Meador Manor

One of my favorite tools is from the early 1960s and has been superseded by its cousins. My parents received it around 1963, when Mid-States Supply Company of Kansas City, Missouri opened a warehouse in Oklahoma City. It’s a metal roll-up yardstick.

It is similar to what one finds in a retracting cased tape measure, but when you roll it out to be read, its convexo-concave blade rolls downward against the surface, not upward, and it needs no case. When unrolled completely, it stays extended and when you’re finished with it, you just flex one end and it will roll up into coil two inches in diameter.

My only complaint is that it is so old that it has 1/8 and 1/16-inch scales, and I would sometimes prefer a finer scale in millimeters. I had no luck finding a roll-up meterstick on Amazon, but I was able to set up an account and order uncased metric roll-up tape measures from the Hoffman Group in Germany, which were delivered by DHL some weeks later.

So now I have three of these gems, which will serve me for the rest of my years. I would much rather carry one of them in my pocket than wear a bulky cased measuring tape on my belt when I am headed to a store where I will need to check dimensions.

My examination of the yardstick did turn up the patent on its design: U.S. Patent 2,956,795 filed in 1958 by Edwin E. Foster of Austin, Texas and awarded in October 1960. He held a number of patents on various springs and similar mechanisms. I perused them and was surprised to find dozens of them filed over a 66-year period from 1923 to 1989. Egad!

Foster was born in Athens, Texas in 1903 and went to Austin to study at the University of Texas toward the end of World War I. By then he had already invented a pump to inflate Model-T tires. He took it to Chicago to sell, but removable rims were about to come on the market and that negated the appeal of his pump.

Foster didn’t give up. Instead, he rented some space in a machine shop and turned his pump design into a new kind of shock absorber. However, manufacturers feared the shocks might be susceptible to mud caking, so he struck out again.

He next put his inventiveness with springs to work on a system to allow one to iron clothes while sitting down. It had springs counterbalancing the iron, which was held in place by an arm above the ironing board.

He was still toying with ironing boards, with no reported great success, by the time World War II began. Some U.S. tanks had a clutch pedal that took five times as much force as normal to operate since Chrysler had chained together five engines for them. Foster devised a new clutch with his springs and the army used it in 50,000 medium tanks. General Eisenhower recognized him for the role his “clutch booster” had in the war in North Africa.

That was a success, but he didn’t profit greatly from it. He next devised a steel spring for window balances, but it wasn’t until the 1950s that he patented his real “money maker” — the “spirator” steel band. It had just the right curvature so that when rolled out and released, it rolled back up again. It was used in seatbelt retractors, tape measures, and my roll-up yardstick.

Mr. Foster died at age 93 in 1997. He had been awarded over 100 patents, from wind-up baby swings to toys to the devices used in gas pumps, seat belt retractors, wheel covers, cameras, windows, early spaceships, and…roll-up yardsticks.

The first spring-loaded tape measure U.S. Patent was #45,372 by William Bangs Jr. of Connecticut back in 1864. In 1868, Alvin J. Fellows, also of the Constitution state, patented a spring-click tape measure which included a locking mechanism and metal case.

Their tapes were not concavo-convex, so they had little standout or reach distance, which refer to how much the tape can be extended without buckling. I used to have a little tape measure of that sort, and enjoyed pressing a center side button that caused the long white flexible tape to whip back into the case.

Hiram A. Farrand received a patent for concavo-convex tape in 1922, although his version had no locking mechanism or spring. Instead, the tape was manually coiled inside an open-ended can.

Stanley tools purchased the rights to produce Farrand’s push-pull tape from him, and he went to work for them in 1931. Their tapes were all in closed housings and in the late 1930s Stanley released a model that locked, but it still did not self-retract.

Later innovations included the floating hook to ensure a correct measurement whether you push the end of the tape against a surface or hook and pull it. Stanley finally added a retracting spring in 1956. I presume that it was the self-retracting nature of Foster’s spring that made it special, but I’m no patent examiner with all of the answers.

Before World War II, metal retracting tape measures were still relatively expensive, and many carpenters still used those yellow folding rulers. My father had one, but I never liked using it.

Stanley’s PowerLock patent was awarded in 1963, allowing you to extend and lock the tape in place one-handed. Back in 2013, Stanley celebrated 50 years of selling tape measures. It noted how at that time it was manufacturing 31 versions of their PowerLock tape in seven different sizes and producing over nine million tapes each year in its Connecticut plant.

