The Factory
The R. B. Grover shoe factory was big, but not the biggest in Brockton, a town that had 35,000 shoe workers. The wooden building, shaped like a letter E, occupied half a city block at the corner of Main and Calmar Streets. Grover made the popular Emerson brand shoe, and business had been good enough to add a fourth floor.
The factory was heated using steam radiators, with the steam being produced by coal-fired steel boilers installed in a brick boiler house attached to the wooden factory as the crossbar of the E. When the fourth floor was added, the original boiler was replaced by a larger one and the old boiler, 17 feet (5.2 m) long and six feet in diameter, was left in place as a backup. Since the new boiler could generally meet the factory's demands on its own, the old one was seldom used; and when used, was used reluctantly. Grover's chief engineer David Rockwell, who had a first-class engineer's license and twelve years experience, did not trust it.
Read more about this topic: Grover Shoe Factory Disaster
Famous quotes containing the word factory:
“... you can have a couple of seconds to rest in. I mean seconds. You have about two seconds to wait while the blanker is on the felt drawing the moisture out. You can stand and relax those two seconds—three seconds at most. You wish you didn’t have to work in a factory. When it’s all you know what to do, that’s what you do.”
—Grace Clements, U.S. factory worker. As quoted in Working, book 5, by Studs Terkel (1973)
“I reverently believe that the Maker who made us all makes everything in New England but the weather. I don’t know who makes that, but I think it must be raw apprentices in the weather-clerk’s factory who experiment and learn how.... In the spring I have counted one hundred and thirty-six different kinds of weather inside of four-and-twenty hours.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)