The Intriguing Story of the Pressure Seal Valve(2)

ANOTHER DESIGN

The Cincinnati firm was working with an inventor from Germany named Kurt Bredtschneider, who patented a pressure-seal joint in 1932. Working with Bredtschneider, The William Powell Company proceeded to build an order of pressure-seal-designed valves for Diamond Alkali and for Wisconsin Power and Light. The products were installed in 1939.

At about the same time, information surfaced about another European inventor, Friedrich Uhde, who designed and built a pressure seal valve sold to Universal Oil Products in 1935 for use in a high-pressure autoclave. Because of all this, as the storm clouds of World War II began to gather, the claim to the pressure-seal design was also getting more and more cloudy.

Another stalwart U.S. manufacturer, Crane, designed and built pressure sealed valves installed in a monitored high-pressure boiler, which operated throughout the war. Because the War Production Board regulated wartime valve construction activities, the pressure seal design issue took a backseat to other priorities. However, as soon as hostilities stopped, the rush to product development was on again.

REAPING GERMAN KNOW-HOW

As part of the spoils of war, the United States instituted “Operation Paperclip,” a harvesting of as much German engineering knowledge as possible. Results of this dragnet included Dr. Werner Von Braun, who jump-started the U.S. missile and space program. Another interesting catch for the paperclip collections was a physics expert by the name of Kurt Bredtschneider—the same Bredtschneider who tried to offer his pressure-seal technology to the U.S. industry eight years before. As part of his post-war agreement with the United States government, the esteemed physics professor had only two requests: “that his sister be allowed to immigrate to the U.S. and that he have all the coffee that he could drink.”

A 1952 Crane ad promises “a radically new idea in valve design,” an idea that was based upon design principles that were a quarter century old.After the U.S. government got the information they wanted from Bredtschneider, the professor began to pursue his previous pressure-seal venture within the U.S. valve industry. He was a guest of Crane, where he was shown the “newest” (it was 1945) pressure-seal design they possessed. After examining the product, Bredtschneider was quoted saying, “If you are using my design, the least you could do is use it right!” Apparently Crane agreed because they hired him, and he became a valuable part of the Crane engineering department for the next 15 years.

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