I yanked open my main tool drawer and noticed three retractable locking measuring tapes: a 9′ Craftsman, a 16′ Stanley, and a 25′ Lufkin plus one 5′ sewing tape. I have at least two more cased measuring tapes at work, and I wouldn’t be surprised if another is lost somewhere in the garage.

That conforms to how retractable cased tapes are far more popular than roll-up yardsticks or metersticks these days, which have become obscure and far harder to source. I’m so proud of my old-fashioned uncased tapes that I refuse to toss them in the drawer with their more popular cousins. Instead, I keep them at hand beside my desk. Thanks, Edwin E. Foster!

Children’s toys usually require materials that are cheap and durable. My dad, who was born a century ago, recalled playing marbles with his cousins, mumblety-peg with a pocketknife, spinning tops, darts, yo-yos, jacks, and stilts. He later graduated to bean shooters, rubber guns, and a Daisy air rifle, but the only item that survives with us today is a sturdy cast iron bank.

Cast Iron

My dad’s penny coin bank from the 1920s weighs 1.3 pounds empty and is in the form of a colonial house. Such banks were produced from 1910 to 1931 by the A.C. Williams Company of Ravenna, Ohio. Their miniature banks were available in several hundred types and styles and distributed through F.W. Woolworth’s, S.S. Kresge’s, and other five-and-dime stores.

To create cast iron toys, iron ore was melted in a blast furnace and poured into molds made from tightly packed sand. The casting sand used in the old days was often finer than what is used today, yielding a smoother surface with finer details.

Perhaps my father’s bank came from one of the five-and-dime stores in Bartlesville; his parents had a custom of driving the four miles from Dewey to Bartlesville on Saturday nights after his father got off work at the Dewey Portland Cement Plant. They would do a bit of shopping, but downtown Bartlesville was also cheap entertainment. They would find a good parking spot in front of the lighted stores and watch the people come and go. As my late father once wrote, “This type of entertainment has been replaced by radio, television, and now the internet. It was a slower pace back then.”

As for me, one of the first of the kids born into Generation X, I don’t recall having any cast iron toys; mine were mostly wood, Masonite, and, of course, plastic.

Plastics

Eventually, plastics displaced cast iron as the moldable material in children’s toys. My wife, Wendy, enjoys re-rooting the hair in new and vintage Barbie dolls. In her childhood, she loved Mattel’s Pink & Pretty Barbie from the early 1980s. That doll, which includes an outfit with 20 different configurations, is now a collector’s item. Some time ago, Wendy snagged one at a good price and re-rooted its hair.

The types of plastic used in Barbie dolls varies by body part. Early dolls were mostly polyvinyl chloride, with phthalate-based plasticizers added to improve its flexibility and durability. Later ones tended to have ethylene-vinyl acetate arms, acrylonitrile butadiene styrene torsos, polypropylene leg armatures, outer legs of polyvinyl chloride, and heads formed of a hard vinyl compound.

The first synthetic plastic, celluloid, was invented in 1863. Bakelite, a fully synthetic plastic, was invented in 1907, the same year that Oklahoma achieved statehood. By 1967, plastics had revolutionized consumerism such that they were what Mr. McGuire advised Benjamin Braddock to pursue. Of course, in that context, plastics were also symbolic of a cheap, meaningless, and ugly way of life.

Celluloid

By the 1850s, the industrial revolution had begun to strain animal-derived materials like horn, ivory, and turtleshell. In 1862, Alexander Parkes patented in England the first man-made plastic, a semi-synthetic thermoplastic material made from cotton fibers dissolved in nitric acid, intending it for waterproofing woven fabric clothing.

Across the Atlantic, John Wesley Hyatt acquired Parkes’ patent and experimented using cellulose nitrate to manufacture billiard balls, which until then were made of ivory. Hyatt admitted that sometimes hitting two of the celluloid balls together could produce “a mild explosion like a percussion guncap.”

Hyatt also noted, “We had a letter from a billiard saloon proprietor in Colorado, mentioning this fact and saying that he did not care so much about it, but that instantly every man in the room pulled his gun.”

Celluloid went on to important uses in film, but its flammability was a significant problem. Many old films shot on nitrocellulose have been lost to fire and decomposition. In 1978, both the National Archives and the George Eastman House had their nitrate film vaults auto-ignite, destroying the original camera negatives for 329 films and 12.6 million feet of newsreel footage.

