A. B. Chance and His First Earth Anchor

In mid-April of 1907, almost 100 years ago, Albert Bishop Chance (A. B. Chance) began a business in Centralia, MO. The company consisted of just one man – A. B. Chance.

Chance set up shop in a small frame building, a former church, and began turning out some fifteen telephone items, which he had invented. Lightning arresters, back trusses, brackets and the like. The ideas for his products came from his first-hand experience with telephone systems. At the time, he established the A. B. Chance Company. Bishop Chance, with his father, owned the Centralia, MO telephone exchange. He helped operate the exchange, and handled most of the maintenance himself. He had installed the Centralia telephone system as well as others in Missouri and adjacent states.

The A. B. Chance Company progressed slowly. Sales edged upward as customers found A. B's. products serviceable. But Chance, operating on a shoestring, lacked the funds to effectively promote his business. The telephone exchange helped him to keep going though it demanded much of his time.

Then in 1912 it happened. The one event that was to stand out as the turning point in the life of Chance and his company though no one would have guessed it as things began to unfold. One raw winter night, a driving sleet storm iced Chance's telephone lines. The system was badly mangled. Poles were twisted to curious angles, and lines were pulled down. Immediate steps had to be taken as communication lines were extremely vital in those days of slow transportation.

Chance had a perplexing problem. Practically every pole on his system had to be reset and lines re-anchored. There simply was not time to dig the large, deep pits required by the "deadman" method of anchoring then used on telephone lines. Even under normal conditions, when the ice-encrusted ground was not hard enough to dull a pick, a man was lucky to install three deadmen anchors in a day. Something had to be done and fast. A. B. Chance had to come up with a solution. He spent a sleepless, fitful night conceiving it.

Chance moved to eliminate the bottleneck of pit-digging altogether. Instead, with an auger, he bored a small-diameter hole, slanting it at about a 45-degree angle. Then he drove a rod fitted with a removable spear-shaped head through the ground, angling it at right angles to the hole so that its end projected into the side of the hole. The spear point was removed by hand, and a deadman-type log with a hole through the center was slipped length-wise into the hole in the ground and hung on the end of the rod. A nut with washer was screwed onto the end of the rod, where the spear point had been to hold the log fast.

This new, time-cutting anchoring technique saved the telephone lines. And from it, A. B. Chance developed the Never-Creep anchor. It was this necessity-born anchor idea that was to bring the A. B. Chance Company is first widespread recognition.

Made of metal, the Never-Creep was stronger and more easily attached to a rod than its log prototype. Chance called it the "Never-Creep" because, being bolted through and against solid earth, it would never creep up and reduce the tautness of the guy wire and lines. This was state of the art anchoring practiced at Centralia, MO when a Western Union inspector came to inspeck "SKY-ROCKET" lightning arresters manufactured by Mr. Chance for rural telephone and telegraph wires. The inspector liked the anchor he saw and sold Western Union on the use of the anchor. He prodded Albert Bishop Chance into obtaining a patent and going into anchor manufacturing.

At first, there was no mad scramble for Chance's "better mousetrap." Mr. Chance took to the field demonstrating the Never-Creep at every opportunity. It was wearisome work, often discouraging, but after the skeptism – that naturally enough greets a revolutionary new product – was overcome, and the Never-Creep won a steady following.

The first commercial Never-Creep anchors were cast iron. They were so fragile they were shipped packed in barrels like dishes. With the addition of creep guards and a change to malleable iron, there was little further improvement until World War II forced a change to wrought steel.

The A. B. Chance Company was on its way as sales spiraled up and the Never-Creep had done its job on the way to making Chance the world's leading manufacturer of earth anchors.

Hubbell Power Systems, 210 North Allen, Centralia, MO 65240. Phone: 573-682-5521. Fax: 573-682-8714.
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