Connecticut Inventors

By Robert Asher, The University of Connecticut

In the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries Connecticut was famous for the activity of its inventors. Eli Whitney, Charles Goodyear, and Samuel Colt were American household names because of the importance of their inventive activity. Between 1790, when the Federal government began issuing patents, and 1930, Connecticut led all states in the country in the number of per capita patents issued. In the nineteenth century, while the national average was approximately one patent for every three thousand people, Connecticut's yearly ratio ranged from one patent for each seven hundred people to one per thousand. The efforts of Connecticut inventors stimulated the growth of manufacturing activity in the state and the nation. New products and new production technologies developed in Connecticut spread throughout the United States and the world.

Colonial Connecticut was a densely populated agricultural and mercantile society. Connecticut's population included many prosperous farmers and successful merchants who had enough income to purchase luxury goods produced by artisans. To support agricultural activity, meet basic household needs, and satisfy the affluent, many craftsmen—blacksmiths, clockmakers, carpenters, furniture builders, instrument makers, iron workers, shipbuilders, and gunsmiths—worked at their specialties. Swiftly flowing streams and rivers encouraged the construction of many grist mills, which required the development of the mechanical skills used to make and maintain water-wheels, millstones, and power transmission equipment. The state's citizens had a positive attitude towards material progress, which they valued for its own sake and because they believed manufacturing enterprise strengthened the republican form of government by making it independent of European despotism and by preventing poverty and idleness among the nation's citizens. The establishment of many schools (both public and private) throughout the state contributed to relatively high literacy rates. In New Haven, Yale College was the center for the collection and diffusion of scientific knowledge. The state's citizens had a respect for manual labor and also had absorbed the positive attitude towards inventiveness that had been growing in Western culture since the Renaissance.

Connecticut was favored with abundant natural resources for craft production and manufacturing—wood, unusually rich iron ore deposits in the northwestern part of the state, fine mill sites on rivers and streams, many navigable rivers, and good ports. The state was well situated with respect to markets in the most densely populated and affluent sections of the country. In the late eighteenth century the government of Connecticut promoted the construction of textile factories by granting owners and workers tax exemptions and by authorizing special lotteries to raise capital for mill construction. In many respects, Connecticut's natural resources and cultural foundations were similar to those possessed by the other American states that led the United States into the Industrial Revolution. Along with Massachusetts, Rhode Island, New York and Pennsylvania, Connecticut manufacturers, workers, and inventors laid the foundations for today's high-technology society.

The first significant Connecticut invention to be recorded was the lapidary machine developed in 1765 by Abel Buell of Killingworth (1742-1822), a talented goldsmith and engraver. In 1775, Saybrook's David Bushnell (1742-1824), studying at Yale College, built the world's first combat submarine. Bushnell's Turtle was powered by a hand-cranked screw propeller (the first known application of the screw to water propulsion). The Turtle was able to navigate underwater but failed in its attempt (1776) to attach a mine to the hull of a British warship anchored in New York harbor. In the twentieth century, submarine building became a major Connecticut industry. Inventor Simon Lake (1886-1914) designed submarines that were adopted by the U.S. Navy and were produced in Bridgeport after 1913. John P. Holland (1842-1914) also made many advances in submarine design. Beginning in 1924, submarines based on Holland's innovations were produced by the Electric Boat Company in Groton.

Robert Fulton, the New York steamboat entrepreneur, incorporated many elements of Bushnell's submarine design into the steamboats he built. However, more than a generation before Fulton's innovations, John Fitch (1743-1798), a South Windsor native, had used his experience as a clockmaker, brass worker, and silversmith to design in 1786 what was probably the first American boat powered by a steam engine.

Eli Whitney (1765-1825), a Yale graduate who was the son of a Westboro, Massachusetts, farmer, became internationally famous when he invented the cotton gin in the early 1790s. Whitney's cotton gin was ten times more productive than hand labor. It made profitable the cultivation of short-staple cotton throughout the South's highlands and interior lands, a development which encouraged the expansion of the slave system in the South and intensified the sectional rivalries that ultimately led to the Civil War. Whitney built a factory in New Haven to produce cotton gins, but he turned in 1798 to the production of military muskets. Whitney was the first American to publicize widely the principle of interchangeable parts' an idea that involved the use of precision manufacturing machines to make the dimensions of parts for guns (or clocks, sewing machines or other mechanical devices) so similar that parts could be switched from one gun (or machine) to another, or could be taken from stocks of spare parts, without having to be filed or hammered to secure proper fits. Whitney realized that Connecticut, and the United States generally, lacked the large supply of skilled artisans that existed in many European nations. He sought to develop machinery to compensate for this relative shortage. As he put it: "A substitute for European skill must be sought in such an application of mechanism as to give all that regularity, accuracy and finish to the work which is there affected by a skill...." Although the distinction of using machinery to produce the first guns with interchangeable parts belongs to the machinists and other workers at the United States Government armory in Springfield, Massachusetts, Whitney's widely publicized government contracts that were supposed to have interchangeable parts encouraged armsmakers in Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Vermont to develop the improved jigs, fixtures, boring mills and milling machines that were necessary to shape gun barrels, stocks, and firing mechanisms.

