Background
Albert Hamilton Emery was born in Mexico, New York, the son of Samuel and Catherine Shepard Emery. He was descended from John Emery who came to Boston from England in 1635.
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ALBERT HAMILTON EMERY
Edit ProfileEducation
After attending public school he entered Mexico Academy and prepared for Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute at Troy, New York. Following his graduation as a civil engineer in 1858 he returned to his home and began applying himself to mechanical invention.
Career
In 1858 within a year he had obtained two patents, one on a cheese press and another on a window-sash fastener.
Three years later he went to New York to engage in similar work, and during the Civil War concentrated on ordnance.
He remained in New York in his chosen profession for twenty years, perfecting annually from one to ten inventions of various sorts, including a wood distillation process and plant, hydraulic presses for various purposes, a device for towing canal boats, a weighing machine, and occasional ordnance inventions.
In 1883 he organized the Emery Scale Company in Stamford, Connecticut, and assigned to it a group of approximately twenty new patents on weighing machinery, pressure gages, dynamometers, and testing machines.
The company did not manufacture these, but sublet the construction to others, while Emery employed four or five men in a small shop to make the delicate parts.
Competition was too keen, however, with established manufacturers of weighing machinery, and in a short time the company dropped out of the field.
Emery then designed a testing machine for the Watertown Arsenal at Watertown, Massachusetts.
It was most ingenious, and did much to establish his reputation.
It also opened a field for experimental work which has since led to important developments in the realm of mechanics.
Emery thereafter continued as a consultant and designer of testing machinery until his death.
Two unusual machines of his design are used at this writing at the United States Bureau of Standards, one of 230, 000 pounds capacity for tension and compression, and the other of 1, 150, 000 pounds capacity for tension and 2, 300, 000 pounds for compression.
Although his consulting work consumed the greater part of his time he still continued his inventive work in many lines, but principally in ordnance and hydraulic pressure measuring devices.
Achievements
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Between 1862 and 1865 he invented five improvements in projectiles, cannon founding, and percussion fuses. Based on an invention of the latter type, a railway track scale for weighing cars in motion, which Emery developed, is performing important service for the major railroads of the country as well as for large industrial organizations.
Membership
Emery was a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a member of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, and of the American Society for Testing Materials.
Connections
He married Mrs. Fannie B. Myers of Westmoreland, New York, on March 3, 1875, who died thirty years before him.
