This is a sampling of many aerial spacers that recently came from a collection in New Jersey. I do not own them. The gent worked for the electric utility there, passed away several years ago an his wife deceased last summer. Shortly afterwards the house was put up for sale. The owner saved a lot of insulators as well, turning out to be mostly commons. A flea market dealer doing the house clean out for the family had to quickly get rid of everything the survivors did not want since the house found a new buyer. There were boxes upon boxes of spacer insulators and these are examples of what were cleaned up and "on top" of the 30 to 40 year-old rotting cartons in the basement. They were offered to a friend from NYC since she bought insulators from him in the past. She declined and all of these were sold to some undisclosed party (I do not know who). Almost no two of these spacers (at least a few hundred) did not look alike the seller said. There were many transparent plastic ones in several colors other than clear, as well as porcelain ones in many shades of blue, green, brown, black, pinkish-purple etc in many configurations, along with various styles of glass ones. The examples shown here were cleaned up while the others were quite dirty with plenty of rodent mess among their wrapping paper. I do not know why these spacers were so unusually colored. Maybe for marking lines or were salesman samples? Most appeared to have been used, albeit little. The ones shown were made from 1961-66 according to their date stampings. Their coloration is right-through the plastic and not a factory applied coating. Typically these have been found in light gray and shades of bluish-gray. Colors shown here are dark blue, maroon, purple, pink and fluorescent pink.

New Jersey electric utilities have used a wide variety of spacer insulators in porcelain, plastic and glass since the 1950s. Anyone with interest in these should keep a lookout for them if in that region since there is a very impressive variety of older spacer insulators (and sometimes in nice colors) still in service in that state, particularly in the northern portion.