Porcelain Saddleback Insulator Vintage Ohio Brass Co Brown Glaze

This listing is for a brown glazed porcelain insulator. This piece was made by Ohio Brass, as indicated by the B in an oval logo on the side. It measures approximately 3 1/4 inches tall and 3 3/4 inches in diameter at the base. I've seen these dated to the depression era, somewhere around the1930s or maybe 1940s

Ohio Brass Builds a City: 1888-1990:-

Ohio Brass is one of those great American success stories that literally built the cities of our nation. It certainly built our city.

The story of the company parallels the tale of Mansfield and embodies in many ways the awakening of a modest Midwestern town to a thriving dynamic city. The small enterprise begun by sons of an Irish immigrant emerged humbly as a simple bud on the vine, and expanded to see the full flowering of Mansfield’s vitality. And by the time it was finished a century later, it had seeded the city with all the necessary components of society that make for a vital balanced culture.

Hometown Venture

Frank Black graduated from Mansfield High School and then a New York business college, and then tried a number of jobs around town before he decided he needed to be his own boss. So he borrowed five thousand dollars from relatives when he was 23, and opened up a brass foundry on North Main Street.

This was 1888 in the horse-drawn era when everyone needed all kinds of harness rigs to hook their horses to carriages, wagons and plows. Each of those leather contraptions required a kit full of small brass buckles, hooks, rings and cinches to hold the straps in place, and the Ohio Brass Company made that their business as Mansfield’s harness works.

Within a couple years they bought out a local plating factory, which added a new line of brass valves and plumbing fixtures to their foundry works.

⚡️The Spark⚡️

Once the plant had expanded to manufacture whole catalogues full of pieces for assembling streetcars, they naturally began to explore the electrical components that made the trollies run. With intensive research and a new experimental laboratory, OB plugged into the field of electronics and within only a few years they were intricately involved in creating electrical systems around the country that powered the whole nation.

In fact, when scientists decided to harness the power of Niagara Falls into practical public electricity, it was Ohio Brass who engineered a whole new generation of high powered bushings and insulators for transistors and transformers to move the super currents safely through the grid.

Then a generation later when scientists began building atomic power plants along the Ohio River, they turned once again to OB for an entirely new approach to whole mega levels of high voltage lines.

There are binders from the OB vaults with photographic documentation of power lines—high tension, high capacity, fantastically futuristic energy suppliers—in nearly every state of the union. They created science fiction technology long before its time from a futuristic research lab named for Frank Black. By the middle of the century, there were Ohio Brass fixtures from the top of the Alps in Switzerland to the subterranea of South African mines; from Poland to India; from China to South America.

It was a long way from saddle brass.

In the 1960s, long after Frank Black and C.K. King had moved on to the next world, the President of Ohio Brass said he always carried in his pocket a brass buckle from the original foundry on Main Street, to remind him to be ever vigilant for opportunities in creative new markets

By 1910, Ohio Brass had made itself so vital in the industry of power transmission that it acquired a new factory in Barberton to produce the porcelain elements of OB insulators