The Jefferson College Historical Society has a long and distinguished record celebrating the history and heritage of the Canonsburg area. They recently invited me to speak at their Fall meeting. With the subject of the talk left up to me, I decided to discuss the impact of the Flannery Brothers on the Chartiers Valley region, knowing that their involvement with the Standard Chemical Company in Canonsburg was historically significant.
James Flannery began the family’s successful business career by opening a funeral parlor in Homewood. By the time his younger brother, Joseph, graduated from Holy Ghost College (now Duquesne University), there were three Flannery mortuaries in Pittsburgh,
In 1904 the brothers decided to diversify. They acquired rights to a patent for staybolts, a key component in the manufacture of locomotive boilers, and incorporated the Flannery Bolt Company. Their manufacturing facility was constructed in C. P. Mayer’s industrial park, on the Pennsylvania Railroad just north of Bridgeville.
Once they began manufacturing staybolts they realized the advantage of using “vanadium steel”, an extremely strong grade of steel that had a tiny amount of vanadium alloyed into it. The vanadium was also extremely expensive. Joseph Flannery convinced his brother they should enter the vanadium production business.
In 1906 they established the American Vanadium Company and began researching vanadium production in their Bridgeville facility. They were able to acquire a mine in Peru that could produce vanadium ore economically. This ore was shipped to Bridgeville by a transportation system which included llamas, a steamboat on a Peruvian lake, railroads, and ocean-going steamers.
By 1909 the Flannerys were successfully operating both companies, as well as four or five subsidiary firms producing specialty products from vanadium steel. They built a magnificent five story building, the Vanadium Building, at the corner of Meyran and Forbes Streets in Oakland, with a large stained glass window celebrating the vanadium production process.
That year they learned that their sister had been diagnosed with cancer. After researching all the possible cures for it, they concluded that radiation treatment, with radium, had the best chance of helping her. Unfortunately she died; the scarcity of radium had prevented her being treated.
At this point Joseph Flannery resigned his positions with the family firms and decided to find a way to produce radium on a commercial scale in a large enough volume to ensure that future cancer patients would have access to radiation treatment. The two brothers incorporated the Standard Chemical Company.
They found a source of carnotite ore in western Colorado that contained potassium, uranium dioxide, and vanadium tetraoxide. By now it was well known that radium existed in uranium deposits as a product of radioactive decay.
The radium production process was complicated. In an average month they mined 2500 tons of rock containing carnotite. In western Colorado they separated the ore from the rock in a concentrator, producing 500 tons of carnotite. This was then bagged in sixty pound bags and hauled on burros to a Denver and Rio Grande railhead.
The ore was then transported by rail to Canonsburg where a new processing facility had been built. At Standard Chemical the ore was treated by 500 tons of chemicals (probably hydrochloric acid) and reduced to one thousand pounds of salts, mostly barium chloride with a trace of radium chloride.
Once a day a messenger would board a streetcar in Canonsburg with a pail full of glass bottles containing the salts and travel into Pittsburgh, where he would transfer to a Forbes Avenue trolley and ride to Oakland to deliver his valuable cargo to the Vanadium Building.
The final step in the process was the subjecting of the salts to twenty five or thirty cycles of fractional crystallization, eventually producing one gram of radium. By 1920 more than half of the radium produced in the whole world had been produced by Standard Chemical.
Both Flannery brothers had died by 1921 when Madame Marie Curie visited Canonsburg as part of a grand tour of North America honoring her scientific achievements, a tour that culminated in a visit to the White House where President Harding presented her with a gram of radium.
It is reported that the highlight of her tour was the visit to Standard Chemical and the observation of her laboratory techniques being practiced on a commercial scale.
Standard Chemical operated until the early 1930s when it was replaced by a mysterious company, the Vitro Manufacturing Company. Vitro’s business was the reclamation of uranium from the waste piles left by its predecessor.
The motivation for this activity became known years later when it was learned that Vitro’s customer was the Manhattan Project. In 1957 the Atomic Energy Commission took over the site. In 1978 it became a subject for reclamation under the Uranium Mill Tailings Radiation Control Act.
A large pile of radioactive debris was collected on the site and from neighboring buildings and has been encapsulated in a containment cell that is regularly monitored. Although there certainly were many serious health issues in the Canonsburg area during operation of standard Chemical and Vitro Manufacturing, it appears that long term consequences have been avoided.
Thanks to the Jefferson College Historical Society for entertaining me, and for their continued contribution to preserving local history and heritage.