Wartime orders made a Pittsburgh plant the world’s largest grease producer, eventually producing over five million pounds of “Eisenhower Grease,” an essential water repellent needed for virtually all amphibious equipment.
They would have been making lithium soap based grease of varying grades (google up "grease thickness scale" if you want to know exactly what the options are). Cheap mass produced lithium grease was relatively novel back then so there were all sorts of fancy trade names for it. I'm sure in it's day it was high performing but by modern standards it wouldn't be anything special.
I work on heavy diesel engines and old timers know Eisenhower grease. its a nickname for cosmolene, a water resistant grease family used for anything in unforgiving environments. it comes in weights from wax to jelly. you'll see it frequently used to preserve guns for storage.
its also as I've experienced it kinda unrefined? it stinks, smells like turpentine sometimes and is a royal bitch to clean off parts. we don't use it anymore but you can still buy new old stock.
if you burn the wax version to remove it, it emits a choking white smoke. most cosmolene can't be used in high speed applications, and has no friction modifiers like copper or lithium.
just to add, the standard cleaning procedure is mineral spirits or xylene, which creates a toxic waste that most recyclers flat out do not accept. you have to take it to a specialty chemical disposal company.
I've used it to preserve the undercarriage of my Toyota Tacoma which is notorious for frame rot. Well I didn't use strict cosmoline, instead it's CRC marine heavy duty, but it's effectively just cosmoline in a spray can.
[1] says Eisenhower grease was based on "English asbestos grease" which I assume is "Compound 219" [2]. Arnold J. Morway is credited as the Standard Oil researcher who developed Eisenhower grease. [3]
[1] is excellent, thank you! It leads to another question, how did it come to Eisenhower’s attention that this is what was needed?
And [2] promises that answer. Before reading that, I was thinking some mechanic, or perhaps a farm hand turned logistics sergeant, had to see the problem and know that a special type of grease was the answer. Then, how to communicate that up the chain, when the bosses might not know about engines in that way?
I feel this is the struggle of innovation, repeated once more but in a literal life and death context.
I’d love to know more about that part of the story.
>Eisenhower requested a special kind of grease to help enable an amphibious attack on Sicily. On May 31, the Standard Oil Development Company (SODC), the technical hub of Standard Oil of New Jersey, where experiments and testing were centralized, received instructions to create a scalable formula so that delivery of the grease could happen within one week. SODC succeeded and SONJ began producing the lubricant in its Baltimore plant on June 2.
leading to many days in the grease plant like the one documented.
That's major milestones for you, the old fashioned way.
There's something about the way you can maintain readiness with decades of experiments & testing under one hat, on the same rare equipment.
> The public relations team at Standard Oil of New Jersey — including Stryker and Parks — recognized that the best way to tell this story of industrial lubricants was to humanize it. Parks’s comprehensive portrait of these working men and their participation in the Allied cause was intended to sway consumers who may have been suspicious of an avaricious corporation to identify with its employees and admire the company.
That, right there, is a special kind of moxie.
It would be interesting to compare these photos with how executives at SONJ were living at the time.
A long time ago during one of history's previous oil and gas booms I spent a few weeks one summer working in a place making pipe dope for lubricating the threads of drill pipe. We made a line of specialty greases.
This was a small operation, only three steel buildings if I remember right, built on the owner’s land beside his house in a small town in east central Texas where there was great highway access to an interstate but no real regulatory interference. Out there you could, and still can, do anything you want to do without the threat of your neighbors hauling you to court. Having just made it through my teens without too many issues I took a temporary job there to earn money for a long horseback trip I was planning to take in the fall.
This job paid minimum wage though I don't remember what that was back in 1980. All the work was performed by the 4-5 employees including myself and our efforts were guided by regular phone calls from the employer who watched from his air-conditioned living room and made sure we weren't fucking the dog (another common term for dilly-dallying) on his time or anything like that.
The grease that we made needed to be able to lubricate pipe threads that were already wet with drilling mud so it had to stick like glue to anything, even if it was submerged when you applied it. We made several products, each designed for different mud types and temperature maximums.
One of my high school 'friends' helped me get the job since he knew the owner from the local beer joints where we all hung out, before the owner tied up with a beautiful fundamentalist Christian gal who made him quit drinking and start spreading the word about his savior Jesus. There was also a Mexican man, an undocumented immigrant. This man left Mexico like many of his countrymen to come north and earn higher wages than he could at home so he could better support his family, all of whom stayed behind.
The pipe dope grease was mixed in batches based on customer orders in a large vat with large mixing paddles just as the grease was mixed by the men in the article. Like the process described in the article we used a recipe for each specific type of grease that we produced. First you would empty multiple 55 gallon barrels of axle grease into the vat. Follow that with a quantity of 90W gear oil and blend that until it was smooth. Then you would add the dry ingredients that gave the grease its special properties. Multiple 5-gallon buckets of powdered graphite, molybdenum, copper, and lead, followed by bags of lime and then you would go to the 55-gallon barrel of raw benzene and measure the required amount and add it as the paddles churned all this together. Then you would dispense all this into 2 gallon or 5 gallon buckets based on the size of the order to be filled.