Between 1800 and 1860 gun manufacturing became one of Connecticut's leading industries, and Connecticut was well on its way to becoming the arsenal of the nation. Gun manufacturing stimulated the development of improved machine tools and the growth of the state's machine tool industry in turn aided advances in gun manufacturing techniques. Simeon North (1763-1852) was a Middletown gun manufacturer who probably deserves the credit for developing in 1818 the nation's first plain milling machine. In 1836 Samuel Colt (1814-1862) conceived the idea for a repeating handgun whose rotating cylinder was turned by the action of the trigger. Colt appreciated the importance of developing machinery to produce standardized, interchangeable parts. In 1849 Colt hired machinist Elisha K. Root (b. Ludlow, Massachusetts; 1808-1865), who had designed the efficient machinery that made the axes of the Collins Company of Collinsville, Connecticut, famous throughout the world. Colt encouraged Root to mechanize revolver production whenever possible, and Root designed the advanced drop hammers, boring machines, gauges, jigs and fixtures that made the Colt revolver the first handgun in the world to be produced with truly interchangeable parts. Horace Smith (b. Cheshire, Massachusetts; 1808-1893) and Daniel B. Wesson (b. Worcester, Massachusetts 1825-1906) joined their talents in Norwich to develop in the early 1850s the first repeating rifle, the Winchester, which was manufactured in Springfield, Massachusetts, and New Haven beginning in 1866. Smith also secured the first U.S. patent for a metallic cartridge in 1854. Christian Sharps (b. New Jersey; 1811-1874) invented the Sharps breech-loading rifle, manufactured in Hartford after 1854. Christopher Spencer (1833-1922) developed the famous Spencer repeating rifle used so effectively by Union forces at the decisive Battle of Gettysburg during the Civil War.

Machine tools—lathes, milling machines, drill presses, planers, and grinding machines—are machines that shape the metal parts that are used in all machinery (including machine tools). By the Civil War, the United States had become a world leader in the design and production of machine tools. Connecticut inventors made crucial contributions to the development of machine tools. Working for Colt, Elisha K. Root made subtle, but important, changes in the advanced milling machine that had been developed by the Robbins and Lawrence Company in Vermont and by Francis A. Pratt (b. Woodstock, Vermont; 1827-1902) when Pratt was working at the George S. Lincoln firm in Hartford. The "Lincoln Miller" Root designed became the pre-eminent American machine tool of the last half of the nineteenth century, selling over 150,000 units.

Another machinist-inventor who worked at the Colt plant, William Mason, secured more than 125 patents for innovations in machinery that made guns and parts for power looms and steam pumps. Christopher Spencer invented the first automatic turret lathe used for machining screws and perfected the variable cam cylinder used to enable a variety of turret movements on a lathe. Francis A. Pratt and Amos Whitney (b. Biddeford, Maine; 1832-1920) together invented machinery in 1865 for thread milling. Whitney also pioneered in developing accurate instruments for measuring the dimensions of machine parts. Simon Fairman (1792-1857) of West Stafford invented in 1830 the iron chuck that holds parts being turned on a lathe. His son-in-law, Austin F. Cushman (1830-1914), developed the self-centering Cushman Universal Chuck in 1862. Edward P. Bullard (b. Uxbridge, Massachusetts; 1841-1906) designed in 1883 the vertical boring mill to machine large metal parts. Charles E. Billings (b. Wethersfield, Vermont; 1835-1920) developed the modern board drop hammer for metal forging in the 1870s and designed a copper communicator bar essential to the operation of electrical dynamos. Torrington's Edwin R. Fellows (1865-1945) designed the first flat turret lathe and built a gear shaper in 1896 that was instrumental in the expansion of the American automobile industry.

Most of Connecticut's nineteenth-century inventors were barnyard or machine shop "tinkerers" who used their familiarity with handcrafts and machinery to good advantage as inventors. Many became entrepreneurs, producing the new products they developed. Clearly, Connecticut's inventors were motivated by a desire for financial reward as well as by their fascination with technology. Perfecting many inventions and then manufacturing them also required the physical skills and knowledge of thousands of anonymous machinists. As a manufacturer told a Congressional committee in 1883: "Where an inventor is at work carrying out an invention you have got to have a workman who knows something about the theory of it."

