base there, into magnificent, precisely tuned musical steelpan drums.Īs the wartime economy transitioned to peacetime production, the problems posed by chemical wastes grew by the year. Emptied barrels were repurposed into cook stoves, footings for roughshod buildings, and on Trinidad and Tobago, near the U.S. By then, a few dozen companies manufactured drums that supplied oil and diesel to war machines. She lost control of the companies-employee fraud, bankruptcy filing, and disputes dragged on for years in court- just as World War I began and the need for steel drums skyrocketed. The chemical industry, still in its infancy when the first of Bly’s steel drums hit the market, in time would become one of the drum’s biggest users.īly’s steel barrels brought in $1 million a year, The New York Times reported in 1911. Standard Oil bought Bly’s barrels, as did other oil, gasoline, and paint companies. She founded the American Steel Barrel Company and built a factory next door. “For shipping or storage,” read one advertisement for the new barrels. Even when full, it could be tipped on its side and rolled. Bly helped straighten and gird the sides, and changed the industry standard. But they were leaky and poorly designed for shipping liquids. Steel barrels at the time had bowed sides, like wooden wine and ale caskets. Bly resolved to know every corner of the business, and in particular, “devoted a considerable portion of her time to the perfection and introduction of the steel barrel,” wrote the American Machinist in 1906. When he got ill and later died, she ran the company’s factory in Bushwick, Brooklyn, which made milk cans, tubs, and soda fountains, among other metal products. But it also portended other changes of globe-shrinking significance that were already in motion, including the rise of organic chemistry in 19th-century Europe and its transformation over the early decades of the 20th century into an industry whose hazards would become, in time, globe-travelers, too.Īfter returning from her travels, Bly left journalism, married a man many decades her senior, and took on increasing levels of responsibility at his company, Iron Clad Manufacturing. Bly’s race around the world, like other globe-spanning adventures her travels later inspired, had annihilated time and space, wrote The New York Times in 1913. Until then, global travel for its own sake and at that speed had been the stuff of fiction. Bly was the investigative journalist who in 1889-at the dawning of the Oil Age-went on to circumnavigate the globe and then invent the prototype for the modern steel drum. It made me think of Nellie Bly aboard the Augusta Victoria-hands gripped at the boat rails, rocked green by the Atlantic. Within moments, I was up and pacing circles around my office, trying to contain my stomach. In all the years I taught community and environmental health at Tufts University, I only sampled the toxic waste candy recently. Along with the landfill and the retention pond, the 55-gallon drum was the waste-management technology of the 20th century. Unregulated production systems were allowed to generate unusable, often dangerous wastes. They ran continuously, churning out synthetic plastics and other materials unprecedented in their novelty and utility, but also in the quantity of their byproducts. By mid-century, chemical factories had matured into massive operations spanning acres. chemical industry, which came of age during WWII, that introduced the drum into the popular imagination. Of all the industries that have relied on the 55-gallon drum, it was the U.S.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |