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Photos
Story - HistoryI purchased this insulator from Ross Baird AKA "emminger" on eBay last December. It is the only CD known to be produced in Iran.
Here is the history of this piece quoted from the GIFONA reference guide:
"Before World War II, when Iran was about to undertake the expansion of its railway system, it became evident that insulators for the new telegraph lines would be needed. A small family-owned and operated business, known as the Mehr Glass Factory, was chosen to make them. Units are embossed with the family name in Farsi, the native language of Iran. The embossing resembles an M in script, {
} but actually represents three letters of the Farsi language, M H R. The E is implied.
"The insulator was made in a hand-operated iron mold that produced only one insulator at a time. The molten glass was placed in the mold by an assistant (usually a child) and the master molder determined when the glass was ready to come out. Some of the insulators are tilted or lopsided due to being removed from the mold too soon by an overanxious master molder.
"It is normal for small defects to occur at the bottom of the skirt and on the seam ends. These were sometimes made when the mold was opened in order to remove the insulator. This would also happen at the rim around the pinhole.
"When the insulator was used, a handmade metal pin was inserted into the pinhole and molten sulphur was poured around it. Once the sulphur cooled, the pin was held securely. It could be removed by tapping on it, which caused the sulphur to fall away as chips and dust.
"Less than two huundred had been made at the time the war came along and railway expansion was halted. As a result, the insulator order was cancelled and production ceased. The unused units were stored away and discovered some thirty years later. Needless to say, these insulators are in short supply and are highly collectible."
This insulator is quite small in size, being only 2-1/4" in diameter and 2-7/8" tall. See the photo with the quarter below for a size comparison. An interesting feature of this CD is that the cable groove on the top is neither parallel to nor perpendicular to the mold lines like most cable tops are. The cable groove runs at an angle across the top of the insulator. See the closeup picture below.
More Photos
Embossing, Colours and Price Guide ListingThis insulator comes in several colours including sage green, green and yellow green. I believe mine is the green version. While looking something up in the GIFONA price guide, I just noticed that there is an unembossed variation of this insulator that is found in straw colour.
ConditionThe condition of this insulator is MINT. According to the history of these, they were never put into service. The molding of this piece is very crude with a rough texture on the glass. The mold lines still have excess glass "flash" that was never trimmed, worn or broken off. The pinhole is rough and very crudely formed. Several bubbles may be found throughout the glass.
Market Place MusingsThis is the only one of these insulators that I have ever seen come up for sale on eBay. Given the relatively small numbers of these pieces known to exist and the unlikely prospect of any more of them coming out of Iran, I feel that the book value for this piece is very under-rated. Other insulators with many more than 200 known examples sell for many times the value of this one. I paid less than $18 US for this one so I feel I have a real bargain piece here.
I would like to conduct an informal survey here. If you have one of these in your collection, please email me (email link is on the navigation menu above) and let me know. I'm trying to get an idea of how many of them there are floating around out there. Thanks in advance for your help!
Email Survey ResultsA number of people took the time to email me about their CD 505s. Thank you to all who did respond. For those of you who have one of these and didn't send me an email yet, it's not to late to let me know. Most collectors typically had only one of these in their collections. Two people repsonded that they had two of them, both of them had one in green and one in sage colour. One is owned by a bottle collector who has a thing for green glass. No one mentioned having the yellow green version or the unembossed straw variant.
In total, I can now account for 17 of these CD 505s. From the responses that included colour information, it appears that about 11 of them are green and maybe 6 are the sage green version. This is a bit of a guess as several people replied that their 505 was sagey green.
Copyright © 2007 - Doug Netzke and Micro Solutions of Sudbury