Of course all that powdered material required use of a specific type of mask if you followed OSHA regulations. The benzene required special handling and use of gloves. The masks that were provided were definitely not up to the task of protecting anyone from inhaling stuff that been powdered so finely and the wind blowing through the open doors in the mixing building guaranteed that the dust got on and in everything. Even the lead dust could be seen billowing up as you poured. The worst was the benzene though. It was just a barrel with an ordinary hand pump that one could use to dispense a measured amount into a container held in a hand. The signage on the barrel made it clear that this shit was not to be trifled with and emphasized that it caused cancer. I had already worked a couple years in the oil field so I knew about that anyway since a number of the leases where I worked had signage warning of benzene. My Mexican coworker though did not have the advantage of a mastery of English or any experience with hazardous chemicals. The first time I had to be the guy who pumped the benzene he took me to the barrel and using his broken English, showed me how to measure the exact amount. As he did this he made sure that I knew to put on the...
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its also as I've experienced it kinda unrefined? it stinks, smells like turpentine sometimes and is a royal bitch to clean off parts. we don't use it anymore but you can still buy new old stock.
if you burn the wax version to remove it, it emits a choking white smoke. most cosmolene can't be used in high speed applications, and has no friction modifiers like copper or lithium.
just to add, the standard cleaning procedure is mineral spirits or xylene, which creates a toxic waste that most recyclers flat out do not accept. you have to take it to a specialty chemical disposal company.
[1] https://hdl.handle.net/2027/mdp.39015068120040?urlappend=%3B... - Popple, C. Sterling. (1952). Standard Oil Company (New Jersey) in World War II. New York: Standard Oil Co. (N.J.). Pages 119-120.
[2] http://www.royalpioneercorps.co.uk/rpc/history_compound.htm -- "Taken from The Royal Pioneer, Issue No 40, September 1954"
[3] http://www.njinvent.org/1996-awardees.html
And [2] promises that answer. Before reading that, I was thinking some mechanic, or perhaps a farm hand turned logistics sergeant, had to see the problem and know that a special type of grease was the answer. Then, how to communicate that up the chain, when the bosses might not know about engines in that way?
I feel this is the struggle of innovation, repeated once more but in a literal life and death context.
I’d love to know more about that part of the story.
>Eisenhower requested a special kind of grease to help enable an amphibious attack on Sicily. On May 31, the Standard Oil Development Company (SODC), the technical hub of Standard Oil of New Jersey, where experiments and testing were centralized, received instructions to create a scalable formula so that delivery of the grease could happen within one week. SODC succeeded and SONJ began producing the lubricant in its Baltimore plant on June 2.
leading to many days in the grease plant like the one documented.
That's major milestones for you, the old fashioned way.
There's something about the way you can maintain readiness with decades of experiments & testing under one hat, on the same rare equipment.
Mr President (FDR) knew full well as he had instituted an oil embargo on Japan in July 1941.
That, right there, is a special kind of moxie.
It would be interesting to compare these photos with how executives at SONJ were living at the time.
This was a small operation, only three steel buildings if I remember right, built on the owner’s land beside his house in a small town in east central Texas where there was great highway access to an interstate but no real regulatory interference. Out there you could, and still can, do anything you want to do without the threat of your neighbors hauling you to court. Having just made it through my teens without too many issues I took a temporary job there to earn money for a long horseback trip I was planning to take in the fall.
This job paid minimum wage though I don't remember what that was back in 1980. All the work was performed by the 4-5 employees including myself and our efforts were guided by regular phone calls from the employer who watched from his air-conditioned living room and made sure we weren't fucking the dog (another common term for dilly-dallying) on his time or anything like that.
The grease that we made needed to be able to lubricate pipe threads that were already wet with drilling mud so it had to stick like glue to anything, even if it was submerged when you applied it. We made several products, each designed for different mud types and temperature maximums.
One of my high school 'friends' helped me get the job since he knew the owner from the local beer joints where we all hung out, before the owner tied up with a beautiful fundamentalist Christian gal who made him quit drinking and start spreading the word about his savior Jesus. There was also a Mexican man, an undocumented immigrant. This man left Mexico like many of his countrymen to come north and earn higher wages than he could at home so he could better support his family, all of whom stayed behind.
The pipe dope grease was mixed in batches based on customer orders in a large vat with large mixing paddles just as the grease was mixed by the men in the article. Like the process described in the article we used a recipe for each specific type of grease that we produced. First you would empty multiple 55 gallon barrels of axle grease into the vat. Follow that with a quantity of 90W gear oil and blend that until it was smooth. Then you would add the dry ingredients that gave the grease its special properties. Multiple 5-gallon buckets of powdered graphite, molybdenum, copper, and lead, followed by bags of lime and then you would go to the 55-gallon barrel of raw benzene and measure the required amount and add it as the paddles churned all this together. Then you would dispense all this into 2 gallon or 5 gallon buckets based on the size of the order to be filled.
Of course all that powdered material required use of a specific type of mask if you followed OSHA regulations. The benzene required special handling and use of gloves. The masks that were provided were definitely not up to the task of protecting anyone from inhaling stuff that been powdered so finely and the wind blowing through the open doors in the mixing building guaranteed that the dust got on and in everything. Even the lead dust could be seen billowing up as you poured. The worst was the benzene though. It was just a barrel with an ordinary hand pump that one could use to dispense a measured amount into a container held in a hand. The signage on the barrel made it clear that this shit was not to be trifled with and emphasized that it caused cancer. I had already worked a couple years in the oil field so I knew about that anyway since a number of the leases where I worked had signage warning of benzene. My Mexican coworker though did not have the advantage of a mastery of English or any experience with hazardous chemicals. The first time I had to be the guy who pumped the benzene he took me to the barrel and using his broken English, showed me how to measure the exact amount. As he did this he made sure that I knew to put on the...