Kingston Inventions

The old mode of boring holes in wood was by a pod-auger, which had to be drawn out at intervals to empty the pod. Now we bore continuously through two feet or more of dense timber in ship and bridge work, and the chips are worked out as fast as cut. This is the result of the introduction of the screw-auger. John Washburn, of Kingston, Mass., was the inventor in the latter part of the last century. He also invented cut nails and tacks. He cut the blanks in one machine, and employed children to pick them up one by one with their fingers, and insert them in the places where they were to be headed.

Jesse Read, then of Kingston, put the improvement upon that which made it a commercial success. He held the blank by a spring after it was cut, and by the motion of the cutting knife itself moved it into the dies and left it there. He made the cutting and heading one operation, and ever since his Kingston patents of 1809-10-11, the nail machine has been able to take in plate iron at one point, and drop the finished nail or tack at another, at the rate of about three per second, till the knives or dies become dull and require a delay of ten minutes for grinding. The screw-auger, the cut nail, and the machine for making the cut nail, are all Kingston inventions.

Kingston with a population of less than 2,000, one twenty-thousandth part of the American union, has done her full share to promote the present advanced condition of the arts. None of Kingston's sons have as yet made fortunes by their inventions without work, but with the same great strides, or even with much smaller ones, the chances are far greater for doing so now than a century ago. They are still at work. The patent is only a few years old on an improvement in stump pullers, one of the first necessities for back-woods' farming, invented by Caleb Bates or Thomas Newcomb, or both, and forged by Christopher Drew with the water power of Stony Brook, which flows past the Kingston depot. These are all residents and active business men in Kingston. The railroad is, on the other hand, a type and a product of the most rapid and dashing civilization. Our railroad cars glide over long lines of steel rails on our western praries, and move through the rocky defiles of our sister republics in South America, on wheels containing improvements invented and patented by George G. Lobdell, a native of Kingston, and manufactured in a large way in Wilmington, Del., by a company of which he is the head.

It is hard to conceive anything more simple than an invention of Martin Washburn, of Kingston, not yet patented, for cleaning horses, or anything more abstruse and intangible than the invention of Dr. Frederic W. Bartlett, one of Kingston's sons practising medicine in Buffalo, which has just been patented here and in Europe. He makes ozone better. Ozone is electrified oxygen, electrified water, oxide of oxygen, double oxygen, peroxide of hydrogen, the bleaching priciple of chlorine, the disinfecting, vitalizing, purifying principle of fresh-burned charcoal, or of nature generally. Nobody knows what it is as well as he does nails and augers, but Dr. Bartlett knows what it is of importance more practically, how to make it, and his invention is attracting much attention in scientific societies. Heretofore ozone could be made artificially, but too impure. Instead of pleasing, it offended; instead of invigorating, it choked. The Bartlett process promises to give, at practicable cost, a useful gas, destined, it is hoped, to become, like ice and chloroform, a necessity in every hospital.

Kingston inventors have made probably their proportion of failures. Osborne Morton and Asaph Holmes, of Kingston, labored together, twenty years or more ago, to attain perpetual motion, or something which cannot be much distinguished from it. Their faith was too great. But another Kingston inventor, a half century earlier, nearly attained one of the most successful machines, in a pecuniary sense, in the world, the harvesting machine. No one, until Obed Hussey, in 1833, made a useful invention in that line; but Samuel Adams, of Kingston, made one of the early attempts, and went all the way to Washington on horseback to obtain a patent, which issued Dec. 28, 1805. The records have been burned, but it is believed to have been close in the line of the present machine, which has contributed millions to the wealth of individuals, and hundreds of millions to our nations greatness and to the prosperity of the world. His faith was too weak.

Unsuccessful experiments do not benefit the world, and are no longer cited in the courts to defeat patents. They tend to establish, so far as they establish anything, that success in that direction is impossible. They signal to keep off, rather than to follow. But it is hard if we try, which we will not, to avoid a deep feeling of sympathy for the luckless toiler in the mine of invention, who, through want of merit in his conception, or through want of capital, persistance, or judgement in developing it, almost, but not quite, succeeds. Success is not in obtaining a patent, many other Kingston men have reached that point, but in making the invention useful and profitable. The United States Lock Company, now manufacturing in Kingston, make probably the very best lock in the world, but the invention is not by a citizen or native of Kingston; so I will not dwell on it.

John Washburn did not try to keep secret, or to patent, or in any way to protect his inventions. He threw them out for any to copy, just as he did his successful adoption of precious foreign arts, in the casting of sleigh-bells with the balls magically contained inside, and just as his brother, Elisha Washburn (my grandfather), did with the model and details of the construction of the famous Kingston fishing-boat, "Moll Corey," which it was the ambition of fishermen and fancy sailors vainly to try to equal fifty years ago.

As the law and practice now stands, nearly every really important forward step in the arts can be protected for the exclusive benefit of the originator for a considerable term, either by patent for invention, patent for design, or by registration of trade-mark, or by copyright; and it is every one's duty, to himself and family, to avail himself of the priviledge, when he makes a happy hit.

I have used names and spoken them plainly out loud, and it is right. It is an American weakness to glorify Americans generally and decry or ignore them specifically. An inventor, artist, or savant is fortunate who is born in England. The English praise Englishmen, Americans copy from English books; and the science of Newton and Brewster, the pictures of Turner and Landseer, and the inventions of Watt, Hargearves, and Bessamer are famous wherever the English language is spoken. Let us not refuse to the past or to the present inventions of out countrymen and our neighbors the credit of distinct acknowledgement, which is in too many cases the only reward.