Lampworks 8 — The Machine Shop

 

In a well-equipped machine shop on the first floor of the Lampworks a team of machinists kept machines running to fulfill the last order for tubes from the tube presses in the neighboring shed. 

 

 

I wish I had more often set my tripod beside the men at their precision work to simply have more angles on the shop. The machines were sold when the tube mill closed. There was little left here for the pigeons or for the fire to claim — just memories.

Machining is, arguably, the signature skill of the industrial age as programming is of our digital times. Does such human re-wiring change us?

Lampworks 7 — Remembering Stair Towers

Holmes, Booth & Haydens Lampworks, 2011 (from the southwest)

Interior, western tower

Interior, southeastern tower

Where is the line between art and documentation? Labels. These photographs fail to reach Minor White's "What else is it?" criterion except within the prose of the whole experience. Yet I stopped often at that wheeled hamper thinking how photogenic it was and then failed to shoot.

 

The Lampworks, once connected to other brick buildings of its era, was a survivior. The floors of the Lampworks were connected by two vertical stair towers and a an industrial freight elevator that I never saw used. The stair tower on the southeaster corner of the building, half-hidden in the picture, had a simple pitched roof and contained doors fastened shut that once led to buildings that had vanished and left no trace. 

 

The tower on the west side of the Lampworks had an elegant, 1880, pointed Victorian, slate, tower roof with tiny dormers that were owned by the pigeons, and it was all feathers and guano. 

 

Brick work at the northern end of the tube mill complex and a similar pointed tower, just visible over the tube mill roof, is a reminder of buildings that had stood between that were replaced around WW1 by the tube mill.

But that's all there is. Minor White properly asks what else might it be?

Lampworks 6 — Alternate Takes

Ansel Adams famously said that the negative was the score, the print was the orchestration. I offer two alternate interpretations of this photo of the Lampworks. Exploring possibilities.

 

 

 

Lampworks 5 — Analog Spam

This Graphotype machine was all that remained to indicate what went on in the offices on the third floor of the Lampworks. It may look old and frail, but when two of us tried to nudge it into a more photogenic position, it would not budge. Even the movers who had emptied the partitioned offices had given up and left the iron Graphotype machine holding the floor — Just as it had held the floor when it automated spam and even as we started hearing, “You’ve got mail,” 80 years later and began receiving robocalls.

Graphotype is the companion machine to the Addressograph. The Graphotype machine allowed operators here to stamp the address, one laborious letter at a time, of a customer onto a metal card about the size of a credit card. A stack of such cards, the mailing list of customers, would have been stored in cartridges (a data base in a box). When run through an Addressograph machine each metal card would be inked and the address of each customer quickly stamped on a mailing label. During WW2 nearly 19 million dog tags were made with the Graphotype technology to help sort the wounded and dead. Early credit cards were called “charge plates,” and were made similarly. In the Lampworks the cascading rusted plates hold only the customers of a defunct metals company, even as the light deflecting and multiplying through hazy glass office partitions flashes occasionally the silhouettes of clerks rushing another solicitation.

The Addressograph was patented by Joseph Smith Duncan in 1896 after he had exhibited it at the great 1893, Chicago Worlds Fair. Commercial production and sale of the technology began in 1917.

 

 

Lampworks 4, Waterbury

 

Lampworks 3, Waterbury