The Livingston Boiler Explosion: F.G. Daniell's Investigation Notebooks, Including 66 mounted original silver gelatin photographs alongside typed record sheets, graph-paper technical leaves, manuscript notes, and hand-drawn diagrams. 1913–1915

Staten Island Industrial Disaster

Archive

New York Public Service Commission investigator F.G. Daniell documenting the infrastructural failures behind the October 21, 1913 double boiler explosion at the Richmond Light & Railroad Company plant at Livingston, Staten Island, which killed fireman Daniel Sullivan, engineer Francis Hannan, and another worker, completely cutting electric service and trolley operation across the borough. Inscribed "F. G. Daniell" and "Desk Memo. F.G.D." on the covers, the two post-bound folios together contain photographs of the accident damage and surrounding infrastructure, interleaved with Daniell's own typed forensic commentary, handwritten captions, marginal annotations, and pencil sketches drawn directly onto graph-paper leaves. The opening section, headed "Photographs of Power Plant Taken October 24, 1913," was assembled within three days of the accident, with plate registers indexing views of the "inside of wire tower," "rear of boiler No. 2 showing mud drum etc.," and "view of wreck of explosion from floor of boiler room," revealing the mechanical structures responsible for the disaster which caused the borough-wide outage and killed three individuals.
Two post-bound folio notebooks measuring approximately 11.5 x 10 inches and 11 x 8.5 inches, together containing 66 mounted original silver gelatin photographs alongside typed record sheets, graph-paper technical leaves, manuscript notes, and hand-drawn diagrams. F.G. Daniell's Occupational Notebooks; Public Service Commission for the First District. Richmond Light & Railroad Company; Photographs of Power Plant. New York, October 24, 1913, with additional Livingston Power House and Long Island R.R. leaves dated November 1913 to February 1915. The opening section bears the printed reference "SE Inv. #15389, File 41.39-1," and an official register credits photographer P. P. Pullis and witnesses "Nexen & Daniell" on Oct. 24, 1913. Daniell's typed pages identify the failed equipment as Wickes Boiler #13 and trace the cause to "leaky header caps... allowed to deteriorate," while his critique of the plant's wiring condemns "the utter lack of system or design when this was installed," noting that "no wires were tagged or marked in any manner." A hand-drawn boiler plan maps the full power-plant layout, marking the exploded Wickes boiler alongside surviving Babcock and Wilcox and Aultman & Taylor units. Later sections follow Daniell into February 1915 construction at Livingston and November 1913 Long Island Railroad electrification work at Flushing Meadows and Bridge Street, with notes on wire towers, lightning arresters, and a submarine cable terminal beneath Flushing Creek
New York's First District Public Service Commission, created under the 1907 public service reforms, supervised electricity, traction, equipment, casualties, and complaints across the metropolitan utility system, and these notebooks preserve that oversight in operational form. Desk references of investigator Daniell as he moved between a fatal disaster inquiry and ongoing electrification fieldwork. Livingston had already been the site of a fatal steam accident in 1906 and suffered another boiler failure in 1914 that again left Staten Island without power, placing the October 1913 investigation within a continuing history of risk at a plant tied directly to borough lighting and street railway service. Minor toning on leaves and occasional creasing. Overall in very good condition. An early twentieth-century industrial disaster investigation as it was actually compiled — 66 bound photographs, typed forensic commentary, and the investigating official's own handwritten notes preserved across two working notebooks.

Item #23269

Price: $1,450.00