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| Joseph Schuessler |
I am interested in the making of barrels, the work of the cooper, because when the beer business was bad in Oshkosh, that 's what my great-great grandfather, Joseph Schuessler, or Schuessler, had to do, to support his wife and eight children up to about 1870 when he moved to Fond du Lac and owned a successful brewery there for 20 years.
This is from the Age of Wood, by Roland Ennos (Simon & Schuster, 2020):
Wooden barrels, made by joining together curved wooden staves, were probably invented around 350 BC by the Celts and quickly proved far more practical. They were strong, could be rolled along the ground to move them, and could readily be stacked. The key to their success is the curvature of the staves, which allows the center to bow outward, enabling the longitudinal stiffness of the wood to resist the internal pressure of the liquid inside. To make a barrel, coopers had first to precisely carve each stave to shape, using specially made drawknives to give it the desired curved cross section, and a jointer to cut the sides at an angle so when put side to side the staves formed a circle. They then joined the staves together, inserting them into a temporary hoop at each end, and heated the staves until they fitted together snugly. Finally, the cooper made the ends and fitted them onto the ends of the barrel of the staves and reinforced the structure at the ends with iron rings. Barrels proved to be the lifeblood of commerce in preindustrial times, the equivalent of the tin cans, plastic bottles, and shipping containers of today combined.
