Peter Cooper's Steam Locomotive

On September 16, 1830, a crowd gathered in Baltimore, Maryland, to watch a most unusual race.  A spirited gray horse was pitted against a tiny steam locomotive, the Tom Thumb.  The owners of a stagecoach line had challenged the locomotive’s maker, Peter Cooper, to prove his “iron horse” could pull passengers as well as a real horse could. 

Cooper was an inventor from New York.  He had built Tom Thumb to convince officials of the Baltimore and Ohio Railraod that steam locomotives were practical.   Iron pipe was not available in the US so he used old musket barrels for boiler tubing.   A mechanical blower ssupplied air to the fire that boiled water and produced steam.  The locomotive weighed one ton, but had less hosepower than most modern lawn mowers.

In a preliminary demonstration, Tom Thumb pulled a car with 36 passengers over a 13 –mile  track at an average speed of 10 miles an hour.  Then came the actual race.  The horse was fastest off the mark, but the little locomotive soon took the lead.  Victory seemed assured – until the boiler developed a leak.   Tom Thumb chugged to a halt as the horse galloped ahead.  Nevertheless, Peter Cooper’s demonstration concvinced the railroad officials that steam locomotives were practical, as the railroads began to prepare for the Age of Steam.

Among Cooper’s inventions were a washing machine and a a compressed-air engine for ferryboa

I.M. Singer

SINGER 7258 Stylist Model Sewing Machine

The sewing machine was invented by Elias Howe, but it was I.M. Singer who manufactured and marketed an affordable model for home use.  In this effort, Singer established another “first”.  In order to sell his product, he pioneered an American institution – the installment credit plan.

Earlier, while working in a Boston machine shop in 1851, Singer built a machine that could sew continuous and curved stitches.  Unfortunately Singer’s design incorporated elements Howe had patented and Singer had to defend himself in court.  For five years, the two inventors battled in court.  Howe eventually won the lawsuit for patent infringement. But in the meantime, Singer had manufactured and sold so many machines that the penalty payment was painless.

Singer had formed his company in partnership with Edward Clark.  Buyers could pay in small monthly allotments, on credit, rather than in one lump sum.  The Singer Manufacturing Company also permitted buyers to trade in old machines for new ones.  In 1855, the company began to market its products internationally, and by 1860 it was the largest producer of sewing machines in the world.

Singer’s first patented inventions were for rock-drilling and wood-carving machines.

Board Games

Whether they are set up on the kitchen table or spread out on the living-room floor, board games bring friends and families together. Although games like chess and checkers go back to ancient times, board games have only been around since the mid-1800s. that was when many Americans first began to have leisure time, and they looked for ways to fill it.


The first board game manufactured in the US was the “Mansion of Happiness,” an instant hit in 1843. Like many other board games of the 1800s, it taught a moral lesson: Landing on spaces representing good behavior sped players toward the finish line. iN the 1860s, Milton Bradley introduced a series of popular board games, including the “Checkered Game of Life” and a set of pocket games for Civil War soldiers.

Parcheesi, based on ancient Indian game, was America’s favorite from 1900 to 1930. The word game, Scrabble, introduced in the 1940s, is still popular today. But the most successful board game of all time remains Monopoly. It came out in 1935, during the Great Depression. Americans love this fantasy game, in which players buy and develop property while trying to force their opponents into bankruptcy.

Monopoly was based on a handmade board game designed by Lizzie Magie of Virginia in 1904. Pennsylvanian Charles Darrow adapted it in 1933. He became a millionaire when his version was later published by Parker Brothers.

Otis and the Elevator

In May, 1854, an amazing demonstration took place at the American Institute Fair in New York City. Elisha Graves Otis rode an open elevator to a great height. Then he ordered its lift cable cut. Onlookers gasped, expecting the elevator to plunge to the ground, but it stayed in place. Otis had invented and installed an automatic safety device for elevators. And he had risked his life to prove that it worked!
Born in Vermont in 1811, Otis manufactured wagons and carriages and then worked as a master mechanic in factories. The need for safe ways to install heavy machinery in factories led to his first experiments with “safety hoists” for elevators. Soon he invented the device that prevented an elevator from falling if its lifting cable broke.

The advent of skyscrapers in the 1870s led to a huge demand for Elisha Otis’ invention. Today, many US elevators are built by the Otis Elevator Company, which was founded by Elisha Otis’ sons. So the Otis nameplate is familiar to many people who live or work in tall buildings.

Elisha Otis also invented a steam plow, a rotary oven, railroad-car brakes, and a steam-driven elevator.

Timothy O'Sullivan

Taking pictures in the early years of photography was hard work. Cameras were large, heavy boxes that sat on strong tripods. Bright light, and at least several seconds were needed to take a picture. The negative images were recorded on fragile glass plates that had to be coasted with light-sensitive chemicals just before the exposure was made, then developed immediately afterward. So a photographer working away from his studio had to carry a portable darkroom in his horse-drawn wagon. It would not be until the 1880s when rolls of film replaced glass plates for photographic negatives.