Since the early nineteenth century the Naugatuck River Valley has been a center of brass product manufacturing. Waterbury inventors, concentrated in the brass industry, led all Connecticut cities in the number of patents issued per resident. Hiram W. Hayden (b. Haydenville, Massachusetts; 1820-1904), a machinist employed by the Scoville Company, invented in 1851 a method of making brass kettles by spinning disks of sheet brass through a die. Machinist Eli J. Manville of Watertown (1823-1886) invented an automatic wire-forming machine. In the twentieth century engineers at the company he founded developed many machines that automatically produced brass parts used in automobiles. During the nineteenth century the American pin industry concentrated in the Naugatuck River Valley because Dr. John I. Howe (1793-1876) built a plant in Derby to make pins with the machine he invented to shape pins in one operation instead of the eighteen separate steps required for hand production. Howe also invented a machine to stick the pins in paper packets.

Mass production was brought to the American clock industry by Eli Terry (1772-1852) of East Windsor who used the waterpower supplied by the Naugatuck River for the machines he developed in 1807 to cut the teeth of clock wheels and other clock parts. By 1814 Terry had patented a thirty-hour shelf clock with interchangeable parts. One of Terry's apprentices, Chauncey Jerome (1793-1868), was the first manufacturer-inventor to mass produce clocks whose moving parts were made entirely of brass (1838). Joseph Ives (1782-1862) secured an 1833 patent for a brass rolling lantern pinion that greatly reduced friction between the moving parts in clocks with metal movements. Seth Thomas (1785-1859) purchased the manufacturing rights to Eli Terry's clocks and went on to become a major clock manufacturer.

Since the end of the eighteenth century, textile production has been an important Connecticut industry. Joseph Pitkin (1772-1838) of East Hartford secured the first U.S. patent for felt manufacturing machinery in 1807. In 1809 Mary Kies of South Killingly received the first patent issued to a woman in the U.S. when she invented a device for weaving straw with silk thread. In 1832 Levi Lincoln invented a machine to insert wire teeth into the cards used to process cotton and wool fibers. Frank Cheney (1817-1904), one of the founders of the world-famous Cheney Brothers silk company in Manchester, invented a machine to combine three steps—doubling, twisting and winding—in the making of silk thread. The Grant Reel, a device to guide silk thread from the skein to a bobbin or spool without snarling, was invented by James M. Grant (1860-1957), a worker at the Cheney mills. Another member of the Cheney family, Frank Cheney, Jr., invented a machine in 1910 to make ribbonzene, a compacted silk ribbon.

Other important mid-nineteenth century inventions by Connecticut residents included a machine to crush stones used in macadamized roads, perfected in 1858 by Eli Whitney Blake (b. Westborough, Massachusetts; 1795-1886), the nephew of Eli Whitney. An important version of the sewing machine was invented in New Hartford in 1846 by Elias Howe (b. Spencer, Massachusetts; 1819-1867). The first large-scale production of sewing machines in the U.S. began at Watertown, Connecticut, in 1850. Charles B. Richards (b. Brooklyn, New York; 1833-1919), a trained mechanical engineer, developed in 1860 a steam engine pressure indicator that greatly increased the safety and efficiency of steam engines. Henry A. House (b. Brooklyn, New York; 1840-1930) developed a steam-powered carriage in 1866 and patented a machine to sew buttonholes. Linus Yale, Jr. (b. Salisbury, New York; 1821-1868) perfected the first functional pin-tumbler lock mechanism in the early 1860s. In 1879 Frank Holland, a Manchester schoolteacher, patented a pen with an improved point. Although Holland's pen was not good enough to market, it was modified by L.E. Waterman and became the famous Waterman fountain pen.

As the nineteenth century progressed, Connecticut became a major silverware producer. Electric silver plating techniques were first developed in Europe. In the U.S. Asa H. Rogers (1806-1876) and his brother Simeon S. Rogers (1812-1874) greatly improved existing processes and became, along with their brother William Rogers (1801-1873), well-known manufacturers of silver-plated eating utensils and accessories.

