Peter Cooper / The Riverside Biographical Series, Number 4

him up in business as a coach-builder, lending him the necessa

in the city. But a day or two before the coach was to be delivered the gentleman died, and it was then found that he was insolvent. This made me hesitate. If I should accept my employer's kind offer and have such a misfortune happen to me

nearly three years had saved enough money to purchase the right for the State of New York to a patented machine for that purpose. He used to tell, in his old age, of his el

enot descent, who made for him a happy home during fifty-seven years.[1] He bought a house in Hempstead, expecting to remain there; and in the household, as in business, he gave rein to his ardent and versatile inventive faculty. One of his domestic contrivances rocked the cradle, fanne

the ground where the Bible House now stands, opposite the Cooper Union on Ninth Street. Upon this ground he erected several buildings, one of which he used as his office. The business was profitable; but the real foundation of Mr. Cooper's wealth was laid when, at the age of thirty-three, he purchased a

s. For many years, he carried on his glue business without bookkeeper, agent, or salesman. Dawn found him at the suburban factory (on what is now Thirty-Second Street) lighting the fires and preparing for the day's work; at noon, he drove

ess could financial direction and protection be compassed by the simple scheme which Mr. Cooper, in his old age, recalled with pride. "I used," he said once, "to pay all my debts every Saturday night; and I knew that what I had left was my own!" This could not have been strictly true; but it doubtless expressed an old man's memory of the way he began, and the principles he had followed, with that horror

entioned) the part played by Peter Cooper in the development of the American iron indust

coal iron near Baltimore, and in 1836, together with his brother Thomas, he operated a rolling-mill in New York (on Thirty-Third Street, near Third Avenue). At this mill anthracite was used for puddling in 1840. In 1845 the business was removed to Trenton, N. J.; and in the new rolling-mill-then the largest in the United States-built at Trenton for the manufacture of rails, the first iron beams for buildings were rolled in 1854. By the erection of blast furnaces at Phillipsburg and Ringwood, N. J., and Durham, Pa., and the addition of wire mills, bridge shop, chain shop, etc., to the works at Trenton, the purchase of iron and coal lands, and the development of numerous mines,

lished, and the doubts as to its practical application to a line of at least twenty-five hundred miles were of such a character as to seem more serious to scientific men than to American capitalists of Mr. Cooper's type. In March, 1854, the New York, Newfoundland, & London Telegraph Company was organized, and Mr. Cooper became (and remained for twenty trying years) its president. There was little difficulty in raising the money for the eighty-five miles of cable which were to be laid under the Gulf of St. Lawrence, or in obtaining from the British colonies favorable charters granting exclusive privileges, land grants, and eve

to construct and operate the line under concessions from the parent Newfoundland company. All classes in England felt a sentimental interest in the rom

cable; contracts for the cable and its insulating covering were executed; and by the end of July, 1857, the British Agamemnon and the American Niagara had each twelv

ially in England, where it was known that the British government had wired by the cable before its failure news of great political importance. The British company indeed courageously proceeded to make another cable; but when this parted in mid-ocean during the process of laying it even British tenacity of purpose was daunted, and for some

d better luck would preclude; and he backed with his own faith and money the undaunted enthusiasm and persuasive eloquence of Mr. Field, whose expenses he paid for another journey to England, and who succeeded at last in raising there the funds for the third and successful attempt. Moreover Mr. Cooper upheld the credit of the Newfoundland company, personally paying the drafts drawn upon it, and taking its bonds as his security.