It was our second visit to the California State Railroad Museum in Sacramento, and I recognized some previous exhibits and a new one, a field riveting hammer (misidentified as a rivet gun). This museum is surrounded by riveted bridges with thousands of shop-driven rivets. Massive steam engines fabricated with iron, steel, cast iron, and finely crafted riveted steam boilers are on display. Just a few blocks from the museum is the 1935 shop-riveted Tower Bridge that continues to accommodate modern vehicular traffic.
What I would like to see on display is an exhibit with a detailed description of the shop and field riveting processes with historic artifacts and personal records of those craftsmen and women who labored in this country’s large industrial steel mills and fabrication plants, representing an industrial process used in the fabrication of buildings and bridges throughout Untied States.
No major industrial museum in the United States has any exhibits on the industrial rivet processes used in the construction of legendary buildings and bridges in the USA.
