The Machine Age of Innocence

THOSE WERE THE DAYS--Edward R. Hewitt--Duell, Sloan & Pearce ($3).

When Peter Cooper ran for President, on the Greenback ticket, he got 82,000 votes. But he was one of the most wonderful grandfathers who ever lived. His prosperous glue (and gelatin) factory, at Madison Avenue and sist Street in Manhattan, would have made him a fortune even if he had not invented the mercury vapor lamp, built the first American steam locomotive, or helped finance the Atlantic cable. His long white hair reached almost to his shoulders. He shaved himself with a razor used by George Washington. He wore a black frock coat, a black stock about his neck and, when he went visiting, had one of his grandsons trot along after him carrying an air cushion to ease his sharp old bones when he sat down.

Peter Cooper hired a professional mechanic to teach his grandsons how to use tools and make things, gave away money right & left (but advised them not to), and told them, out of the reminiscent wisdom of his 92 years, about General Washington's funeral parade along Broadway, with the General's military boots slung over the saddle of his war horse.

In Those Were the Days Edward Hewitt describes the life of the Coopers, his parents, grandparents, brothers, friends, in an autobiography which is unique: it is full of information about everybody but its author.

Bomby Boyhood. Peter Cooper's grandchildren were such hellions that the City of New York had to keep a policeman at Gramercy ' Park to watch them. Using some giant firecrackers and a small charge of gunpowder, they blew up the policeman's hut while he was inside. Later they eluded the police by sawing a hole through the iron railings around the park. Once they constructed a fiddle to frighten the neighbors. It had a box four feet long, three feet wide, and two feet deep, and a bow twelve feet long. It emitted an unearthly bellow.

When the snow melted on the street they took their sleds into the huge house--it had a frontage of 100 feet on Lexington Avenue and no on 22nd Street--and slid down the carpet on the stairs. They crashed right through the front door, nearly killed themselves and their mother. who was coming up the steps. She made them stay indoors all day. The family had a gymnasium, fitted up for the boys over the stable, hired an instructor to teach them gymnastics. The little Hewitts cut trap doors through the floor of their gymnasium to make a secret hideout. When the police called, as they often did, Mrs. Hewitt used to direct them to the gymnasium, knowing that the cops would never find the boys. They never did.

In the summer, on their farm at Ringwood, N.J., they built a 250-foot slide from the top of the orchard across the lawn, greased the slide with beeswax, and sailed down it "at great speed and with wild howls of glee." Ambassador Whitelaw Reid and Presidential Candidate Samuel J. Tilden tried it once when "both of them [were] rather well along in years." Says Author Hewitt: "It is a wonder that they were not hurt."

Those Were the Days grew out of Edward Hewitt's stories to his grandchildren, and is as warmhearted as a letter home, full of untroubled admissions of failures and modest accounts of achievements, of unsensationalized disclosures of gigantic frauds, and an unself-conscious wistfulness. "I should be just as happy as I have ever been," says Edward Hewitt in conclusion, "if it were not for the fact that Mrs. Hewitt has become an invalid. ... If only I could get my wife well again, life would be even more enjoyable."

The book's distinction is that it takes readers so quickly and intimately into the Cooper and Hewitt families that it virtually adopts them. Its weakness is that, through its 316 pages, no connecting thread guides the narrative, and the discursive anecdotes include ancient and doubtful ones, as well as the stories which throw their mellow light on the strange people, mores and morals of the administrations of General Grant.

Across its span of years--through Peter Cooper's 92, Abram Hewitt's 80, Edward Hewitt's 77--the picture unfolds of a day of unchecked productivity, where wealth was the reward of ingenuity, and the common good was the result of wealth, when patents, like decorations for heroism, were signed by the President, and the capitalist who backed a new mechanical device to better the lot of mankind (and make a private fortune) was the equal of a general, a commissar, a duke, or a mechanic.

Spawning Inventions. All of the Coopers and Hewitts were inventors. They spawned ideas like salmon. Each had his pet idea, like a spoiled child, which he labored over more & more as it failed to work out, and which he grew more & more fond of as the other successful ideas raced on to practical accomplishment while the failure stayed in the laboratory. Old Peter Cooper's pet was a continuous chain drive for boats. He planned an endless chain, run by water power, along the Erie Canal. He got Governor Clinton's approval, and set up an experimental unit that pulled a boat eight miles an hour against the current of the East River. But farmers along the canal, who sold feed to the tow mules, refused to permit the chain to be installed.

