Ever been the Cincinnati Water Works? It contains an engineering marvel with 6 of the largest ever constructed steam pumps in the world. We got a tour of this facility during our Society for Industrial Archaeology (SIA) conference. The architecture was quite fantastic, but no idea what was in store inside.
You walked through the front door & were looking at the top 2 stories of these steam pumps. There was a ledge near the middle of the building that afforded a view all the way to the bottom: breath-taking! This photo really doesn't do it justice...you were looking into this well-lit abyss.
Luckily, we signed up early for the conference & got on the best tour. Not only did we see the pumps, but we also got to visit Vardin iron works. They cast bells and were gearing up for 7 on the day of our visit. All the large boxes are full of packed sand with a void the shape of a bell.
Molten brass has a different color than aluminum, bronze, or iron. The hue was much more orange. One guy controlled the turning of the large ladle (on the left) another steadied the whole venture (off the photo on the right) and a third operated the crane's location (green on the right). These guys have cast hundreds of bells in their decade-long careers.
The ones we saw poured were too hot to get out of the moulds right away. So we got to check out others laying about the place that had been cast the week before. Each bell is polished on the outside and then tuned by scraping away metal from its inside. A delicate process!
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