Connecticut's rubber industry grew rapidly after 1839, when Charles Goodyear (1800-1860) turned his attention from designing machinery for making spoons and buttons to experimenting with different chemical additives in an attempt to develop a compound that had the flexibility of natural rubber but would not melt in warm temperatures and become brittle in cold temperatures. Goodyear was one of several Americans experimenting with mixtures of sulfur and rubber when he accidently dropped one such compound on a hot wood stove. The compound did not melt but became charred. The next morning Goodyear noticed that the compound was very flexible at low temperatures. Correctly interpreting the relationship between the heating of the compound and its resultant durability, Goodyear needed three more years of experimenting until he came upon a mix of rubber, sulfur, and white lead and a schedule of heating temperatures and times for the "vulcanization" of rubber. Goodyear's formula became the basis for the durable rubber products—boots, shoes and rubber clothing—that were manufactured in the Naugatuck River Valley and other regions of the nation.

Many of the machines and consumer products invented in Connecticut between 1800 and the end of the Civil War played a vital role in the expansion of American manufacturing. Throughout the world, the use of precision metalworking machines to produce interchangeable parts became known as "The American System of Manufactures."

After the Civil War, Connecticut inventors continued their activities. In 1892, George C. Blickensderfer (b. Erie, Pennsylvania; 1851-1917) patented the first portable typewriter. Curtis H. Veeder (b. Allegheny, Pennsylvania; 1862-1943) was an electrical engineer who invented a cyclometer in 1894 to measure the distances traveled by wheeled vehicles and developed in 1903 a speed-measuring tachometer. The first coin-operated telephone was patented by William Gray. Frank J. Sprague (1857-1934) was an electrical engineer who developed pilot controls for electric motors and established the nation's first electrified street railway system in Richmond, Virginia, in 1887. The familiar electric socket with a pull chain was developed in 1896 by Harvey Hubbell (1857-1927) of Bridgeport. Alfred C. Fuller (b. Berwick, Nova Scotia; 1885-1973), the founder of the Fuller Brush Company, designed a twisted-in-wire method for brush making and had the first machine incorporating his method constructed in Hartford in 1905. Fuller hired a talented English inventor, Henry Cave, who obtained more than eighty patents for new brush products and brush-making machinery. Hiram P. Maxim (b. Brooklyn, New York; 1869-1936), a graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, designed automobiles at Hartford's famous Pope Manufacturing Company before he invented in 1909 the Maxim gun "silencer," familiar to all Americans.

The great majority of Connecticut's inventors in the years before World War I were practical men, who used trial-and-error experimentation to develop new machines and new products. These inventors often had above-average abilities to visualize the three-dimensional spatial relationships between different shapes. This type of thinking, known as synthetic-spatial design, is especially important for technological innovation. Pure scientific research into the basic properties of matter and the characteristics of living organisms requires different types of thinking that are more verbal, logical, and analytical and often require a knowledge of complicated mathematical procedures. In the years since World War I, inventors in Connecticut and elsewhere throughout the world have generally had more training in scientific theory and analysis than their predecessors. An increasing number of inventors are graduates of the engineering and science programs of colleges and universities. In many instances, inventive activity in the twentieth century has required large laboratories with expensive equipment. A new term, "research and development," has been coined to indicate the complexity of modern technological innovation, which often requires the coordinated efforts of a group of researchers or many different research teams. However, even in today's high-technology world, trial-and-error experimentation and synthetic-spatial design abilities are still important to the process of invention.

Since World War I, Connecticut inventors, working individually and in groups in hundreds of business and university workshops and laboratories, have developed thousands of patented inventions. With more people engaged in inventive activity than ever before, and with increasingly sophisticated research and production technologies available, the number of inventions in Connecticut, and throughout the country, has increased with each passing year. Inventors working individually or for small companies have produced as many fundamental inventions as have those employed by very large firms.  Complicated products have been developed by research teams working for large companies: helicopters (Sikorsky Aircraft); electronic video recording equipment (CBS Research Laboratories, Stamford); and high-performance jet engines (Pratt and Whitney Aircraft). And individual inventors, like Professor Vernon K. Krieble (1885-1964), a chemist at Trinity College, who developed loctite, (1953) an anerobic sealant and structural adhesive, have also been active. Today Connecticut's inventors continue to sustain the state's economic vitality and work to enhance the convenience and amusement of people throughout the world.

For Further Reading

Cooper, Carolyn, et al. "Industrial Archeology at the Whitney Gun Factory Site," Essays in Arts and Sciences (The University of New Haven). X (March 1982), 135-151.

Chandler, George B. "Industrial History," in Norris G. Osborn, ed., History of Connecticut in Monographic Form. IV (New York, 1925). 1-419.

Hindle, Brooke. Emulation and Invention. New York, 1981.

Kuslan, Louis I. Connecticut Science, Technology, and Medicine in the Era of the American Revolution. Hartford, 1978.

Studley, G.L. Connecticut: the Industrial Incubator. New York, 1981.

* Entry under revision.