He was born on August 23, 1861 at West Point, New York, United States, the son of Glover Perin, an army officer and later Assistant Surgeon-General, and Elizabeth Spooner (Page) Perin. On his mother's side he was related to the Page and Lee families of Virginia. His grandfather, Lemuel Perin, had been an engineer and bridge builder.
After graduating, A. B. , from Harvard in 1883, Perin continued his studies there for an additional year and then, having received a legacy, studied for a year at the École des Mines in Paris.
He was awarded an honorary doctorate in engineering by Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 1933.
He began his professional career as metallurgist and later superintendent of a small mine in West Stockbridge, Massachussets, serving subsequently as superintendent or general manager for several mining, steel, and railroad operations in the United States and Canada. In 1900 he opened a consulting office in New York City. One of his first assignments took him to Siberia in the winter of 1900-01 to search for a coal supply for the Trans-Siberian Railroad.
The most important project of Perin's career began in 1902 with a visit from a wealthy Parsee cotton merchant and philanthropist, Jamsetji N. Tata, who was planning to establish the first modern steel plant in India. Tata had approached the American steel engineer Julian Kennedy about constructing the plant, and it was at the latter's suggestion that Perin was engaged, along with a younger Harvard geologist, C. Minot Weld, to find a suitable location. After a lengthy survey Perin and Weld picked out a very advantageous site about 155 miles west of Calcutta, and there a plant was constructed by Kennedy and the Swedish engineer Axel Sahlin. By 1911 the first pig iron was being produced, and a modern city, Jamshedpur, was growing up around the site of the Tata plant.
During World War I the need for more steel east of Suez led to a great expansion of the Tata Iron and Steel Company, and for this expansion Perin was called in as engineer. Between 1916 and 1920 he and his partner, Stewart M. Marshall, provided plans for a new, electrically driven blooming mill, a rail and structural mill, a sheet-bar and billet mill, and many other additions, and introduced into the Tata plant the "duplex process" of producing steel, a combination of the Bessemer converter and open-hearth processes. These additions increased the plant's capacity to 30, 000 tons of steel a month. Steel products from Jamshedpur helped the Allies to win the Near East campaign, and the growth of the Tata company had a far-reaching effect upon India's industrialization.
Throughout World War I Perin made numerous trips to Jamshedpur to supervise the plant's expansion. In 1919 Perin served briefly as chief engineer of the appraisal commission attached to the Peace Commission.
Soon after the war he began experimenting with an electrolytic process for the manufacture of iron and steel. He later patented it, and in 1925 his firm built a plant at Niagara Falls, New York, where he attempted to produce pure iron directly by this process. The product, however, was brittle, being high in hydrogen, and he lost a substantial sum in the venture. He also lost money in an attempt to beneficiate the iron and recover the nickel and chromium from a low-grade ore deposit at Moa Bay, Cuba.
In 1931, after the withdrawal of Stewart M. Marshall, Perin and Frank L. Estep continued the consulting firm as the Perin Engineering Company.
During his last trip to India, in 1935, he contracted dysentery at Baghdad, from which he never fully recovered. He died at his home in New York City of pneumonia.
Charles Page Perin was the head of Perin Engineering Company, he designed an electric-furnace steel plant in Toronto, Canada, the largest electric steel plant built in any country up to that time. His other projects of the war and postwar years included blast furnaces in Mysore, India, in China, and in Manchuria and a study of iron and steel resources in South Africa. Besides, Perin served as president of the American Institute of Consulting Engineers.
Perin was a cultured man with an imposing personality. He had great energy and physical stamina. His tastes were expensive, and he had a tendency to plunge into projects on insufficient grounds.
On July 7, 1887, he had married Keokee Munroe Henderson at Ravenswood. She died in 1913. His second wife, from whom he was divorced in 1925, was Jeanette Bean. During that same year he married Katharine Sharp Hoyt, the widow of Colgate Hoyt, a banker.
