Tinkerers galore in Northwest Corner

This week is National Engineers Week. During this week, members of the engineering profession organize events at schools to inform students about engineering as a career and sponsor other activities to bring their work into public view.

Engineering is one profession that does  not attract much public attention. Most engineers work out of the public eye, solving problems and developing new ideas. Innovation and creative thinking have played a large role in the development of this country from its very beginning but many of those ideas have been lost with the passage of time. There is, however, one unique record of past innovations: old patents.

In order to encourage and protect new ideas, the United States Patent Office began operation in 1792. From then until the present day “Letters Patent†have offered innovators a way to protect their creations for a period of time (15 years at present) so that they can profit from their efforts.

During my 30 years in engineering, I wrote and filed a number of patents and read thousands of them. Some seem very obvious, while others are incredibly clever. In either case, they provide a record of creative thought from 1792 until the present day  —  well, almost. In December of 1836 the U.S. Patent Office burned. Ironically the fire occurred while all the records were in a warehouse awaiting the completion of a new fireproof storage facility.

All patents filed up to that date were incinerated. Some of the lost documents were recreated from other sources, but many of them were lost forever, so the period from 1792 until 1837 is not well-represented. Nevertheless, the restored early documents and the filings from 1836 on reveal a rich record of creative thinking.

One day I got to wondering if there were any inventors in the Northwest Corner during the industrial boom of the 19th century. After all, the term “Yankee ingenuity†came into use during that time. The answer was close at hand thanks to the Connecticut State Library (cslib.org), which has made the records of Connecticut inventors available online.

The database can be searched by town and covers the period from about 1800 to1900. Would there be any records for the Northwest Corner? There are indeed!

For the area including Salisbury, Sharon, North Canaan and Falls Village, there are more than 100 patents in the database. The most prolific town is Sharon with more than 50 patents, most belonging to Asahel Hotchkiss and his sons, Andrew and Berkeley.

The Hotchkiss family is most noted for its inventions related to artillery and armament, but the family also patented things like harness hooks, rakes, a railroad snow plow and a mousetrap.

Some of the inventions are quite practical, such as the “footstove†invented by Ezekiel Daboll of North Canaan. It was designed to keep feet warm in the unheated churches of the time. The user placed coals from the home fire in the device and took it along to Sunday services. By virtue of its design it would keep your feet warm without the danger of setting clothing on fire. It was reported to be very popular at the church in East Canaan. Perhaps this was because the inventor lived across the street.

Other inventions were much more esoteric, such as that of George Weising of Lime Rock. He developed an improved mold for making railroad car wheels. (He worked at the Barnum & Richardson foundry in Lime Rock).

Issued in 1884, Weising’s patent is full of the jargon of a foundryman and describes how his mold works to reduce defects such chill cracks, shelling and side checks. Weising is not alone, as another Lime Rock foundryman, Edward Amundson, was issued a patent in 1887 for his improvements in car wheel casting. Perhaps these innovations helped make Barnum & Richardson wheels achieve their legendary reliability.

Still other patents describe how things were done in 19th-century factories. In April 1865, Horatio Ames of Amesville (which is part of Salisbury) was issued patent 47,177 for his method of making large cannons by welding iron rings together. This patent gives a detailed description of the arduous process by which he made his guns, and is fascinating to read. It is hard to imagine how the workers handled large, white-hot pieces of metal in 1865 to get the job done, but they did.

Every town in the area has similar stories. Because of the patent office fire, not all of the patents are available so there is no record of what the “twisted screw gimblet†invented by J. Broad of Salisbury or the “barrelhead cutting machine†invented by H. Andrews of North Canaan looked like. Even so, the record of achievement is impressive and fun to browse.

Does the record stop with the passing of the industrial era of the Northwest Corner ? Not at all. This area continues to attract creative thinkers and the chain of patents issued to local inventors continues on through the 20th century and into the 21st.

The later history is harder to inspect because there is not a corresponding database for the 20th century, and only the patents from 1976 on can be searched online at present.

Even so, a quick check of the data base at the U.S. Patent Office (uspto.gov) shows that design patent  D582,214 was issued on Dec. 9, 2008, to the team of Lawrence Hutzler of Lakeville and William Kolano of Pittsburgh for an ornamental design for a marinade tray. It will doubtless not be the last.

Richard Paddock is a historian and retired engineer who lives in Salisbury.