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James "Chick" Herrin became a journeyman lineman in 1966. He has worked in the industry for contractors, investor owned utilities, municipalities and rural systems. For over 40 years, Chick has been applying his skills and sharing his knowledge with other craftsmen and utility employees throughout the continental United States. His Profession has exposed him to the varying environmental elements and diverse population complexion seldom experienced in today's society. Chick has continually strived to improve working conditions for linemen by acquiring new skills, establishing improved practices, creating safety/training programs and becoming an instructor to educate the workforce. |
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Andy Anderson started as a lineman with Alabama Power in the 1930's. He joined the A. B. Chance Company in 1938 as the first Chance live line tool demonstrator. His travels in training linemen took him across the country and throughout the world. He was a "great communicator" and was noted for his ability to remember names of those he worked with years after even only casual introductions. Stories of Andy conducting training from the top of a pole and looking down at eager students and remembering names from his last training session that may have been years before abound. "Pulling" his Chance tool trailer, making presentations, showing movies and demonstrating the tools made Andy a welcome visitor and friend wherever he went. As Andy once up it, "I sold a whole shirttail full of tools." Besides training, Andy brought his ideas back from the field and working with Chance engineers spearheaded the development of many tools and techniques still used today. Andy was especially proud that none of the thousands of linemen who learned from him were ever injured wile working with him. |
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It was Floyd's solid reputation as a hard worker and a man of integrity that helped catapult the company over it's initial financial hurdles. Individuals who believed in Floyd and his entrepreneurial vision underwrote some of the start-up costs. Eventually more conventional financing was secured. Crews were added to the Duke Power system, then to Carolina Power and Light (now Progress Energy). The company expanded into Virginia and West Virginia on the American Electric Power system and later into Georgia. The makeshift office in the kitchen of the Pike home was no longer adequate for the burgeoning company. The time had come to move into a separate facility. Over the years the building was repeatedly expanded, and a garage was added so equipment could be maintained and repaired. In less than a decade, Pike Electric had grown to several hundred employees. The young company was reaping the benefits of an excellent reputation both for its outstanding personnel and its quality equipment and services. |
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When a group of experienced linemen and wiremen worked together at the St. Louis Exposition in the fall of 1890, they began to meet on a regular basis to compare industrial notes and discuss common, industry wide problems. Linemen, the group learned, suffered an exceptionally high mortality rate, but they could expect to earn no more than fifteen to twenty cents an hour for a twelve hour day. Convinced that they had no chance to improve their situation as individuals, the St. Louis group got in touch with Charles Kassel, an organizer for the American Federation of Labor. With Kassel's help they established a mixed union of linemen and wiremen that was chartered as AFL Federal Labor Union 5221. When Henry Miller became president of the St. Louis union in 1891, he immediately set up a national organizing committee. Gathering together a group of well traveled "floaters" who had worked all over the country. On November 21, 1891 ten delegates representing about three-hundred workers in eight cities met in St. Louis to organize the National Brotherhood of Electrical Workers. Convinced that "common cause and universal sympathy should exist" among all workers in the trade, this handful of men intended to build a "thorough" organization that would supply the industry with competent, well trained electricians able to command the highest wage rates and unwilling to work for anything less. |
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Thomas Edison invented the electrical utility industry. Although many inventors were pursuing a commercial incandescent lamp in the late nineteenth century, Edison and his colleagues at Menlo Park succeeded -- after thousands of experiments involving thousands of substances -- in producing a practical lamp in 1879. Beyond that, however, Edison saw the need for a complete system to generate, transmit, and sell electrical power to industry and the public. Edison and his team devised the generators, dynamos, wires, cables, conduit, measuring instruments, and power stations that would allow that lamp to glow with the flip of a switch in both home and shop. |
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During the 1850's the world's tool-making business was centered in Europe, and virtually all tools used in industrializing North America were imported from Germany and Switzerland. With his understanding of both old-world craftsmanship and new world entrepreneurialism, Mathias first went to work in the shop of a hardware merchant. Later in 1857, he opened his own blacksmith shop, and used his skills to make hospital beds, mailboxes and ornamental iron fences. Using a forge to heat metal and a hammer and an anvil to shape it, he continued his blacksmithing. He also began repairing metal tools like chisels and steel hammers which were being use to build the great city of Chicago. History has it that a lineman working for the Mississippi Valley Telegraph Company walked into the Klein shop with one side of his pliers broken. Mathias repaired the pliers by forging and finishing a new half for the tool and riveting it to the old half. Not long after, the lineman returned because the other original half of the pliers had now broken and he needed its replacement. Mathias forged and finished the second half of the pliers and riveted it to the other replacement half -- thus creating the first complete Klein pliers. |
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