Background
Thomas Davenport was born on July 9, 1802 on his father’s farm in Williamstown, Orange County, Vermont, United States. He was the eighth in the family of eleven children of Daniel and Hannah (Rice) Davenport.
Thomas Davenport was born on July 9, 1802 on his father’s farm in Williamstown, Orange County, Vermont, United States. He was the eighth in the family of eleven children of Daniel and Hannah (Rice) Davenport.
Davenport attended school but a few years when his father died, and he was forced to assist in the support of the family.
When fourteen years old Davenport was apprenticed to the local blacksmith with whom he remained for seven years.
Immediately after the close of his apprenticeship, in 1823, he moved to Brandon, Vermont, where he opened a blacksmith shop and prospered, as indicated by the fact that on February 14, 1827, he “built a commodious brick house. ” The topic of conversation around Brandon in 1831 was a mysterious magnet (a Henry electro-magnet) used at the Penfield Iron Works at Crown Point, New York.
When Davenport saw the magnet, he was overcome with the desire to possess one like it. Trading his brother’s horse for a poorer one (without his brother’s knowledge) to gain the necessary cash, he purchased an extra magnet which the iron works had for sale instead of the iron for which he had gone to Crown Point. He afterward made a larger one, his wife sharing his enthusiasm to the point of tearing up her silk wedding dress to insulate the wires.
For some unaccountable reason he saw in the device a possible source of power, and with the help of a friend “handy with tools, ” by July 1834 he had built a little machine composed of four electro-magnets, two arranged as opposite spokes in a horizontally revolving wheel and two fixed, and the four connected up through a crude commutator to an electric battery.
When current was applied the wheel revolved at a high rate of speed.
This machine unquestionably constituted a complete embodiment of the principles of the modern electric motor.
Upon the advice of a college professor of Middlebury, Vermont, Davenport, with the financial assistance of friends, for he had totally abandoned his regular business during the preceding two years, went to Washington in 1835 to have his machine patented.
By the time he reached there, having stopped at various cities to show his device to prominent individuals, his money was gone, and he made his way back to Brandon totally discouraged.
Amos Eaton of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute prevailed upon him, however, to demonstrate his motor at Troy, New York, that autumn, and as a result he secured some additional financial assistance.
In the hope of obtaining sufficient funds to patent the motor and go into manufacture, Davenport spent the year of 1836 building and exhibiting a number of miniature machines, including one which is now recognized as the embryo of the electric trolley car. With the money thus raised, he applied for a patent, sending in a model, but all was lost in the Patent Office fire on December 15, 1836. A second application and model were immediately submitted and Davenport received letters patent on February 25, 1837.
For the next six years he endeavored in various ways to establish a market, but never succeeded. He organized a workshop and laboratory in New York City where he was constantly engaged in improving and enlarging his machine, but one after another of his supporters deserted him. He undertook to publish a technical journal called the Electro-Magnet and Mechanics Intelligencer, for which an electric motor of his own design operated the printing press, but after a few issues this was abandoned.
Finally, about 1843, he broke down physically, returned to Brandon, and three years later retired to a small farm in Salisbury, Vermont. Here in the last year of his life he undertook successful experiments with an electro-magnetic player piano, but his death at the early age of forty-nine brought an end to this work.
Thomas Davenport married Emily Goss of Brandon.