Films were later shot on acetate, which was once called “safety film” since it melts, rather than burns, when heated. However, heat, moisture, or acids break acetate down into acetic acid, and vinegar syndrome plagues old films and magnetic tapes. It might interest you to know that while polyester, in the form of polyethylene terephthalate, was eventually used for film prints, it was not suitable for actually shooting films because it was so strong that it could damage a camera in a film jam. Polyester also requires tape or ultrasonic splicing, while acetate can be spliced with film cement, so acetate film was easier to edit before almost everything went digital.

Bakelite

In 1907, Leo Baekeland of Belgium beat his rival, James Swinburne of Scotland, to the patent office by one day. Thus I grew up associating Bakelite with molded items like older telephones and radios, which was named for him. Swinburne and Baekeland were intrigued by the product of the reaction of phenol with formaldehyde, with Swinburne unable to produce a good, solid resin but using it for hard lacquer. In 1927 Swinburne merged his Damard Lacquer Company with Baekeland’s English licensees to form Bakelite Limited for United Kingdom products.

Meanwhile, Baekeland systematically experimented with controlling temperature, pressure, and composition until he could produce a hard moldable plastic out of polyoxybenzylmethylenglycolanhydride. Thank goodness he called it Bakelite!

Bakelite’s advantages included excellent heat resistance, high electrical insulation, good strength, moldability into complex shapes, and a distinctive appearance. However, it was brittle and lacked the flexibility and impact resistance of modern plastics. It also had limited color options, is difficult to recycle, and offgases formaldehyde, a known carcinogen.

So Bakelite was superceded by a variety of different thermoplastics such as polypropylene and polyethylene terephthalate (PET). I kept on hand some Bakelite electrical meters and old Dial-An-Ohm boxes in my physics lab at Bartlesville High School, but offhand I can’t think of any Bakelite items at home.

Modern Plastics

I live in the city where crystalline polypropylene was invented by Paul Hogan and Robert Banks of Phillips Petroleum Company, and I recently toured the ChevronPhillips’ Plastics Technical Center on the west edge of town where 190 chemists, scientists, and technicians focus on the development of new plastics, work to improve existing ones, and provide technical support for customers worldwide with polyethylene, normal alpha olefins, and more.

The most commonly used plastics now include:

• Polyethylene (PE): Considered the most widely used plastic overall, including its different densities like HDPE and LDPE. 
• HDPE (High-Density Polyethylene): Known for its strength and rigidity, commonly found in milk jugs and detergent bottles. 
• LDPE (Low-Density Polyethylene): More flexible than HDPE, used for plastic bags and food wraps. 
• PET (Polyethylene Terephthalate): Often used for beverage bottles and food packaging due to its transparency and ability to prevent oxygen from entering. 
• PVC (Polyvinyl Chloride): Used in pipes, construction materials, and some flexible packaging, but concerns exist regarding its environmental impact. 
• PP (Polypropylene): Often used for containers, lids, and some food packaging due to its heat resistance. 
• PS (Polystyrene): Commonly found in disposable cups, food containers, and Styrofoam packaging. 

There are others, of course, including polylactic acid (PLA) and acrylonitrile butadiene styrene (ABS), which are commonly used in 3D printers.

The immense utility and low cost of modern plastics brings with them environmental concerns. Over 90% of plastic is not recycled, and there is mounting concern about microplastics.

Many of my favorite toys were plastics, with ABS forming my Tog’l blocks and Legos.

I received my Tog’l blocks when I was two-and-a-half years old, and I first encountered Legos at my spinster aunts’ home some years later. I played so much with the Legos that my mother bought me the 135 and 145 Universal Building Sets with hundreds of bricks, and my aunts eventually gave me all of theirs, so I had about 1,000 bricks to play with.

Back in 2016, when Wendy and I were engaged and cleaning out Meador Manor for her later move-in, she gathered up the Legos and we donated them. In the process, she discovered taped to each box the “Building Specifications for The Super-Deluxe Home” which as a child I had typed out and affixed.

Clearly my Lego constructions were serious business. But, just as only one cast iron bank remains with us from my father’s childhood, I only retained a couple of my childhood items: a bouncy ball made of elastomers and a hippie figurine molded not out of plastic, but of diatom skeletons. However, my ABS Legos may still be in use by some child somewhere. .they certainly held up better than anything else of mine did.