Providence resident Don Briel talks about his glass insulator collection during an interview at his home on Thursday afternoon.
Providence resident Don Briel talks about his glass insulator collection during an interview at his home on Thursday afternoon.
Glass insulators are seen on display at Don Briel’s home in Providence on Thursday afternoon.
Providence resident Don Briel talks about his glass insulator collection during an interview at his home on Thursday afternoon.
Providence resident Don Briel talks about his glass insulator collection during an interview at his home on Thursday afternoon.
Providence resident Don Briel talks about his glass insulator collection during an interview at his home on Thursday afternoon.
Glass insulators are seen on display at Don Briel’s home in Providence on Thursday afternoon.
Providence resident Don Briel talks about his glass insulator collection during an interview at his home on Thursday afternoon.
Squirreled away in just about every house is a collection of some kind. Often those collections are old baseball cards or trinkets gathered as a child.
Lining the walls of a room inside Don and Jeanne Briel’s home in Providence is an expansive collection of glass insulators collected over the past 25 years.
The colorful assemblage comes to life with the flip of a switch and Don’s vast knowledge of the glass often found atop power poles or strung together to create telegraph lines.
“My career started with Bell Telephone Labs, and that spurred some interest. I wish that I would have started collecting back then, but didn’t,” Briel said. “When I saw them in antique shops and that they were disappearing, that is when I got interested.”
With insulators ranging in size from a couple ounces all the way up to nearly 50 pounds, Briels collection is housed in custom built shelves backlit to show the insulators unique character.
Briel publishes the North American Glass Insulators Pricing Guide — similar to a Beckett guide for baseball cards — in which prices top out at one could pay for a newer used car.
“We’ve decided that nothing is worth less than a dollar. They start at about $1, and the book caps out at $20,000,” Briel said. “The highest that I know of that has sold is $65,000. The person that wants it and the person who have it get together and figure out how to make it change hands, and there are a couple who are billionaires in the hobby.”
The rarity of the insulators can come from ones that were never put into production because of poor designs to glass that was just for prototype purposes. In his collection, Briel has an insulator that is known to only have 13 other similar to it.
“There are some out there that are fairly rare. What makes some more rare just depends on the circumstances surrounding them,” Briel said. “Almost everyone I meet says: ‘I used to shoot those as a kid.’ My response to them is always, ‘Well, that’s what makes them valuable today.’”
Briel acknowledges much of his passion for the collection stems from the stories he gets to hear about insulators and the history associated with glass.
“For me, the insulators are just a token of the history. When you stop to think about it, since 1944 we’ve gone from a telegraph powered by a battery to a computer that we carry on our person that we can communicate with,” Briel said. “My grandkids don’t have a clue what a dial telephone even is, let alone a telegraph. So preserving the history to me is fascinating, and these are just colorful tokens of it.”
Those colorful tokens will be on display this Saturday as the third annual Cache Valley Insulators Swap Meet takes place at the Cache County Fairgrounds.
From 9 a.m. to 2 p.m., Briel and around 40 other collectors from around the West will gather at the Fairgrounds Pavilion to trade, sell and buy insulators and swap stories about their finds.
Briel is worried that this year’s swap meet might be the last after the Pavilion is torn down to make way for a new multipurpose building, but he hopes they can find a way to keep the show going.
At last year’s event, nearly 100 people attended, with one valley resident getting shocked by the value of an insulator found in a basement.
“We had someone come in with a little box, and they opened the box and had a $4,000 insulator along with some $1,000 ones. They about fell over,” Briel said. “The trading is the best part of the event because you get to hear stories. The stories are my favorite.”
The swap meet is free, and Briel said people are welcome to bring insulators they would like to have appraised.
Images from the glass insulator collection of Providence resident Don Briel.
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