Edmund Cogswell Converse

Background

Edmund Cogswell Converse was born on November 07, 1849 in Boston, Massachusetts, United States. He was the son of James Cogswell and Sarah Ann (Peabody) Converse.

Education

Converse graduated from the Boston Latin School in 1869.

Career

Converse went to work as an apprentice in the McKeesport, Pennsylvania, plant of the National Tube Works, of which his father was founder and president. On January 10, 1882, he was granted Patent No. 252, 020 for a lock-joint for tubing. During the next six or seven years he perfected his invention in its details and extended its application, taking out eleven other patents of his own and gaining possession of a number of others. His coupling was the best on the market for water and gas systems, and once it became known it brought millions of dollars of business to the company, of which he had become general manager in 1889.

He now turned his attention from coupling tubes to coupling tubing companies, with even greater benefits to himself. In 1892 he consolidated various tube manufacturing companies under a New Jersey charter with a total capitalization of $11, 500, 000. In 1899 he and William Nelson Cromwell, acting as agents for J. P. Morgan & Company, succeeded in merging about twenty iron and steel tube companies, with others acquired later, into the National Tube Company, which was incorporated at $80, 000, 000.

When the United States Steel Corporation was organized in 1901, Converse retired from the field and gave himself to banking and its ramifications. By this time he was a power in financial circles, doing much to make New York the banking center of the nation and responsible for the rise of such men as Henry P. Davison, Benjamin Strong, and Seward Prosser, who with others were known as "Converse boys. ” He was president of the Liberty National Bank 1903-1907, of the Bankers’ Trust Company 1903-1913, and of the Astor Trust Company from its organization in 1907 till its merger with the Bankers’ Trust in 1917.

During the World War he again was head of the Liberty National Bank, while its regular president, Harvey D. Gibson, engaged in Red Cross activities in Europe. He was a director of many corporations. In his late years he withdrew, so far as circumstances would allow, from his financial interests, played golf, joined genealogical societies, and experimented with possibilities of life that hitherto he had left untried. Conyers Manor, his 2, 000 acre estate in Greenwich,

Connecticut, became a show place; apples from its orchards won prize after prize at pomological fairs.

In 1910, when the district between Rye, New York, and Sound Beach, Connecticut, was suffering from a water famine, he proved himself a good neighbor by turning over his large private lake at Stanwich to the use of the public. In 1912 he bought for $75, 000 the Gainsborough portrait of Count Rumford, who was a member of his mother’s family, and in the same year he gave $125, 000 to the Harvard Graduate School of Business Administration. In 1915 he gave the Converse Memorial Library to Amherst College. In 1915, also, he made his Greenwich estate into a bird sanctuary. The winters he spent in a Pasadena hotel, where he died unexpectedly of a heart attack. His will was equally generous to public institutions and to numerous friends and employees. According to the inventory and appraisal filed in the Probate Court of Greenwich, his estate was valued at $30, 769, 867.

Achievements

• Converse was known as an inventor of a tube coupler which became widely used in manufacturing. He contributed significantly to the development of the steel industry in the United States and was instrumental in merging the companies that resulted in an enterprise known as the National Tube Company.

Works

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Connections

On January 2, 1879, Converse married Jessie Macdonough Green of New York, who died in 1912; and on January 30, 1914, he married Mary Edith Dunshee of New York.

Father:

James Cogswell Converse

Mother:

Sarah Ann (Peabody) Converse

Spouse:

Mary Edith Dunshee

Spouse:

Jessie Macdonough Green

References

• Biographical Dictionary of American Business Leaders 4 volumes: Set.