JSTOR subscription for details.

The Oakland Public Library http://www.oaklandlibrary.org/ provides access to InfoTrac OneFile and Mergent.

InfoTrac OneFile: a very large collection of magazine articles. Over 7000 periodical titles are indexed and full text is available for over 4000 of them.

Mergent (formerly Moody's) Online: financial and investment information for publicly held companies. Includes current and historical data, company histories and stock splits, custom charts and graphs. The library also has a fairly complete collection of Moody's and Walker's (a California only equivalent) which provide a financial overview of publicly traded companies.

These are only some of the resources available from some of the libraries our great state. If you haven't been to the library recently check out library web pages. To access these resources all you need to do is go to the library (in person!) and fill out the application. You can then access this library's electronic resources for home, well except for a handful that have to be used from inside the library. Each library's offerings are different, so you may have to investigate several libraries to find the resource that you need for your project

Podcasts for Industrial Archeologists

By Tony Meadow

Podcasting is a recent development that makes it possible to easily share audio and video. The term podcasting refers to this general capability and, although the term comes from the name of the Apple™ product, it does not require an iPod™ to listen to podcasts. You can listen to them on any recent vintage computer as long as you have a high-speed connection to the Internet: DSL, cable modems or some other form of broadband access. The media files tend to be large and while it is possible to download such files on a dialup, it will be a frustrating experience.

Why should someone interested in IA care about podcasts? Well, among the sources of podcasts are many universities. It's possible to listen to a whole semester's worth of lectures on a topic of interest to you basically for free (that's assuming that you have a computer and an internet connection).

You'll need some software to subscribe and listen to podcasts. There are many programs out there that will do this. I use Apple's iTunes™ which is a free program available for Macintosh™ (OS X) and Windows™. You can download it from http://www.apple.com/itunes/.

Looking for podcasts is pretty easy. If you are using iTunes go to the "iTunes store" in the program and enter terms that describe what you're interested in into the search box. I've just entered "American history" and iTunes found 150 podcasts. Podcasts, especially those from universities, are usually free. Songs, most of which cost money, also appear.

Besides iTunes, you can use search engines such as Google, or you can use podcast directory sites such as http://www.podcastalley.com/ or http://www.podcast.net/.

Most podcasts are just mp3 files, a file format that is very widely supported by numerous applications. Some podcasts are in other formats such as Real Audio. Yet other podcasts are video podcasts, containing video and sound.

Listen to podcasts on your computer using iTunes or one of the many other applications that can play them. Or get an iPod or one of the other mp3 players out there.

I'm listening to a wonderful US history course that starts during the Civil War and ends up in our times. The course is taught by Jennifer Burns who teaches at UC Berkeley. Her course is an undergraduate survey course so it does not go into great detail, but it's been a long time since I took a history course and listening to this course has helped me connect many disconnected topics together: railroads, industrialization, labor unions, the Gilded Era, and so on. I listen to these podcasts when I'm driving instead of the radio and driving has become an educational experience! To find this series of podcasts go to http://webcast.berkeley.edu/courses/archive.php?seriesid=1906978276.

The curriculum, including readings, etc. is available at http://history.berkeley.edu/faculty/Burns/H7B/.

There are many, many other educational podcasts available and this trend has just begun. Among Berkeley offerings are CS 61A: The Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, ESPM 160AC: American Environmental and Cultural History, ME 109: Heat Transfer, Physics 10: Physics for Future Presidents, and VisSci 203A: Geometric Optics. Stanford also has many offerings including faculty lectures, guest lecturers, concerts. Many other universities also offer podcasts.

When you find a podcast that you think is of interest to our members, drop us a line!

Bureau of Mines “Minerals Year” now Available On Line

By Tony Meadow

Another milestone in the preservation of older technical materials! The University of Wisconsin has scanned all issues of the Bureau of Mines Minerals Years from the 1932-33 issue through the final 1993 issue and put them online. These annual reports are essential reading for anyone interested in mining in a larger context. There's articles in each volume on the various mineral commodities including the obvious stuff including gold and silver, copper, lead, zinc, iron ore, gravel and sand, and so on, as well as some of the more obscure commodities such as talc and ground soapstone, fluorspar and cryolite, asbestos, barite, potash and mica. As time goes on more and more materials are covered by separate articles.

