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Echoes from the Oil Country, Volumes 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5: W. Osborne’s Experiences Repairing Machinery in Western Pennsylvania in the late 1800’s, by W. Osborne, originally published by American Machinist magazine in the early 1900s. Republished by Lindsay Publications, Bradley, IL, 2003-5. All are 5½ x 8½ softcover. Volume 1, 61 pages; Volume 2, 64 pages; Volume 3, 93 pages; Volume 4, 175 pages; Volume 5, 64 pages. Please note these books are new, not used. Into this booming, hell-bent-for-leather region, came W. Osborne, a machinist and keen chronicler of the vagaries of human nature as well as the infernal cussedness of mechanical objects. Osborne was machinist at a time when a machinist was much more than someone who stood behind a lathe or milling machine. By 1903, the column by W. Osborne was the most read in American Machinist. The first volume is actually the middle of the original American Machinist series, because Lindsay did not acquire the beginning of the American Machinist series until after he had published the first two volumes. Osborne first started writing his column in July 1900. It is not until Volume 3 that you discover how Osborne got to Petroleum Center in western Pennsylvania: oil country. He'll tell you about meeting the owner, the room he stayed in, and the machinery all over the shop floor. Then it's out to repair a 9x12 steam engine pumping oil out on a "lease", details of the work of the joint turner, crack pot inventors, and more. Then there’s the story of sending Charley out to the repair the steam engine at the nitroglycerine factory. Charley, convinced the factory would explode at any instant, was so nervous it's a wonder he didn't wet his pants! When Charley was told to go over to the nitro-glycerine factory and fix the engine, he wasn't exactly tickled to death over it. Of course he wasn't expecting to find anything very hard to do about the engine. Indeed, he knew very well that they purposely used cheap stuff there, so that when the factory blew up the loss would not be great. It was this idea of loss that bothered him; believing that the stock of good mechanics was not any too large, the thought of having the shop and the world get along without one of the best of them rather disturbed him. Then, on the other hand, he had often thought of the nice things the neighbors would say when that calamity did take place… You can read about Osborne being sent out to a hotel when the engineer couldn't figure out why the steam pump would not draw water from the lake. Or how he helped the boneheads at the brewery when they incorrectly hooked up a new-fangled bottlewasher to the overhead line shaft and proceeded to break scores of bottles. And there’s the amazing trip to the sawmill through ice and snow to repair the steam engine. When he got there, the crew had removed the head but the piston was tight. Well, no wonder. It used "Dunbar" packing. After he got that fixed, he babbitted the crosshead in thunder and lightning with snow coming down so hard he thought it was night. He even had to steal rosin from the local fiddler to use as flux for his babbitt job. Or the explosion and fire from a gas well. And the rattle snakes. About hating red tape, and the machinist who was almost fired because of the way he cut threads. About how Osborne made a fool of the nasty owner of a printing press "that needed repair". Or his experiences of water annealing tool steel. Or having to make emergency repairs to a lumberman's locomotive. (It was first geared Shay he had ever seen, and what a wild ride he had on it!). One time, Osborne found that a vibrating line shaft was 4" low at one end. So, how do you think the owner fixed the hangers? He sent his workers out with jacks and they jacked the corner of the building up 4" to bring the shaft in line! You get stories with titles like - a drilling wrinkle for the lathe; misled by reversing work; trouble with brass castings; a general utility boring bar holder; laying out an oil derrick,\; moving to the new shop; melting gray iron chips in the cupola; patternmaking in the small shop; reducing friction; introducing gas engines into oil country; a visit to the machinery hall at the St Louis Exhibition of 1904; and more. Imagine you were saddled with the responsibility of moving lathes without damage from the second story of a large frame building to a new building half a mile away, using jacks and timbers, horse and buggy, and unpaved roads! Osborne pulled it off. Tune into the arguments and discussion by Osborne and others about the experiments of remelting the enormous piles of gray iron chips created by machine tools. Only a couple methods could be used successfully, otherwise the new iron would be difficult, if not impossible, to machine. Get Osborne's humorous observations on the hicks in the sticks when faced with getting a gas engine running and keeping it running. The ol' one-lungers could be a bit more cantankerous than our modern engines, but some oil men looked down on them as some kind of devil machine. Osborne learned 'em otherwise. During this era Osborne was elevated to shop boss, and as a result, wrote many articles on business management that had little to do with machinery. The date and titles of those articles are listed here, but not reprinted. * U.S. media (book rate) mail is $4.95. PLEASE NOTE that our experience over the 2004-5 holiday season was that an alarming number of books took over four weeks to be delivered to states west of the Mississippi River. We think—and hope—this probably has something to do with homeland security rather than any sudden deterioration of postal service, but we really do not know. All we know for certain is that we do NOT want to deal with a number of inquires and complaints about “Where’s my books?†when there is NOTHING we can do after we hand the package to the postal clerk and have the receipt in hand. If you want to use media (book rate) mail please wait at least four weeks before you contact us to inquire about the whereabouts of your book. And note that all we’ll be able to tell you is the date we mailed it from the Post Office. We will NOT be able to tell you where the book is, or when the Post Office is going to deliver it. The history of industrial, transportation, and agricultural development From Steam Engines . . . to Spacecraft (Echoes from the oil country -- memoirs of early engines was posted and is owned by: Francis Nicholson) |
francis_nicholson@chicagopartsnetwork.com (Francis Nicholson) for more information.
