TUBE TALK We have many types of tubes with us today. Some take us our highways and rail roads through mountains and under lakes, and in larger cites we often ride sub-level networks of underground tunnels fitted out with amazing comforts.
The tube concept is with us in industry and commerce, as well , and serves us domestically in more ways than we can keep a count of realistically.
There is a plant down in the Tennessee area which is unique in the ways it is seen by local residents. People living nearby see large vans loading and departing daily for destinations all over the country - large steel boxes, too, filled and ready to be taken to leading seaports to be stacked on freighters for overseas use. They witness this busy activity of products being transferred to where they are needed. Never do they ever see any raw materials entering the plant to be processed into some manufactured item. There are no incoming trucks. other than an assortment of various types of smaller vehicles delivering office supplies, cafeteria requirements, vending machine supplies, and other things it takes to keep a plant of that size in operation and in full production.
The product made at the plant was a plastic made with water from the nearby river plus chemicals made by the parent company. Everything required to manufacture their product - large blocks and sheets of a foamed plastic used in construction work and in various specialty projects requiring insulation qualities. All of the chemicals were delivered to the plant's tall silos - really upright tubes - through pipelines from the firm's Chemical Division Center.
Many people saw a plant shipping a product with no incoming raw materials coming in. It was, of course, more of an illustration of how the collapsible tube came to be is a vital part of our way of life. The main use today, I suppose. is the common use of such a tube is our toothpaste, shaving cream, lotions of many kinds, beauty aids, medications , an artist's colorful tubes of paints in a wide array of colors
They were not around at all until after September 11, 1856 when an American artist who was earning a living of a sort painting houses and signs more than doing portraits, landscapes and still-life studies. Upon insistence of a friend of his by the name of Samuel Morse - who you will know to have been an inventor - John Goffe Rand was urged to write the description of something he felt we all needed.
"... a metallic vessel so constructed as to collapse with slight pressure and thus force out the paint or other fluid confined therein through proper openings for that purpose and which openings may be afterward closed air-tight, thus preserving the paint or other liquid remaining in the vessel from being injuriously acted upon by the atmosphere".
Thus it was was that the collapsible became a part of our present day culture.
Andrew McCaskey Sr amccsr@comcast.net 1-27-07 [c506wds]