In 1952 the yearbook starts including articles on fuels such as coal (anthracite, bituminous, etc.), coal black, natural gas, helium (which is only obtained commercially from certain natural gas wells), and petroleum. Also included are articles about minerals developments in each state, and shortly thereafter, most countries in the world.

Historical volumes (1932-33 through 1993) are available: http://minerals.usgs.gov/minerals/pubs/usbmmyb.html or through the University of Wisconsin's web site at: http://digicoll.library.wisc.edu/EcoNatRes/

The more recent issues which were created by the USGS (shortly after the Bureau of Mines was closed) are available directly from the USGS web site at: http://minerals.usgs.gov/minerals/pubs/commodity/myb/

Atlantic Monthly Historic Articles

By Tony Meadow

The Atlantic Monthly is celebrating it's 150th anniversary. Each month they've included excerpts of historic articles on a variety of topics. A recent issue included some excerpts of historic articles on technology. These excerpts as well as the complete articles are available on the Atlantic Monthly's web site.

I strongly recommend the Atlantic Monthly for anyone who is interested in current events both here and abroad, government and policy, books, movies, and travel. They have some of the best essayists who are currently writing like James Fallows, Robert D. Kaplan, and William Langewiesche. I read it cover-to-cover and often find that government policy can be interesting - really! There are occasional articles that cover technology and history, but that's not their strong suit.

http://www.theatlantic.com/ideastour/technology/

Archival excerpts:

The Age of Photography (June 1859) by Oliver Wendell Holmes

In the mid-nineteenth century, photography was in its infancy. Louis Daguerre had developed the daguerreotype in 1837, and by the 1850s travel photography and photographic portraiture were beginning to catch on. In a much-cited 1859 essay, Oliver Wendell Holmes impressed upon readers the revolutionary implications of this new technology.

A Telephonic Conversation (June 1880) by Mark Twain

Mark Twain's family was one of the first in Hartford to install a telephone (which had been patented by Alexander Graham Bell in 1876) in its home. In 1880, Twain, bemused by this new device that permitted eavesdroppers to hear only one side of a conversation, wrote an amusing description of overhearing his wife talk on the telephone.

The New Talking Machines (February 1889) by Philip G. Hubert Jr.

In 1889, Philip G. Hubert Jr., a noted architect and writer (his 1893 book Men of Achievement: Inventors remains in print today), commended Thomas Edison for his progress in developing the phonograph and predicted great things for its future, including books on "phonograms" and music reviews accompanied by sound clips.

Life As We Know It (July 1924) by Arthur D. Little

In the early years of the twentieth century, standardization, mass production, and the rise of consumer culture combined with new scientific advances to transform the everyday lives of Americans. In 1924, Arthur D. Little, the MIT-educated chemical engineer who in 1886 founded the world's first consulting company, took note of some of those dramatic changes.

Television and Radio (May 1937) by Gilbert Seldes

In 1937, the impending commercial launch of television inspired Gilbert Seldes, a commentator on popular culture and the author of The Seven Lively Arts (1924), to consider how this new technology would affect radio. Soon after this essay appeared, he became the first director of programming for CBS.

As We May Think (July 1945) by Vannevar Bush

Near the close of World War II, Vannevar Bush, the former director of the wartime Office of Scientific Research and Development, urged scientists to turn their energies from war to the task of making the vast store of human knowledge accessible and useful. The "infostructure" he sketched out-including a proposal for what might be seen as a kind of precursor to hypertext-was destined to be realized in what we now know as the Internet.

Moving Toward the Clonal Man (May 1971) by James D. Watson

As the science of embryology advanced in rapid strides, the geneticist and Nobel laureate James D. Watson-best known for his research on the structure of DNA-considered the potentially troubling implications of such research.

Living With a Computer (July 1982) by James Fallows

Always a technophile, Atlantic contributor and editor James Fallows was one of the first writers to incorporate a personal computer into his life. A few years later, he explained for Atlantic readers how it worked and how it was subtly influencing the way he wrote.