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Asa Whitney was an American merchant, railroad promoter, inventor and manufacturer.
Background
Asa Whitney was the son of Asa and Mary (Wallis) Whitney, and a descendant of John Whitney, who emigrated from London, England, to Watertown, Massachussets, in 1635. He was born in Townsend, Massachussets, where his father was the blacksmith.
Education
He obtained a meager education.
Career
At an early age, he went to work in his father's shop. When he became of age, in order to secure a wider mechanical experience he secured employment in various machine shops, wheelwright shops, and machinery manufactories in New Hampshire and New York. About 1820, while working in New Hampshire in a cotton-machinery manufactory, he was delegated by his employer to install the machinery in a new cotton mill in Brownsville, N. Y. Upon completing the work he remained in that town and began in a small way the manufacture of axles for horse-drawn vehicles. Although successful in this enterprise, about 1827 he gave it up to become a partner in a local cotton-machinery plant and in three years lost what little capital he possessed. He then accepted the opportunity offered him by the Mohawk & Hudson Railroad to take charge of erecting the machinery on the inclined planes at Albany and Schenectady and of the building of railroad cars. While the work was entirely outside the range of his experience, its novelty strongly appealed to him and by earnest application he progressed in three years to the position of superintendent of the railroad. He continued in this capacity until 1839, by which time his reputation had become such that Governor Seward literally drafted him to fill the office of canal commissioner of New York State. While Whitney conducted this office with distinguished ability, railroading continued to interest him deeply and on June 27, 1840, he was granted a patent for a locomotive steam engine. After serving a three-year term as canal commissioner he resigned to enter into partnership with Matthias W. Baldwin, pioneer locomotive builder of Philadelphia, Pa. , and in 1842 removed with his family to that city from Rotterdam, N. Y. Whitney was the first of Baldwin's partners to possess a railroad experience and this combined with his keen business sense enabled him in the succeeding four years to develop for the company a sound system of management - something it had lacked up to that time. Whitney also applied his talents in other directions, introducing, for example, a locomotive classification, which in 1934 was still used by the Baldwin Locomotive Works. In his leisure moments he gave serious attention to the improvement of cast-iron car wheels and made such satisfactory progress that in 1846 he decided to devote his whole attention to this work and resigned from the Baldwin organization. On May 27, 1847, he obtained two patents, one for a cast-iron car wheel having a corrugated center web, and another for the method of manufacturing the same. With his three sons he at once organized in Philadelphia the firm of Asa Whitney & Sons. He continued with his metal experiments and on April 25, 1848, obtained a patent for an improved process of annealing and cooling cast iron wheels, which he incorporated in his manufactory. These three patents formed the foundation on which the Whitney car-wheel works soon developed into the largest and most successful establishment of its kind in the United States. At the time of Whitney's death the daily consumption of pig iron was between sixty and seventy tons. With this business well established, Whitney in 1860 permitted himself to be elected president of the Philadelphia & Reading Railroad. The terminus of the road at that time was at Schuylkill Haven, Pa. , but it did not reach any of the anthracite coal mines in that vicinity. One of Whitney's first acts was to devise a plan for acquiring the lateral roads by securing a lease of the Schuylkill Valley Railroad. He thus prepared the way for the Philadelphia & Reading to secure all the coal trade of the Schuylkill region. While intensely interested in this new occupation, Whitney was compelled to relinquish it in 1861 because of his poor health and thereafter until his death he lived in retirement in Philadelphia.