What is Fairbanks & Morse, BuckSkin?
Fairbanks & Morse was an American manufacturing company in the late 19th and early 20th century.
Originally a weighing scale manufacturer, it later diversified into pumps, engines, windmills, coffee grinders, radios, farm tractors, feed mills, locomotives, and industrial supplies until it was purchased by Penn Texas in 1958.
Fairbanks & Morse manufactured scales, ranging from little bitty scales for weighing postal letters, gunpowder, and teeth fillings, to massive in-ground scales for weighing entire tractor-trailer trucks and under track scales for weighing loaded railcars.
They are most famous for the big green "pea" scales, about the footprint-size of a washing machine, that were common in every feed-mill, grocery store, and farm supply store, mostly used for weighing things such as sacks of feed and flour, potatoes, and the like.
My paternal grandmother owned a grocery store that also had a coal yard out back.
Alongside the store building, right against the outside wall, was a long set of in-ground Fairbanks & Morse scales for weighing the coal trucks.
The balance beam, peas, and read-out were in a bay-window-like protrusion in the outside wall, such that Granny could see the truck, communicate with the driver, and take the weight, without ever actually going outside.
The incoming "Empty" truck would be weighed; and, once loaded, then weighed again; the difference between weights would be the weight of the coal.
Every stockyard and livestock market has one and often many sets of Fairbanks & Morse livestock scales; in modern "Weigh Out" yards, the actual sale ring itself is the scales.
These livestock scales are identical in design to the in-ground truck weighing scales with the addition of a pen strong enough to contain the animals.
Half-wild cattle on a set of scales, climbing the walls and shaking the entire building, also make the scale readout go wild and erratic; a good scale man is worth his weight in gold, as he knows how to "catch" the weight either at the low end or the high end, depending on whether the scale owner is buying or selling the livestock.
With eight or ten head on the scale, this variance can be as much as three or four hundred pounds.
If old docile family-pet cattle walk onto the scale, it is not going to fluctuate much, and therefore not much crooked money to be made; good yard workers can foresee this and, if the yard owner is financially involved in the transaction, they will prod the cattle into action so that the scale readout will bounce up and down.
A stockyard owner can soon become a millionaire by working the sale difference in his favor; it is like I once heard a very wise and very wealthy old man telling a young man who had just went into the feed-mill business and was worried he might not make it; the old man told him "you own the scales; if you go busted, it's your own fault".
