The Patternmakers
Did you have an ancestor who "punched the clock" at Westinghouse? Most of us are familiar with the term "German engineering," or can associate "Swiss engineering" with a person who is skilled in a precision craft. These terms are rooted in the structure established in the early educational systems of both Germany and Switzerland. When George Westinghouse was building his industry, the company surrounded themselves with the best and brightest engineers to produce his products. Trafford City was no exception, and we can point to at least two immigrants who worked in Trafford who were responsible for the precision demanded to produce a Westinghouse product.
Gottfried "George" Somerhalder was born in Reinach, Switzerland in 1875. He was a patternmaker and a forman in the Trafford Foundry. An article appeared in the June 1905 issue of The Patternmaker that highlighted the new "Pattern Department of the Westinghouse Machinery Company in Trafford City." The article gives examples of documents that were used by Somerhalder to sign-off on his work.
The other patternmaker we researched was Joseph Frederick Tewes, born in Gelsenkirchen, Germany in 1889, who arrived in the United States in 1902. Joseph and his wife Mildred purchased their home at 507 Fairmont Avenue in 1927, first enrolling their youngest daughter Evelyn in the Trafford Schools in 1928. Three of their children graduated from Trafford High - Evelyn (Class of 1940), Betty Jane (Class of 1941), and Joseph Robert (Class of 1946, also Senior Class President). Joseph R. continued his education with classes at Carnegie Technical Institute in Pittsburgh and followed in his father's footsteps to become a patternmaker at the Trafford Foundry.
The 2017 Arcadia publication Images of America: Trafford has a photo of the Pattern shop on page 26. Here, we have included a close-up view of items in the shop. One photo shows a wood pattern sitting on the shop floor that you can compare to the photo of a finished Westinghouse product. Two of the photos show the doors to the shop open and you can see the worker's time clock.
