Pumps - Dave's Midwestern Ohio Memories

Series of Guest Blogs by an out-of-state Fish Report reader originally from this area about fond memories of growing up in Midwestern Ohio during the 50’s & 60’s

Pumps

The first real job in my eventual field as an engineer occurred during the summer of 1966 at Copeland’s, now Emerson’s, as a lab technician working on developing a new air conditioning compressor, which is essentially a pump that circulates refrigerant to provide cooled air. That experience coupled with an engineering degree led me to the Frigidaire Division of General Motors in Dayton as a compressor engineer and then to Ford where I performed similar work as described in this previous blogpost. But before all of that, the very first pump I was exposed to was the hand pump on our farm like shown above. I can recall having to prime it by pouring a little water in the slot to get things started, pumping like crazy to fill the buckets, then hauling the water to the hogs, cattle and chickens. There was also a hand pump over our cistern where rain water was collected from the barn and house roofs that was used for washing clothes and bathing. It was a happy day when our first electric-powered well pump was installed.

My grandparents had a wind driven pump that was used to fill a huge cement water tank next to the windmill. I can recall on hot summer days, taking a dip in their water tank while visiting their place. Cool and refreshing!

Well lo and behold, some distant relatives in Germany are also pump engineers, so the apple must not have fallen far from the tree! There’s a German pump company with the brand name Borger. Here’s a short video about the company and their products.

My ancestors who immigrated to Ft. Loramie from Germany in the 1830’s spelled their last name the same way, as evidenced by this tombstone of my great-great grandparents. They kept the old German name Borger before converting to the Boerger name during WWI to distance themselves from Germany.

In Germany, the Borger pumps have an umlaut over the “o”, but are marketed here in the states converting the umlauted “o “ to “oe” as Boerger, as indicated on the photo above.The German pump designs are very exact using complex geometry for their pump designs. Check out this video of the internal functioning of their pumps. You’ll be impressed by the precision of the design, as they have to be that precise because their most prevalent applications are ironically designed to pump liquid farm manure and human sewage! Imagine the stuff you flush down the toilet; their pumps have to push it on no matter what’s coming its way. Hard to fathom is the testing my German relatives have to endure to make sure the pumps work as intended.

By the way, my German relatives and the company bearing their name are located near Munster, Germany, with operations in suburban Minneapolis and elsewhere around the world as shown on the map above.

Alois Borger, pictured above, founded the firm in 1975, around the same time my career in pump design was emerging. We are both about the same age. What a coincidence? I’ll send the company this blog to see if they respond. Stay tuned. Incidentally, my father’s middle name was Aloys, so that’s also a similar twist of fate! No doubt Alois enjoys pilsner beer like I do?

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