Skip to main content

The Pump Primer Who Invented Water and Trees and Logs and Pumps and Deep, Deep Thoughts a Couple of Days Ago

I used to dread hearing Grandpa Jacobson ask me to pump water for the cows.  I should guess I was about ten at the time, and there were twenty or thirty cows and horses who needed water, who could drink it faster than I could pump it.

 It was a log trough, and the pump stood at one end, directly over a shallow well at the edge of the swampy field.  There was a plunger inside the "belly" of the pump, with a flap valve.

 Lifting the handle shoved the plunger down, lifting the flap valve, allowing water to flow up above the plunger.  Pushing down on the handle dragged the plunger up again, at the same time causing the flap valve to flop down, keeping the water from escaping back down:  out it ran, down a short run to the log trough, where the cows drank it faster than I could pump it.

Worst, when the cows were satisfied, I had to keep pumping until the trough was full.  It was a big log; at that time of my life and size, possibly the biggest log in the world.

The space between the plunger and the pipe going down into the well was filled with a leather gasket:  else all, or almost all, the water would run back down before it could be spilled into the trough.  In warm weather, especially, the leather dried out and shrank just enough so that a partial vacuum could not be created to draw water up the pipe, so the pump had to be primed.  That is to say, water had to be poured down into the pump to make the leather expand just enough to seal the space around the plunger.

A little water had to be poured in, in order to be able to get a lot of water out.

 That was in about . . . let us say . . . 1942:  seventy-five years ago.

A few days ago, Donald Trump, in an interview with The Economist, explained that he had just invented a new phrase to explain something about his fiscal policy:  he was going to prime the pump.

TRUMP: We have to prime the pump.
ECONOMIST: It's very Keynesian.
TRUMP: We're the highest-taxed nation in the world. Have you heard that expression before, for this particular type of an event?
    ECONOMIST: Priming the pump?
    TRUMP: Yeah, have you heard it?
    ECONOMIST: Yes.
    TRUMP: Have you heard that expression used before? Because I haven't heard it. I mean, I just...I came up with it a couple of days ago and I thought it was good. It's what you have to do.
    In today's New York Times, David Brooks, a rather stubborn conservative himself, has an article titled, "When a Child is Leading the World".  
    Getty Images

    Comments

    Post a Comment

    Popular posts from this blog

    Friends-- My step-father of 35 years died this morning. His name was Conrad Royksund. He was 86 years old. He was born into poverty on a farm near Puyallup, WA. He was the first member of his family to attend college and earned a PhD from the University of Chicago. He paid his way through all of that by fishing in Alaska. He spent his professional career as a college professor. I met him when I was just 3 years old and don't actually have any memories of my life befor e he was in it. He was intimidatingly smart, funny as hell, and worked his ass off. He taught me to meet people with kindness and decency until I was certain they could not be trusted. He taught me to meet ideas with carving knives until I was certain they could. I will remember him as one of the bravest, most curious, and funniest people I have ever met. He left this world with a satisfied mind. We are so grateful. Dan Hubbard
    1 comment
    Read more

    The Sea is Rising

    Let us just step back:  two hundred and fifty years ago, or so, the ships of England and Spain had drifted onto a whole new continent, as they saw it, from far north to a savagely cold south; pole to pole, as if there were such things. Millions of people already lived here, some of them still hunters and gatherers; some of them very wealthy, indeed!  Gold and silver stolen from the southern Americas funded Spanish and English dreams. There was land, lots of land, under starry skies above, rich land, and oil and coal and iron ore.  The whole western world learned how to build industries not on simple muscle power, but on steam and oil.  We farmed, too, of course.  All we needed was cheap labor--slave labor from Africa, mostly, so the ships came with slave labor.  Chinese labor built railroad beds where there had been rock cliffs. Europeans, long used to killing each other for good, religious reasons, brought their religious savagery with them. ...
    Post a Comment
    Read more

    That's all we want: fairness! Not more guns and more war! Fairness!

    The five police officers who were killed in Dallas are certainly not the officers who killed innocent citizens. There is more than enough tragedy to go around. "What is happening to our country?", Mari asked this morning. I had no answer.  We do have an answer.  We do not want to say it. There are lots of answers, all of them pertinent. We are a racist society, like most human societies. We are a society in the midst of enormous changes-- social, political, economic--and we do not know what to do about it. We are divided unsustainably into absurdly rich, and an enormous number of crumbling middle class families, and poor. We have guns everywhere; military guns, guns just for killing people, cheap guns, heroes carrying guns into churches and supermarkets, idiots who think guns ought to be allowed in bars and schools and ball games and beauty parlors and political rallies. Our political process is almost useless. There are good people in Congress, but there...
    Post a Comment
    Read more