Most of the people the Coopers and Hewitts knew were inventors or financiers of inventors. Readers of Those Were the Days get an impression of a nationwide intoxication with applied mechanics. Hiram Maxim's new improvements on electrical devices made equipment obsolete so fast that the electrical companies sent him abroad for ten years, with a contract not to invent anything electrical during that time. Restless, he invented the machine gun (for which Queen Victoria knighted him). When he demonstrated it before the Kaiser, Wilhelm asked to try it out, swung it in a circle, almost killed the whole General Staff of the German Army.

Manslaughter and Mrs. Fish. Society people were also interested in inventions. Mrs. Hamilton Fish bought the first electric automobile in Gramercy Park. During her trial run, a big Negro stepped in front of the car. Mrs. Fish tried to slow down. But she pushed the lever forward and the car speeded up, knocked the Negro down, ran over him. Mrs. Fish tried to stop. But she pushed the lever too far the other way, and the car backed up, ran over the Negro again. This rattled Mrs. Fish. Again she pushed the lever forward too far, again ran over him. The Negro jumped up, yelled: "'Fore God, ma'am, you sure is goin' to run over me," dashed for his life around the corner.

Alexander Graham Bell came to the Cooper house to show old Peter Cooper his telephone. The Hewitt boys studied it, cut out a wooden earpiece, made coils and a magnet, got a piece of black enameled iron from a tintype photographer for a diaphragm, and ran wires to the bed of their brother Erskine, who had scarlet fever, found they could talk to him without breaking quarantine. The doctor was astonished. Thomas Edison demonstrated his talking machine to Peter Cooper, and the boys copied that too. They used their telephone diaphragm and the cook's rolling pin, which they stole while she was in the laundry. They got the machine to say "Hello," were irritated when P. T. Barnum withdrew his offer to pay $10,000 for a machine that would really talk.

$600,000 Forgery. Cooper Hewitt's favorite discovery was the transformation of polyphase alternating current to direct current through the mercury vapor transformer. He decided suddenly, circa 1910, that "if a path of electric current were established across a tube which had a single negative electrode and multiple positive electrodes, and the positive electrodes were each connected with a different phase of the alternating current, the positive impulses would be conducted successively to the negative electrode which was already in operation with its surface resistance broken down, but the negative impulse could not be transferred to the positive electrode because here the resistance was not broken down. The positive impulses would, therefore, flow successively from each of the positive electrodes to the negative and a continuous direct current would pass from the negative electrode." Cooper had not tried it. He simply decided it must be so. It was. Because it interfered with General Electric's profitable business in mechanical transformers, the corporation sued Cooper. Their lawyer discovered a forgery in their evidence, got so mad he made the corporation buy Cooper's patent for $600,000.

Favorite episode of all the Coopers and Hewitts was Peter Cooper's sturdy backing of the Atlantic cable after the first break disheartened its inventors. From that demonstration of confidence, he netted $2,000,000. When Herman Frasch developed his method of mining sulphur in Louisiana--by pumping hot water into the sulphur deposits to melt the sulphur and pumping it to the surface by compressed air--the Coopers and Hewitts were in the company. When the first experiment failed, five of the backers withdrew. Edward Hew itt's mother, Peter Cooper's daughter, knitted silently through the talk, then said, "If no one else will put up the money ... I will do it myself." She wanted to take at least half of the $600,-ooo capital. Her family, to save her, took most of it, let her invest $50,000. Soon sulphur flowed out of Louisiana at the rate of 2,000 tons a day. Profits were $30,000 a day. The $600,000 was repaid in a month. Dividends were 100% a month for years. In all, they totaled $125,000,000.

Inspired Wolf. Edward Hewitt has little use for large research laboratories for scientists, except in cases where the cost of experimentation is too great for one-man enterprise. He believes that most scientific progress depends on the lone wolf acting on his hunches and inspirations, and being backed in them. Readers noting, in the pages of Those Were the Days, the broken glass, smashed flywheels, torpedo boats that did not work, guns that blew up, flying machines that smashed before they left the ground, may decide that inventors also needed some special kind of confidence which was not courage so much as faith that nothing they built themselves would hurt them.

Peter Cooper tried to invent an explosive motor, made tha cylinder walls of glass so he could watch it work, and almost lost an eye. His paddle-wheel steamer sank at the dock. His locomotive was beaten in a race by a horse.

Edward Hewitt lost his own fortune in 1929. "I have had a most wonderfully interesting life," says he. "While I have taken out many patents, none of them has proved of fundamental importance, although some have received quite extended use. . . . My writings on the art of salmon fishing and trout fishing may well prove to be my most lasting contributions to human welfare."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.