I have accrued a number of safety manuals in my archeology. While the content is similar, they span a variety of time periods and formats:
- Acme Safety manual (red – date unknown)
- Acme Safety manual (green – October 1990)
- Interlake Safety manual (softbound – August 1972)
I found this one very early on during my visits. I didn’t really review it at the time, I was so excited to find it. But the contents were boilerplate so I discarded them and saved the binder. I later found many more binders but this was the first. It is in pretty bad shape but I have refilled it with other historical documents.
This one was too good to pass up. It is a tiny binder with flexible covers, only about 9″ x 6″. The cover is still stained to this day from coal/coke despite my attempts to clean but the pages inside are free of moisture damage.
I located a number of these – this was ironically the best condition of the lot so I left the others behind. While the cover is pretty bad (I actually was able to clean and improve upon this a bit), the inside is in good shape, none of the pages are damaged or unreadable.
As I stated, I no longer have the contents of the red binder but I can attest that the contents of the green binder and the ‘Primary Safety Program’ are almost IDENTICAL despite the fact that they were published under different company names with 18 years between them. Pure boilerplate – the section tabs are identical as is the table of contents. Both include an ‘introduction’ from a company officer and these two are very, very similar.
The rest of the contents are very unremarkable. The third section, ‘Exhibits’ has examples of some safety documents but also the JSA form which I know well. I have found many real JSAs (in fact, they were some of the first documents I ever removed from the site, on my second of over 50 visits).
You can check out the real scanned JSAs in the Document Archive. Or enjoy the one I put together below (yes, I even found blank, mint condition JSAs at one point).
Which leads to my newest discovery. I found an ebay seller who had something very similar available for only $5 (dated January 1967) so I scooped that up without hesitation.
This one also does sort of fall into the ‘boilerplate’ category but it is remarkable for a few reasons. This was clearly designed to be a ‘pocket’ type handbook, and the writing is not only simple and straight forward but much more common sense type rules. Actual good habits that apply to almost all jobs.
I was not familiar with the Holger-Niesel method before. Turns out Holger Nielsen was a person (not two, as the hyphen would lead you to believe). He was an Olympic handball player from Denmark born in 1866. He developed this method in 1932 and the National Research Council supported it from 1951-1958 when mouth-to-mouth superseded it as a more effective method. So a bit odd that it was still included here some 9 years later.
And that back cover is very cool, both the content and the artwork. All in all a steal at $5 and proud to know it came from the Toledo mill. Another nice piece to add to the collection!