Despite these limitations, some early photographers managed to take remarkable pictures. One of the best photographers was Timothy O’Sullivan, who had a natural talent for selecting interesting subjects and making striking visual compositions. O’Sullivan learned his craft from the famous photographer Matthew Brady. During the Civil War, O’Sullivan accompanied the Union army; his heartbreaking battlefield images were published in a book, Harvest of Death, in 1863.

After the war he traveled with survey expeditions to the American West, taking memorable pictures of the Great Salt Lake, Arizona’s Canyon de Cheily, and other wonders of the then little-known region. He was the first to photograph the ruins of the ancient Native American civilization that flourished in the Southwest around 1100 A.D.

The image with this post is a Timothy O'Sullivan photograph.

Thomas Alva Edison

“There’s a better way to do it,” was Thomas Edison’s lifelong motto. Edison proved that motto at his “invention factory” in Menlo Park, New Jersey, where he and his staff created a steady stream of new devices.

Born in poverty, Edison had very little formal schooling. But he read widely to satisfy his enormous curiosity. Whatever money he could earn as a teenager he spent on science books or on equipment for his laboratory. He was just 21 years old when he produced his first major invention---a stock ticker for printing stock-exchange quotations.

Edison liked to boast that his laboratory turned out a new invention every few days. Thomas Edison was awarded over 1,000 patents in his lifetime. One after another they appeared; the first successful lightbulb, a system for distributing electricity from power stations, the first phonograph, and improved telephone, a fluoroscope for medical research, an electric storage battery, a mimeograph machine, a moving-picture machine. The list of achievements was staggering, and it made Eidson one of the most admired men of his time. He was a prime example, people said, of the American dream of success achieved through talent and hard work.

Brooklyn Bridge

One of the greatest engineering feats of the 19th century, the Brooklyh Bridge opened with fireworks and fanfare on May 24, 1883. It connected New York State’s two largest cities, Brooklyn and Manhattan, which were divided by the East River. Before the bridge was built, the only way to travel from one city to the other was by ferryboat.

The Brooklyn Bridge was conceived by John Roebling, America’s leading engineer. Roebling envisioned a suspension bridge, the first to use steel-wire cables, that would be the longest bridge in the world. Unfortunately, he died of tetanus after a minor injury at the bridge site. His son, Washington Roebling, supervised the actual construction, which began in 1870. First, two great granite towers were sunk into the bed of the East River. Then, large steel cables were draped between the towers. Finally, the bridge roadway was suspended from the cables. The total cost of the project was nine milllion dollars.

The Brooklyn Bridge took 13 years to build. Soon after opening in 1883, it was carrying 33 million people a year between Manhattan and Brooklyn.

Today, Brooklyn and Manhattan are no longer separate cities; they are both boroughs of New York City. But John Roebling’s Brooklyn Bridge still carries millions of travelers between them each year.

Inventions, Travel, New York, 1883, May 24

Clipper Ships

“Never, in these United States,” wrote historian Samuel Elliot Morison, “has the brain of man conceived, or the hand of man fashioned, so perfect a things as the clipper ship.”

The word “clip,” which meant simply “to cut,” later came to mean “to move quickly.” So a clipper ship was a fast-sailing one.

Clipper ships were the fastet and most beautiful sailing ships ever built. Between 1845 and 1849, American shipyards produced nearly 500 of them. The speediest were the giant Yankee clippers. With their masses of sail, these long, slender ships could travel up to 400 nautical miles a day.

Clippers were first built to carry goods to and from China. After the discovery of gold in California in 1848, they carried prospectors and supplies from the East Coast to the gold fields. Earlier, this 15,000-mile trip around the southern tip of South America took five months. But by the early 1850’s, speedy clippers such as the Flying Cloud had cut the time to three months.

Clippers set other records, too. In 1849, the Sea Witch sailed from Hong Kong to New York in 74 days. In 1852, the Challenger raced from Japan to California in 18 days. And in 1860, the Andrew Jackson sailed from New York to Liverpool, England, in 15 days. But by then steamships, which did not depend on the wind, were replacing the clippers. The era of these “greyhounds of the sea” was coming to a close.

The Phonograph

President Rutherford B. Hayes couldn’t believe his ears---a box was politely asking about his health! Hayes had invited Thomas A. Edison, the famous inventor from New Jersey, to the White House to demonstrate his latest invention. The device was called a phonograph and it could both record and replay sound. It amazed Americans and many people thought it was a trick.

But Eidson’s phonograph was no trick. The “record” was a sheet of tinfoil wrapped around a metal cylinder. A disc with a needle in it was set vibrating by the sound of the human voices, causing the needle to make grooves of varying depths in the tinfoil as the cylinder rotated. A second disc-and-needle unit was employed to play back the sound; as the second needle traveled over the same grooves, its disc vibrated, recreating the sound.

Eidson charged admission to people who wanted to hear his early phonographs play”Yankee Doodle”, and sold several hundred tinfoil phonographs. But he considered them oddities, and concentrated on other projects. Alexander Graham Bell, inventor of the telephone, improved on Edison’s idea, introducing wax-covered cylinders. Recorded disks, or “records,” were the idea of German inventor Emile Berliner. Millions of records could be stamped from a single master disk. They were first marketed in the United States in 1893. And Americans were soon cranking up phonographs to listen to their favorite singers and dance to the newest tune.