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E.A. Smith's Fish Butchering Machine

Mechanical Butchering Machine (1906) sometimes known as the Iron Chink

In 1906 the mechanical butchering machine arrived and was installed in the west wing (butchering shed) which was later converted into net loft storage.

It's inventor, E.A. Smith, born in 1878 in London, Ontario, was a large, intelligent, inventive man who loved practical jokes. His parents were farmers and moved to British Columbia when Smith was young. He started working life as a teen-age cook, at one time running a cookhouse in Cascade, B.C. Moving around in search of work was common in those economic times and he moved to the Puget Sound area in 1898, where he joined with several businessmen in starting the Harper Brick and Tile Company at Harper in Kitsap County, Washington. Besides bricklaying and terra-cotta pressing, Smith toyed with the idea of making reinforced concrete pilings to replace the wooden ones rotting in salt water but eventually abandoned this idea.

Selling his shares in the brick company in 1900, he invested in the Alaska Fishermen's Union, which had a cannery at Chilcat, Alaska. Despite the salmon runs being very good, he was disconcerted to discover his investment did not pay off due to labor problems. He was told the butcher crews could not clean the fish fast enough to earn a profit.

The problem was increased mechanization of the canning line. Automation first came to the canneries in the form of more efficient can making systems at the end of the 1800s. Machines took over the canning process incrementally with steam closing machines, can fillers, steam cookers (retorts) and conveyors which sped up the whole process of putting fish into tins, though no one believed a machine could ever work as efficiently or economically as the Chinese butcher crews. But as the speed of the line increased these human butchers could not keep up. Gangs of thirty men had to process 1500 to 2000 fish in time spans of ten hours and more. Quality slipped, as the men grew weary.

The mechanization of fish butchering, using limited numbers of men to run and supply the machines with fish, was a challenge many at that time were trying to solve. Butcher machines were patented in Sweden, Britain and North America and between 1856 and 1905, twenty-one patents were granted in North America alone. However, early machines were bulky and very long requiring large areas of floor space. Plus speed seemed to equate with waste.

Smith now lived in Seattle, where he had a 10 x 12 workshop on a back lane and a company called Smith Manufacturing. He took up the challenge to invent a butcher machine. He worked unsuccessfully for eight months, finally, $60,000 in debt, he admitted defeat to his wife and decided to get a job to repay all the money. That night he awoke with a flash of inspiration. His daughter recalls that at 3:00 a.m. there was no transportation available and he ran all the way to his workshop where he remained for ten days and nights emerging at last, wreathed in smiles.

Borrowing more money, he headed to Washington D.C. to register the patent for his “Iron Chink” machine. This name is written in the first patent and it stuck. In later years, the patented name changed to “Smith Butcher Machine” but “Iron Chink” was used on the manufacturer’s plates on all machines for many, many years.

At a cannery in Fairhaven, Washington, Smith persuaded friends to test the new machine. His invention was in need of constant repair so Smith moved into the plant with the machine, sleeping in a canvas chair, keeping it operational and learning hands on about necessary modifications.

The ingenious feature of Smith’s design was that the process of fish butchering was compact and circular, freeing up valuable floor space for storage. Two men were needed to work with the machine: one with a band saw to remove the heads, the other with a rotary knife to remove the tails, then to feed the bodies into the machine. This did mean more labor than required by other early butchering machines but it avoided the wastage the others generated.

Smith persevered, tackling wastage and maintenance. Reliable machines were essential to canneries, which could not afford down time during peak processing. His small workshop expanded into a manufacturing plant at First Avenue and Stacy. (This plant was demolished in the 1960s to make way for parking expansion for Sears Roebuck.) In 1904, he developed a new, smaller, more efficient model and this version was patented on August 8, 1905.

The Smith Butchering machine was suited for the salmon canning industry in British Columbia and Washington State since it was originally designed to fit sockeye and pink salmon, which were found in abundance in this area, but the early models could not clean the larger Chinook salmon.

The Gulf of Georgia Cannery is a National Historic Site of Canada located in Steveston village in Richmond, British Columbia.

Built in 1894, the Cannery echoes the days when it was the leading producer of canned salmon in B.C. Today it is a fishing museum with interactive exhibits, film, and tours.

Along the banks of the Lower Fraser River in the boomtown of Steveston, the Gulf of Georgia Cannery opened its doors for business in 1894. The Gulf of Georgia Cannery was the largest cannery in British Columbia until 1902. It was known as the "Monster Cannery" - packing more than 2.5 million cans of salmon in 1897! That was during the free-for-all days of the salmon canning industry and soon the "Monster Cannery" boasted hundreds of workers producing these cans of salmon. Each canning season brought together a diverse mix of workers, usually of First Nations, Chinese, Japanese and European descent. The Gulf of Georgia Cannery was representative of an industry that was one of the province's largest employers and whose work force laboriously churned out one of the province's principal export commodities.

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