Okay, what's an OK axlebox ?

[Wickham Green too]

For many years GWR rolling stock used round-topped oil axleboxes described as 'OK' type ........ how did this differ from other 'split' oil boxes of the time and what is the significance of 'OK' ? : this was long before 'OK' came to mean 'alright' ( though, presumably, they were ! ) - was there an Orenstein & Koppel connection p'raps ?

[Welchester]

OK, meaning okay, dates from the 1830s according to Wikipedia (I know), so long before oil boxes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OK

[Artless Bodger]

Oil Keep? vs grease?

[Jeremy Cumberland]

The castings have an O and a K superimposed over each other, which you can see in this photograph to the right of "4IN" - the size of the journal. Could this be the the logo of the manufacturer? I know it sounds odd since I'd expect the GWR to have cast these themselves, but why would they create a logo or glyph?

Photograph by Andy Prime. Full article of the wagon restoration here: https://www.bluebell-railway.co.uk/bluebell/cw_news/gwr87782_restoration.html

Edited April 22 by Jeremy Cumberland

[franciswilliamwebb]

Tourret page 60 claims "The earliest oil boxes used on the GWR were the proprietary 'OK' type" - certainly suggests it was a manufacturer or brand name?

[Wickham Green too]

1 hour ago, Welchester said:

OK, meaning okay, dates from the 1830s according to Wikipedia (I know), so long before oil boxes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OK

OK, the expression was used in the USA long before oil boxes ..... but when did it come into common parlance this side of the pond ? ( Unless it was actually an American product there would be no point in branding it thus until we Brits understood the meaning.)

[Welchester]

1 hour ago, Wickham Green too said:

OK, the expression was used in the USA long before oil boxes ..... but when did it come into common parlance this side of the pond ? ( Unless it was actually an American product there would be no point in branding it thus until we Brits understood the meaning.)

 

Good point. Fowler's 'Modern English Usage' suggests it didn't enter British English until the 1930s, so your original point stands. Sorry for introducing confusion.

[spamcan61]

2 hours ago, franciswilliamwebb said:

Tourret page 60 claims "The earliest oil boxes used on the GWR were the proprietary 'OK' type" - certainly suggests it was a manufacturer or brand name?

Makes sense, if it was a status indicator for the axlebox it wouldn't be cast into the part.

[Jeremy Cumberland]

1 hour ago, Wickham Green too said:

OK, the expression was used in the USA long before oil boxes ..... but when did it come into common parlance this side of the pond ? ( Unless it was actually an American product there would be no point in branding it thus until we Brits understood the meaning.)

The earliest references in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) are from Massachusetts and New York in 1839/40, and although some of these are accompanied by a note saying what the expression means, some are not, which suggests people were reasonably familiar with it by then.

 

There is a quote from 1864 from Boy's Own Magazine (published in London) which stands all on its own among the American entries: "No thought of taking the trouble to find out whether the order was O.K., or ‘orl korrect’, as Sir William Curtis phrased it." Perhaps there is an American connection, but without attempting to find the piece, I couldn't say.

 

The second non-American quote is from Zimbabwe (Matabeleland as then was) from 1894: "As our American friends would say, we were still ‘O.K.’" This suggests it was becoming known in the wider English-speaking world as an Americanism.

 

The next quote from Britain is from 1900, from no less a publication than the Law Times, but presumably refers to an incident in the US (Britain does not have "State Courts"): "The State Court seems to have decided that when a lawyer marks such a decree O.K., he is, by so doing, estopped from questioning that decree by appeal."

 

With the exception of the Boy's Own Magazine quote, the first quotation from Britain in OED without any reference to the US is from a DH Lawrence short story, Monkey Nuts (1922), where the first line is "At first Joe thought the job O.K." This might suggest fairly widespread use, but Lawrence liked to use non-standard language without explanation, and perhaps all we might conclude is that by 1922 it was in common use by some people in Nottinghamshire.

[magmouse]

There was an earlier grease-lubricated box of type ‘K’, so I assume the OK type is an oil-lubricated replacement for that. Possibly there was a patent, to justify the logo? The grease boxes also had a logo in some cases.

 

Nick.