Follow The Lee Company
Sometimes projects are meticulously planned from start to finish, and other times small beginnings snowball into a larger project without any real intent. The latter was the case with The Museum of Early Engineering Technology at The Lee Company in Westbrook, Connecticut. Recently retired CEO Leighton Lee III appreciated the simple virtues of slide rules, and he began to collect them. But before long, Lee was scrounging space-age artifacts from eBay, and a museum was born.
The Lee Company provides parts for precision fluid control, such as plugs, check valves, pressure relief valves, flow-metering valves, and solenoid valves, along with nozzles, screens, and pumps. A typical commercial jet airliner contains an average of 4,000 parts from The Lee Company and the company supplied many parts to contractors during the Space Race.
Additionally, if you’ve ever heard the term “Lohm,” which is the application of “Ohm” in reference to electrical resistance, repurposed as “liquid Ohm” for fluid resistance, The Lee Company originated the term in the 1960s. In the 1970s, The Lee Company started publishing its Technical Hydraulic Handbook, which is regarded as a standard engineer reference for fluid control.
“This all started about 25 years ago,” Lee recalled when asked about the origins of The Museum of Early Engineering Technology. “I started collecting slide rules of all things. Slide rules were all obsolete and were being thrown away.”
Young engineers were advised not to skimp on their slide rule purchase, Lee recalled. Mentors advised students to “Buy a good one because you’re going to use it the rest of your life.” These high-quality linear slide rules are the ones we might remember first, but there are also circular slide rules and ones made of paper that weren’t intended to be durable.
“There were paper slide rules that you used instead of [smartphone] apps,” said Lee. “In the old days, you’d have a paper slide rule to tell you how much paint you’d need,” when painting a room in your house. As an engineer who earned his living and built his company using these indispensable tools, Lee felt obligated to gather examples of the device for posterity. That had a predictable result. “I got so many of the things that they were cluttering up the house.”
Getting the collection booted from his house to a nearby property created the potential to add artifacts beyond the ingenious slide rules. “Nobody’s going to want to see slide rules,” Lee concluded, wondering, “What else can I put in here?”
As a supplier of crucial, if unseen, components to the aviation and space industries, The Lee Company’s parts are incorporated into crucial space race hardware. That made these systems appealing artifacts to collect. At about the same time, NASA instructed the old Apollo-era contractors to get rid of their inventories of old parts, as the agency prepared for a new generation of hardware. As a result, potential exhibits flooded onto the market, Lee recalls.
“I could buy it on eBay with just a few clicks, so I didn’t have to go to California,” he said. These components were “all the scratch-and-dent and oversupply parts.” As such, the Early Engineering Technology Museum isn’t precious about them. “My stuff, you can pick it up and touch it,” Lee explained
A challenge in acquiring these parts wasn’t other collectors, it was the value of some of the materials used to make them. “It is only valuable to nut jobs like me.”
But there was valuable material inside. “Rocket engines are put together with hollow tubes that are brazed together,” Lee said. “A lot of times that has gold and silver in it.” That pitted Lee against people who wanted to reclaim the precious metals when bidding on the parts.
The museum started in a small house near The Lee Company’s headquarters, but it recently moved into the office building itself. This makes tours by visiting engineers easier.
“I realized I couldn’t maintain the little house and now the company has the museum for sales purposes,” Lee explained.
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