EPISODE 281 MASSEY FERGUSON DEMOLITION: PATENT RECORD FOUND UNDER WATER…LOOKED LIKE A BLOCK OF STONE
alan skeoch
March 2021
Often things are not what they seem. A friend pointed that out to me once in a short
comment. “I don’t like him, I think I should get to know him better,” that comment stuck
in my brain. Too easy to form snap judgments. Get to know him better. Get to know it better.
That simple idea Cannot be dislodged. Of course my friend applied it to human relations but the
comment is bigger than that. Often things are not what they seem to be. Look closer.
As the Massey Ferguson plant was tumbling around me I came upon a very unusual thing in
the basement of a building about to be pushed down. The basement had flooded but there
were stepping stones here and there as the water was only two or three inches deep. So
exploration was possible. Getting wet feet was to be avoided since most of my days
were spent teaching history at Parkdale Collegiate. Sloshing around in school was not something
I wished to do.
Those stepping stones allowed me to hop scotch my way through this doomed cellar
to a distant stairway exit. I was glad those stones were there. Lots of them.
Big blocks of wood or stone. Spongy! Must be wood.
What the hell are these things. Mushy. So I stopped and pulled one of the blocks
out of the black water. Lo and behold….it was a book. A book so large that it
was thought to be a construction block…perhaps stone at first…then wood…and
finally paper.
In the darkness I was unsure about the soggy thing. Was it important or some convoluted
legal tome of no interest at sll. So I carried the sodden mass up the stairwell to the daylight.
Flipped it open. Looked at the heading. I was holding The Canadian Patent Record volume
dated January 31, 1909. The Patent Record! Incredible. The blocks in the sodden basement
were these records.
How did this happened. it seemed to me that Patent records were important documents. Yet
in the haste to vacate these books had been discarded and used as stepping stones
by others who had explored this basement before me. Time was critical. The excavators
with their huge mouths were chewing at the building already. My rescue was limited to
this one book.
What to do with it was never resolved. I still have the book. Is it important to an
archivist? The last page number is 1,625. Huge . And there is an index. Wonder if
I can find any Massey patents?
In a random search…i.e. opening the book in a totally random fashion I notice patents
for railway track ‘fish plates’ and wooden handles for paint brushes. Patents for
railway spikes and a farm implement to remove Twitch grass from hay fields.
THIS book is big….1,615 pages of patented inventions…perhaps more than
5,000 inventions many of which pertained to the improvement of agricultural
machines. All neatly indesied by subject and also by inventor.
PATENTED DISC PLOW
Again my random search proved interesting. Here was a patent for a Disc Plow. I happened to purchase
an ancient disc plow at a farm sale a few years ago and it rests comfortably beside a wild apple tree where
once my grandfather’s barn once stood. Patent Number 118,406 by John Lavery, WAUBRA, Victoria, Australia,
on May 18, 1909. Filed April 17th, 1909. followed by a description of the disc plow.
TWO FURROW RIDING DISC PLOW RESTING BENEATH A WILD APPLE TREE ON OUR FARM.
Water was seeping into the buildings…never very deep but deep enough
to destroy any paper records left behind and strewn about. It was only pure chance
that I stepped on the Patent Record book in the darkness. The daylight picture
above was taken in another building.
Eventually the scene around the Massey plant looked
like Berlin in 1945 after a bombing raid.
SUGGESTION CORNER: WHAT SHOLD I DO WITH THIS ARTIFACT?
IF I put the book back in our cellar where it is at least dry then it will just disappear. Is it important enough for
an archivist? There are so many patents described that it would take a month or more for some brave soul
to put the book in digital form. Just think of a book with 1,615 pages illustrating as many as 3 or 4 patients per
page. 4 x 1,615 = 6,700 patents, likely more.
Maybe i am the only person that gives a sweet damn about the book. And all I did was randomly turn
a few of the 1,615 pages. Likely doomed.
END EPISODE 281 CANADIAN PATENT RECORD BOOK