[Thursday] Massie visit

[David Caldwell]

Walter W. Massie, grandson of the founder of the Massie Wireless Telegraph
Company, and his wife came to visit the museum last Thursday afternoon,
toured through the buildings, and spent extra time in the station and in
the Wireless back room where we have the workbench from the company. He
first met Bob and Nancy in 1966, and was last at the museum about 15 years
ago. In addition to the workbench, many of the artifacts on the second
floor of the Massie Station came to the museum through his family.

He had written down some reminiscences of his grandfather and we talked
through them with him. He's a retired civil engineer, born shortly after
his grandfather died in 1941, and has been living in Holland since 1970;
his wife is Dutch.

Three especially interesting bits.
First, the device on the table upstairs in the station with eight solenoids
linked to a cam shaft--which we had speculated was used by the company in
some way--was something his grandfather made to power the Meccano toys of
his kids!

Second, the huge pump handle key in our live display on the second floor
was a style that Massie Wireless made for stations in Alaska, so the key
could be operated with big mittens on. It's not the style that would have
been originally used in PJ.

And last, he recognized the switchboard in the NW corner of the Steam
Building. It's labelled as having come originally from a small
hydroelectric plant on an estate in Portsmouth RI, which matched his
memory, but according to him it had gone first to his father who was trying
to generate electricity along a stream at the family farm in Wrentham and
then to our museum. He thought he recognized the small black GE generator
that's sitting near the American Ball engine, and thought that it or one
very much like it had also come from the Portsmouth estate.

Dave
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