Insulator collectors gather in Merritt to buy, sell and trade

Early morning rays shine on the colourful glass and porcelain shapes lined up neatly on wooden racks in Bob and Bev Scafe’s field, and visitors with varied license plates from as far as California mill about regarding each piece as a treasure.

United by a common interest in insulators, these collectors make the trek to Merritt each September to participate in the Scafe’s annual insulator show where they can admire, buy, swap and sell insulators of various shapes and sizes.

Standing in the midst of his treasures, which are displayed year round, Bob estimates that his collection is made up of almost 7,000 insulators and every one of them has a story. Running his fingers along one porcelain piece, Bob explains that the British made it for use in Barbados.

“The British were masters at setting up and operating railroads,” he explains. “They exported their expertise as far as Africa.”

The first insulator however, was patented in approximately 1843 by Ezra Cornell who would later use the proceeds to found Cornell University. Originally the glass pieces were created to insulate electric telegraph wires, but as technology changed, so did their design and use. For the most part, insulators have not been used on electrical power lines since around the ‘70s. Instead, collectors from all over the world like Bob spend hours hunting them and then bartering and trading with others.

Bob says it was serendipity that got him started. Fifteen years ago he and Bev found an electricity pole down and picked up some insulators, which he thought were interesting. Later that day in Princeton he came across another glass piece in an antique store and decided to purchase it.

“I bought that one and it was a downhill slide ever since,” he says smiling.

Bob has gathered much of his collection personally by climbing poles, picking the insulators and tossing them down to his wife, Bev, who caught them with a softball mitt at the bottom.

Now, Bob says his focus is on acquiring European insulators, which he does by connecting with people online from as far as Hungary to “wheel and deal” for other pieces.  Bob’s insulator shows also serve as a way for enthusiasts to diversify their collections.

“We try to sell as much as we can, but with the money you make, you immediately go to someone else’s table and buy more,” says Bob. “You end up with just as much money in your pocket as when you started.“

James Bergman, a regular visitor to the Scafe’s annual show from Bellingham, Washington, specializes in French insulators. His table displays varied green glass pieces — the best of the best scrounged from over 25 trips to France. Pointing out different pieces of his collection Bergman indicates a unique insulator made in France but used in Italy weighing 58 pounds. To obtain another rare insulator on his table, he had to hire a professional climber in South East France to cross a river and reach it.

For Bergman, who has been collecting since 1985, much of the appeal lies in the hunt.

“There’s more to hunting than simply shooting a rhino off its feet,” he says.

In the process of gathering insulators collectors like Bob and Bergman have gathered friends along the way as well and so, Bob says, the shows are as much about the people as the insulators.

What used to be a one-day show in Ft. Langley evolved to a two-day show when the Scafes moved to Merritt and now people start arriving as early as Wednesday. Fifty to 60 people usually attend and in the past have come from Hungary, Sweden and France besides places relatively closer to home such as Trail and Alberta.

“The computer is great to connect with other insulator collectors,” says Bob. “We just have a great time with these people.”

E-fabric spools bring bullet-proof watches, paper-thin batteries

Computer chips are arguably the most complex objects ever built by humans. Manufacturing a Pentium chip involves up to 5,000 steps of painting, etching, and polishing as up to 25 layers of metal and insulator are stacked onto a silicon wafer.

Imagine a yard-wide sheet of plastic coated in thin layers of metal and semiconductor rolling off a spool in a factory. That sheet passes under a printing press like a rolling pin, which imprints millions of transistors, capacitors, diodes, and wires onto it. The sheet then scrolls through an etcher to complete the printing process. The sheet would wind onto another spool as a finished product: perhaps a sheet of solar cells that could be unrolled and cut to size on a roof, or a flexible television display that could unwind like a blind in a living room.

Mr. Maltabes is working on these so-called “roll-to-roll” methods for making flexible, paper-thin computer displays. But he believes that the cheaper manufacturing and more flexible, durable products could fundamentally change the economic equation of what is affordable to do with electronics in general.

“There are devices that we can't even imagine now,” says Maltabes. “You could 'sensor' the world. Think about wrapping the pipes in your house with some kind of material that actually senses the temperature of your pipes. They tell you the pipes are about to freeze and warm them so they don't freeze.”

Or smart bandages that sense inflammation in a wound and release medications. Or lighted wallpaper, purchased by the roll at Home Depot, that changes color and hue with the turn of a knob.

One gadget being created with US military funds is the so-called Dick Tracy wristwatch: This flexible band, strapped on a soldier's wrist, would provide communication, satellite images, and Google Earth-style maps. “You should be able to shoot a bullet through it and have everything work except for the place where there was a hole,” says Maltabes, of the device, under development at Arizona State University's Flexible Display Center.

Roll-to-roll manufacturing could also lower the cost of making batteries. Yi Cui, a nanotechnologist at Stanford University, in California, is printing experimental batteries on paper and cloth using inks that contain carbon nanotubes and lithium-containing dust.

The technology potentially overcomes a major problem: Engineers would like to store electricity produced by solar and wind farms during the day, so it can be used at night – but the cost of today's lithium batteries renders this out of reach.

The “scale of the problem does not match,” says Dr. Cui. “You put together all of the lithium batteries we've made for the last 20 years to power the U.S. electrical grid and you can probably only power it for five to seven minutes.” Cui hopes, though, that printed batteries can be expanded to that massive scale.

Roll-to-roll could propel another green technology – printed solar cells – into widespread use in developing countries, enhancing the decentralized, off-grid economies that are already emerging.

In areas without electricity, small propane or solar-powered generators are already used to recharge cellphones – or sometimes even small LED lights, says Sandeep Tiwari, a nanotechnologist at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y., who devotes some of his time to developing world technologies.