History of PINCO and starting of the plant by Fred Locke

A Great Inventor at Work

HISTORY OF YOUR JOB

By Ralph S. Connor

Father Time moves swiftly in every way and walk of life and businesses have come and gone before his scythe.

You may think this a peculiar way to start an historical sketch, but many of you who have worked here for a number of years, no doubt have locked in your memory, the interesting rise of this company and how it came about.

To you newcomers we will try to unlock a few of those memories the old timers are holding on to and give them to you. We no doubt will miss many of the amusing and interesting adventures of the old timers, so we leave the secrets of these "oldsters" and of "Father Time" himself still locked up in the memories of the past.

The Company now known as THE PORCELAIN INSULATOR CORPORATION was established in 1920, but wait, let's go back further yet...let's go back to the time insulators were made and fired (in a cook stove oven) in a certain man's home.

The time dates back to April 24, 1861 when one of the country's famous inventors, Fred M. Locke, was born. Mr. Locke was born in West Mendon, Town of Honeoye Falls. He was the son of Mr. & Mrs. William Morton Locke and a member of one of America's oldest and most honored families.

On the front page of this issue, is a photo of Mr. Locke at work in his laboratory. This photograph was loaned to your narrator by Mrs. Locke of Victor, New York, who gave me a very good history of Mr. Locke and also showed me his laboratory. But more of that later on.

We will leave his childhood experiences to his family and take up when he started working for the New York Central Railroad as a telegraph operator at Victor, N. Y.

On numerous occasions when he was operating the telegraph key during storms, he experienced difficulty in getting through to the dispatcher, which resulted in his being called down by his superintendent of the division for inefficiency. But, being an expert telegrapher, he was annoyed at being to blame for something that was not his fault, so he set out to find out what the difficulty was. He knew that the trouble was in the transmission lines and only on days that it stormed. In his search for the trouble, he observed especially the breaking down of insulators during storms. He immediately started his search for a material that would not allow leakage of electricity caused by moisture and after some search developed porcelain that had all the desired qualities.

TO BE CONTINUED NEXT ISSUE