Ancient Web: Elton Gish Indexed Porcelain Insulators by Glaze and Maker

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.

Electrical insulators once helped make long-distance power lines possible. Elton Gish's website demonstrates that the small porcelain pieces left behind on poles can also tell an extraordinary story about manufacturing, patents, and regional industries.

Visit R=Infinity, the porcelain-insulator archive.

Gish organizes the site into unipart, multipart, and miscellaneous porcelain insulators. Rather than presenting them as decorative knickknacks, he compares body shapes, glaze colors, manufacturers, identifying marks, and intended uses.

The multipart index includes Fred Locke, Lima, Thomas and New Lexington products, plus a 1907 power-line case involving rare pieces found along the Kern-1 line. The historical reference section offers manufacturer lists, markings, catalogue inventories, patents, factory postcards, and early photographs of electrical installations.

A collector's shelf turns into industrial archaeology

One especially detailed category concerns knobs, cleats and wall tubes once used in wiring buildings. Another covers strange specialized devices such as radio-antenna insulators, forestry insulators, and supports for batteries or alarm systems.

Gish's site links to collectors' field reports and digs at old factory locations. Visitors can follow the history of the New Lexington company or inspect pictures of a rare insulator whose identification depended on an unusual glaze and manufacturing mark.

He also describes decades of research behind reference books, including a guide to unipart types with over one thousand illustrated forms. Those book figures are the publisher's descriptions, not independently verified counts of every surviving historical insulator.

The homepage was visibly updated in June 2026, so this is not a sealed 1990s relic. Its distinctive archival role is that it keeps older technical and industrial history organized through an independent collector's network. Pages refer back to shows held in 2000 and 2001, a 1993 factory-museum visit, and specialist articles published in 2004.

This is different from another Ancient Web entry covering the publication Crown Jewels of the Wire, which focuses on glass insulator collecting. Gish's reference is substantially concerned with porcelain, its makers, designs, and equipment.

The prices offered for current reference books are commercial details, not reasons to treat the site as a mainstream modern shop. Its enormous hyperlinked inventory and personal expertise remain the point.

Explore the porcelain styles, historic factories and patent references.

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.