As a structural engineer, I do not examine old boilers, but I do see them quite often. The older ones tend to be abandoned in place because (a) they are huge and heavy, and will have to be cut into many small pieces to be removed form the cellars and sidewalk vaults where they currently are and (b) many of them are chock full of asbestos, which is encapsulated if they’re left alone but must be remediated if they are removed. Anyway, I took this picture a few weeks ago
because I was interested in the company name. Actually I was wondering, childishly, if “Heine” was a type of boiler or a company. Note, by the way, that the dark-colored text on the light background on that nameplate is the same on all boilers built by that company, and the light-colored text on the dark background is specific to this boiler.
It turns out that Combustion Engineering grew very rapidly after the 1912 incorporation of its predecessor firm, the Locomotive Superheater Company, in part by acquiring competitors. At some point in the 1920s, Combustion Engineering acquired the Heine Boiler Company, which had a narrow focus on stationary steam boilers. Combustion Engineering went on to build boilers for ships and (this is where it gets weird) “[b]ecause of its production technology in manufacturing large welded pressure vessels and the ongoing nuclear research, Combustion was positioned to become a major supplier of nuclear power plant components.” They started with heaters for non-nuclear portions of reactors, moved into containment vessels, and also moved sideways into oil and gas refining and petrochemicals.
The building I was in was constructed in the 1910s, when Heine was still independent, so this must have been a second-generation boiler from the 1920s or maybe 30s. Coal-fired, not nuclear.
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