Hydraulics

September 16, 2017

Joseph Bramah is not exactly the household name he deserves to be today. One has to be living under a rock to not know who Colin Kaepernick is, but who knows Joseph Bramah? And yet Bramah’s impact upon our daily lives is greater and far more important than Kaepernick could ever dream to be. And tonight I am very thankful for this man (Bramah, not Kaepernick). 

Bramah lived in England from 1748 till 1814. He was a locksmith by trade, and an inventor by avocation. The locks produced by his company were famed for their resistance to lock picking and tampering, and his company had a “Challenge Lock” displayed in the window of their London shop. The challenge stood for over 67 years until the American locksmith Alfred Charles Hobbs finally opened the lock in 1851; Hobbs’ attempt required some 51 hours, spread over 16 days. But it is not for his locks that I am thankful tonight. The precision tooling required for his locks Bramah he also applied to hydraulics, inventing the pump and piston system that powers everything from bulldozers to log splitters. 

For the past week, we’ve been cutting and splitting the oak in our back yard that we had taken down last spring. Maple and ash split pretty easily, but oak is stringy. Splitting oak with a maul and wedge is possible if you’re young and muscular. There’s no way I could do it by hand. But with a hydraulic splitter, it goes pretty easily. Out of a cord and a half of wood, there was only one piece the splitter couldn’t handle.

This afternoon, I was helping my son Nathan with his wood. He split while I loaded the wood into the bucket of my tractor, drove it over to his wood cellar and dumped it in. Hydraulics for the splitter, hydraulics for the loader; a difficult job made much easier by this simple invention. I am grateful for this man, for his intelligence and inventiveness which make my life easier more than 200 years after his death.