Bus Plugs and the Wright Brothers
We were looking for bus plugs and met Orville and Wilber Wright. Well, sort of. MIDWEST was in Dayton, Ohio, looking at old used bus plugs in a former manufacturing facility. A big place. A thousand bus plugs. They had used Square D, ITE, and ITE Bull Dog bus plugs. They had used bus duct and bus plugs throughout the entire facility. We found bus plugs in all the manufacturing areas and above the ceilings in the offices, even the executive office. The facility had evolved and expanded over ten decades. There was a century of history in this manufacturing plant. We found electrical infrastructure every where, behind walls that had been added or moved, above ceilings that had been remodeled many times, hidden in closets, and secreted away in basements long forgotten. We were especially surprised to find a solemn plaque in front of a very old building, a hundred years old that had been beautifully remodeled inside as executive offices. We were looking at old electrical bus plugs and transformers in an area of the building, walked out the front door to find the plaque that read, in part, “…these buildings were constructed in 1910 and 1911 to house the factory of Wilbur and Orville Wright’s first airplane company, The Wright Company.” Now that’s a paradigm shift. One moment it’s just an old building. A second later it’s the Beginning of Manned Flight. Today we have “Human Spaceflight.” But we also still have bus plugs, some new and some old and some no longer used.