Something Shiny

Mr. Tide and I went out last weekend and hit a few stores.  The thrift store, where I picked up some mugs for 35 cents a piece that match some I already have, and a silver tray that I'll be using for an upcoming bridal shower my daughter and I are hosting.

We also walked next door to an antique mall called Maryland Antiques Center which has an array of items from artwork to antique navigational tools, and everything in between.  I was on the hunt for some antique ironstone pitchers but came up empty handed in that department.  What I did stumble across, in a box on the floor near the register, were these wonderful old glass insulators.  They aren't terribly valuable, some even have damage, and truth be told I probably even over paid on a few of them (the small ones were $4 and the larger ones were $5.50), but they were calling my name so I bought them.  They all need a good bath, which from what I've been reading entails acid and a good long soak, so they may stay dirty for a bit longer.

There is something so appealing about old utilitarian pieces that are beautiful in their own right that has me wanting to fill my house with these lost or forgotten items right now.

And to think that these beauties were once hard working little insulators along railway lines on telegraph and telephone poles makes them all the more nostalgic and special to me.

Below is a little history about insulators and how they were used, from this website.

Insulators have been around longer than most people realize. The first rudimentary telegraph line was built between Paris and Lille, France in 1793. The need for insulators to insulate the wire from grounding out soon became apparent. There were a number of early experimental lines in Europe and the United States before Samuel F. B. Morse finally developed a fully functional and commercial system using his particular code. He built his first commercial line between Baltimore and Washington, D.C. in 1844.

Insulators were first used extensively in the mid-1840s with the invention of the telegraph. They were necessary to prevent the electrical current passing through the wire from grounding out on the pole and making the line unusable. The first insulators were a beeswax soaked rag wrapped around the wire. They worked well in the dry laboratory but soon broke down when exposed to the weather. The next concept was a glass knob, which looked much like a bureau knob one might still find on antique furniture today, mounted on a wood or metal pin. From this evolved the pin style insulator, which had no threading inside the pinhole. It was cemented to the pin by driving it down on the pin with a mallet on an asphalted rag. This was not a perfect answer because the weather worked on the rag and eventually the insulator would work loose and pop off the pin allowing the wire to contact a grounding surface. Inevitably, however, as telegraph lines traced the westward expansion of railroad lines across the states, glass manufacturers began to create many new designs in an effort to secure a niche in the rapidly growing insulator market.

Thus, by the advent of the Civil War in 1860, original insulator models could be found in both porcelain and glass. While glass was more common from the beginning for telegraph and telephone line insulation, porcelain would later gain a firm foothold as the preferred material for insulating high voltage power lines. Over time, glass manufacturers would produce hundreds of designs; millions of insulators were made of glass and porcelain, then later of rubber, plastic and other composite materials.

So there you have it, a little history about glass insulators.  And all this time I just thought they were shiny, came in cool colors, and were something different for me to use to decorate my house!