Fatal Industrial Accident at Lake Washington Mill
A chief engineer is killed instantly when a heavy wooden pulley disintegrates in the mill basement.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
Alexander M. McKinnon, the chief engineer in Taylor's mill at Lake Washington, was instantly killed about 1 o'clock yesterday afternoon by the breaking of a pulley in the basement of the mill. The flying pieces struck him on the head in several places, causing fatal injuries. No one witnessed the event, but the sawyer, receiving no response to a signal to shut off the steam, rushed down to find McKinnon dead, his hands still grasping a hammer. It was discovered that lagging had broken off a large wooden pulley driving the edger, and McKinnon was struck while passing by. A singular coincidence was a remark McKinnon made to his sister the night before; he seemed to foreshadow his own death and requested that, should anything happen, his body be shipped home to Ottawa, Canada.
“He seemed to foreshadow some sudden fate, and requested her in case anything should happen to him to have his body shipped home to Canada.”
Early Seattle industry was notoriously hazardous, and the lack of workplace safety regulations meant that workers like McKinnon often bore the cost of mechanical failure with their lives. Today, while the specific dangers of open belt-driven pulleys have been engineered away, the struggle to balance production speed with worker safety remains a core tension in industrial labor.
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