A shop like the one in the photo posted by Greg Menke, having multiple buildings and a foundry, often kept a team or two of draft horses. The draft horses were used to move loads of castings and other supplies, parts, machinery, along with coal and coke around to the different buildings. In 1916, when the Fay and Egan photo was taken, gasoline powered industrial tractors were just coming into being. Forklifts were some years down the road. The workforce included teamsters whose job was to care for and drive the teams of horses. A few men were on the payroll to provide muscle for moving loads of stuff in an around the plant, or loading and unloading wagons or railroad cars.
Another person on the payroll was a blacksmith (or smith plus striker). The smith was on the payroll to forge tools and "jewelry" for work-holding (dogs, slotted links, etc) for use within the shops. Shoeing the draft horses might actually be given out to a farrier- a smith who specialized in horse shoeing.
Having a foundry meant there was a whole other strata of men in the workforce. The molders and core makers were top of the heap (pardon the pun). There were men who spent their days breaking up scrap with sledges to charge into the cupola furnace, or doing such dirty jobs as "dropping the bottom" or "mudding up" the cupola.
These same men would also wheel endless buggies of coke, scrap and pig iron to charge into the cupola.
In shops of the 1916 era, it was common for each man on the clock to have a beer pail or beer container. The beer pails or containers were made of tinware or aluminum and had snug-fitting lids. Each man punched his time clock number or initials onto the beer pail and lid. Each morning, two or more apprentice boys would be sent out to get the beer pails filled. They typically had two hardwood poles with notches or nails and heavy wire hooks. Two apprentice boys stood about 6 feet apart, one behind the other, and the poles were placed on their shoulders with the empty beer pails hanging off the poles on the wire hooks. The boys walked to the saloon or tavern where the shop had an account. The beer pails were filled with beer, lids put on, and re-hung off the poles. The apprentice boys then walked back to the shop with quite a few gallon pails of beer hanging off the poles.
At Brooklyn Technical HS, in 1964, I had an old teacher of wood patternmaking. He told us kids about how, as an apprentice boy, he had to go get the beer pails filled for the journeymen. He told us kids that traditionally, patternmakers and molders had a kind of rivalry, with each claiming the other did not know their business all that well, and how they had to straighten out jobs for their opposing numbers. One story he told us kids was from his own days as an apprentice patternmaker. He was working in a shop which sent the patterns out to an iron foundry to be "poured". Castings would come back from the foundry, machine work would be started on the castings, and after a good bit of machine work was done, blowholes would be discovered as the machining got deep into the castings. The boss called the foundry, complained, and was told they were not doing anything differently than normal, could not understand why the customer was finding blowholes in the castings. The policy of the foundry was to furnish new castings, but did not reimburse for time spent machining a bad casting.
The patternmaker apprentice's boss handed the apprentice a couple of nickels for carfare (street car fare in those days) and told him to report to the foundry the next morning as soon as they started work there. The apprentice did just that. As he told us kids, the apprentice molders went out with the beer pails and each molder got his gallon of beer. The molders worked along, drinking the beer as they worked. As the apprentice told it, the molders did not bother walking to the men's room or even going out into the foundry yard to relieve themselves. As he told us kids:"Them molders were takin' leaks in the coal and coke piles". Some of that same coal was put into a ball mill and pulverized to be used in facing the sand molds. Facing was done using powdered soft coal to prevent the molten iron from vitrifying (melting and fusing) the molding sand. The soft coal dusting would form a thin layer of gas, just enough to insulate the hot iron from the sand until the iron "skinned".
Our teacher told us he saw what the molders were doing and figured it probably had everything to do with the blowholes in the castings. He asked the foundry foreman about it and was told he was nuts. The foundry foreman decided to humor the apprentice patternmaker, so suggested he ram up a mold of a simple pattern and face it with graphite from a can. This was done. When the casting made in the mold faced with graphite was smashed to pieces, it was a sound and solid casting. A couple of castings from that same day's run of castings were also smashed and blowholes were found.
Our teacher said he took the streetcar home, and told his own foreman about what he'd found the next morning. Our teacher, when we had him for our classes in 1964, was well into his 60's, so the era in which his story about the beer pails occurred would have been right around the era of the Fay & Egan photo. About that same time, 1965, I hired on for a summer and part time job in an old time machine shop owned and run by German immigrants. In the morning, the boss rang a large gong, rung by pulling a rope- the kind of gong used in ship's engine rooms and boxing rings. This was to let everyone know it was coffee time. We were on our own to buy what we liked from a catering truck (known as a "roach coach"). In the afternoon of my first day, the foreman blew an air whistle on shop air. Everyone put down their tools and headed to the side of the shop. The foreman gave each man on the clock a quart of beer. I was maybe 15, wondering what that was all about. The shop steward (union shop), told me it was their custom to have beer in the afternoon. The foreman handed me a quart of beer and said it was what they had done in Germany. I was a man on the clock in his shop, so he handed me a quart of beer. We all went outside the shop into the sunshine and fresh air and leaned against the wall or sat on long benches, much as shop men have done for ages. I raised my beer, looked at the foreman and steward and said "Prost" and they nodded at me. I had my daily beer with them whenever I worked there. The foreman and steward and other older journeymen told me I had missed the era of the beer pails by only a year or two, and kidded that I'd have been the one sent out to get the pails filled.
I think every oldtime shop had its share of characters, practical jokes, along with tales and legends. Unfortunately, this sort of thing is fast passing from the scene. I returned to work at the powerplant after 6 1/2 years of retirement, brought back in a mentoring role. I soon found out that a lot of the stuff we did is now totally forbidden by corporate policy. Tales of some of the stuff we pulled, including some hijinks with a dead rat were the legends the young mechanics only heard about. They told me that the new policies forbid a foreman or supervisor from bringing in doughnuts or pizza for the crews, and even bringing in home-baked goods around Christmas was frowned upon by corporate. Any kind of practical joking, even verbal kidding could land a person in serious trouble. Of course, the young hands wanted to hear the tales of the stuff we pulled and what we got away with and how we did it. It is a very different environment at the powerplant from the one I left when I retired. Corporate has buried the plant people under endless procedures, most of which have nothing to do with the business of power generating or power transmission.
We had no GPS on the company vehicles to track our every move, and we were pretty much turned loose to do our work with little or no oversight and no micro-managing (aka meddling). We were proud of what we did, and we generally enjoyed the working environment prior to my retirement. Amazing how fast things changed in the ensuing 6 1/2 years. I tend to relate to the "Bull of the Woods" style of management, believing if you are going to work with a crew, you handle your business on the shop floor rather than running to Human Resources. We were not "menu driven" and did not rely on "job plans" back when I started working at the power plant. If you were designing something or taking a crew out to do a job, you were expected to be able to handle the design as well as running the job, buying tools and supplies, whatever it took.
Now, no one moves without a formalized work order and job plan. Original off-the-cuff thinking is frowned upon, and knowledge about various work on the systems and machinery in the plant is referred to as "tribal knowledge" (who dreamt that one up ?).
I am glad I was working during the timespan that I was and got to retire when I did. How could people work without interaction, kidding, a little horseplay and the usual stuff that goes on in a shop, shipyard, jobsite, or power plant ? Brooklyn Tech HS is a shell of what it was when I was there, and students do not take any of the shop classes and other pre-engineering types of coursework we did. Imagine a teacher of today telling his students about drinking beer on the job and relieving one's self in the coal pile. Not gonna happen, things are too sanitized, I think, and we are the poorer for it.