With many new collectors being exposed to the hobby of collecting insulators, some of the terms we use to describe insulators may seem a bit confusing.

The hobby of insulator collecting may not be quite as old as bottle collecting, but insulators have been around pretty much as long as glass bottles. Many of the early glass houses made insulators as a sideline. Early insulators were a great way to use up end-of-the-day glass from other, more profitable products. This is perhaps why some of the older insulators have been found in such attractive colors.

In this column, I will attempt to describe the methods of insulator identification that collectors use to communicate what they have and it's condition.

There are so many shapes and styles of insulators, as well as possible locations of damage, that there was, and is, a need for a detailed identification system.

Many styles have nicknames such as "Doorknob", "Bullet", "Beehive", "Pony", "Toll".... and the list goes on. This is fine for those who know what style the other is referring to, but with the use of the phone and internet, collecting is no longer a regional thing. I have heard a Canadian collector use the term "Bullet" and mean one insulator, while many American collectors refer to a "Bullet" as a completely different insulator. Confusion results.

One of the hobbies pioneers, N.R. "Woody" Woodward, was doing research on insulators in the 1960s. He developed a Consolidated Design (CD) system of identification in order to communicate with insulator manufacturers. This CD system has been adopted and accepted by the collecting community with Woody's permission. Incidentally, Woody remains the go-to guy when it comes to newly discovered styles that surface from time to time. Collectors with an interest in foreign insulators have been traveling to Europe and South America and finding styles and manufactures previously unknown to North American collectors. Occasionally a new North American style will surface, but this is rare as collectors have been gathering and talking insulators for nearly 40 years now.

So, if I contact another collector and say I have a cd154 Dominion 42, he / she knows which insulator I'm speaking about, primarily based on the embossing. A good example of this system's affectivity would be the description of a no name, no embossing cd292, power insulator. It's not commonly found, there is no embossings on it and it's about 4-3/4" high. Not a lot to go on if the cd style number is left out of the conversation.

I'm not going to describe each cd style, but there are some basics to the cd numbering system that are easy to describe in this forum. 

CD100 - CD144 Single skirt threaded insulator, side wire groove.
CD145 - CD184 Double skirt threaded insulator, side wire groove. 
CD185 - CD198 Threaded pinhole goes all the way through the insulator. 
CD190 - CD205 Threaded transposition styles with several wire grooves and skirts.
CD205 - CD375 Assorted power styles.
CD400 - CD699 Foreign insulators from outside North America. (Some foreign insulators are the same style as North American styles, and have the same designations cd154, cd106 etc. ) 
CD700 - CD796 Threadless styles