19th century set of drafting tools
THE PACKAGE HAD ARRIVED. Charles Hill Morgan leaned forward at a table and opened the velvet-lined case with excitement. One by one, he laid out his new acquisitions: a double point shaft compass, pencil and ink points, an excellent German pen, 3-inch dividers, a complete set of 3-inch steel bows, and eight regular pens with a variety of nib sizes.
The 22-year-old hazel-eyed draftsman sat back, stretched his long legs, and surveyed with satisfaction this major investment in the tools of his trade. He then opened his diary for April 20, 1853, and recorded his purchases in his methodical and steady hand, totaling $22.72 for the drafting tools, plus express shipping to his boarding house in Lawrence, Massachusetts. The price represented more than a few weeks’ wages from the Lawrence Machine Shop, part of the vast Essex Company manufacturing enterprise on the Merrimack River.
Despite his youth, he had travelled far to reach Lawrence. Born in Rochester, New York in 1831, Charles Morgan briefly lived in Michigan as his parents followed the westward expansion of the young nation’s canals. When he was eight years old, however, the family migrated back to central Massachusetts, where they had longstanding roots.
The Morgan family eventually settled in Factory Village (later named Clinton), where Charles spent his formative years. There his parents helped to build a church and passed on to their son their deep-seated faith. Charles learned literacy and numeracy in public schools and at a local academy, but he was introduced to drafting while a teenager working as a mechanic in the coachlace mill of Clinton. He then honed his practical knowledge of machinery and perfected his drafting techniques while working on equipment for mills, looms, and steam engines in Massachusetts and Pennsylvania.
Charles’s mastery of his drafting tools was so well respected by 1854 that when William T. Merrifield asked the Lawrence Machine Shop to design a steam engine installation to power shared facilities for small manufacturers in Worcester, it was Charles Hill Morgan who drew up the plans for the foundation.
From such humble beginnings, Morgan’s technical skills and business acumen launched his varied career as an innovator, entrepreneur and civic leader. He ran a paper bag manufacturing business in Philadelphia in the 1860s, managed the world’s largest producer of barbed wire in Worcester from the mid-1860s to mid-1880s, and then founded his own rolling mill company in Worcester in 1888. He held several important patents and tenaciously defended his rights to the commercial use of this intellectual property. Morgan’s success was initially due to his ability to use a draftsman’s professional-grade compass to make precisely centered measurements. But Morgan himself attributed his success in life to a strong moral compass, centered around church, family and service to others.
Once Charles learned how to use his specialized drafting tools, his horizons widened with greater possibilities. His business travels took him from New England to Chicago and Texas as well as to Sweden, France, Germany and England. The focal point of his professional life remained the dynamic manufacturing communities of central Massachusetts, especially its industrial hub of Worcester. Morgan’s technical and moral compasses aligned to point him on a path as an innovator that led from Factory Village to the courts of Europe. Over the span of his life, Charles would go from living hand to mouth in Shrewsbury, Massachusetts, to taking tea with Queen Victoria at Windsor Castle.
His life journey personifies the development and success of the American Industrial Revolution—a time when the power of ideas coupled with mechanical ability fueled many people with a strong desire to find new solutions to practical problems. Morgan’s struggles, first to gain the technical knowledge and ability, and then to apply them in a commercial setting, with only limited personal capital, reflect the wider experience of this generation of American inventors. Armed with patents, and ultimately, a solid business built on his reputation for quality and integrity, Charles Hill Morgan and his life story demonstrate a 19th-century model of entrepreneurial success in the face of daunting odds, in a time when technological advances first provided a competitive advantage over longstanding methods and practices.
CHANGING PERCEPTIONS OF THE POSSIBLE
1831 was an auspicious year for the birth of someone who was to become an inventor, entrepreneur and fervent Christian. Fiery evangelical preachers crisscrossed the western New York of his childhood preaching a gospel of self-denial, self-discipline and self-improvement. Each man, they taught, should take responsibility for his own morality and salvation. It was, Ralph Waldo Emerson proclaimed that year, “the age of the first-person singular.”
The emergence of such self-directed spiritual philosophies echoed the country’s developing democratic ideology. That very American ideal of self-reliance, where a man could advance on the strength of his education, ideas, and initiative, was reiterated in November 1831 by Massachusetts Senator Edward Everett. In the inaugural lecture of a series honoring Benjamin Franklin, Senator Everett said, “We are all equal” in our ability “to compare, contrive, invent, improve and perfect,” addressing an audience of Boston laborers and mechanics whose backgrounds resembled Franklin’s early years.
Improving and perfecting the ideas of others is the real accomplishment of most innovators. History often pays tribute to inventors with breakthrough ideas, but “improvers” rarely gain the spotlight. Inventions may offer new or different ways to solve problems, but by commercializing those ideas, improvers, or innovators in today’s parlance, build businesses and create jobs. In 19th-century New England, many mechanics tinkered with better ways to do something. Their incremental improvements fulfilled a desire to solve problems and effect change. A new journal, Scientific American, recognized this impulse in describing its mission in its first issue in August 1845: “the Advocate of Industry and Enterprise, and Journal of Mechanical and Other Improvements.” Written particularly for mechanics and manufacturers, the magazine had for its first cover illustration an “improved rail-road car” and articles describing improvements in a variety of fields as well as a list of new patents. Charles Morgan was an avid reader of Scientific American as early as 1852, even before he invested in his high-quality drafting tools.
The virtues of improvement had been “a watchword of society” in early 19th-century America, according to Robert Friedel in his comprehensive work, A Culture of Improvement. Novelty was not welcomed. Inventions that were too new were suspected of quackery or worse, the source of labor savings that were unwanted in challenging economic times. Craftsmen who made incremental improvements in their tools, methods and materials were clearly interested in raising the quality of a product. Improvements, however, were not always patentable. The distinction between invention and improvement, as Friedel details, “mattered to those seeking sources of national wealth and prosperity.”
In the United States, establishing a patent system was a priority for George Washington’s administration in 1790. Together with Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson and Attorney General Edmund Randolph, the president signed the new nation’s first patent in 1790, for an improvement on the making of “pot ash and pearl ash.” The patent system soon needed its own improvements, but not until 1836 did Congress create the Patent Office. No longer a responsibility of the Secretary of State, the country’s patents were administered through a Commissioner of Patents.
As inventions and improvements on them received patent protection, the volume of patents grew. While it took close to 20 years to grant the first 12,000 patents after 1836, that quickly became an annual figure by the 1870s. Charles Morgan offers a prime illustration of this escalating trend: his first patent, issued in 1857, was number 17,184, and his last, in 1909, was number 931,750.
Charles was fortunate to live in an inventive location. Many observers considered the spirit of improvement and innovation of the time to be rooted in the genius of particular individuals or places. “The New Englander invents normally; his brain has a bias that way,” reported the London Times in reviewing the American exhibits
