George Hillard Benjamin was an American engineer and patent lawyer from New York.
Background
George Benjamin was born on December 25, 1852, in New York City, one of the sons of Park Benjamin and Mary Brower (Western) Benjamin. His descent was from John Benjamin, who migrated from England to Watertown, Massachussets, in 1632. His father was a well-known poet and editor who had been associated with Horace Greeley on the New Yorker (before the founding of the Tribune).
Education
George was fitted for college at Phillips Andover Academy and entered Union College, Schenectady, New York, in 1868; but left before the graduation of his class to begin his professional studies at the Albany Medical College. He was keenly interested in branches of science and technology outside his profession; to familiarize himself with advanced work in those fields he studied at the University of Freiburg, Germany, later receiving his doctorate in philosophy from that institution.
Career
For four years George practised medicine at Albany, New York; but in 1880, at the age of twenty-eight, he removed to New York City, joining the staff of Appleton's Cyclopædia of Applied Mechanics, of which his brother, Park Benjamin II, was editor. In his editorial work the legal aspects of engineering commanded more and more of his attention. Thus he was led to study patent law and in 1884 he was admitted to practise. Still he always had far more than a merely legalistic interest in engineering and technical problems. His counsel was sought in the organization of large corporations, notably the Western Electric Company, the General Railway Signal Corporation, and United States Steel. As a technical engineer, Benjamin long represented the German firm of Siemens and Halske. He frequently appeared as an expert witness in important patent litigation and other suits in which the Government was interested.
Benjamin was a contributor to the technical journals and at times to the daily newspapers. His mind was unusually versatile in technical directions and so keen that the mere suggestion of an idea could be converted by him into a patentable invention literally overnight. He was the patentee of a great many devices as well as the joint assignee of many of his clients' inventions. The same year that he was admitted to practise patent law he devised and patented an underground electric conduit; the following year a glass-melting furnace; the next year he was assignee with a Swiss client of a dynamo-electric machine; and the following year secured three patents on pipe couplings and expansion joints. A tin-plate manufacturing process was patented by him in 1892, and in 1893 he patented and assigned to his client, the Siemens Halske Company, Berlin, Germany, an incandescent electric lamp and an electric street-railway trolley.
Benjamin's inventive work extended over the chemical and metallurgical fields as well. He devised a process of manufacture of diethyl ether in 1900; secured four patents for a metallurgical furnace in 1905; one for a regenerative gas furnace in 1910; for a by-product coke oven in 1920; for a metal casting furnace as late as 1923; and during the last ten years of his life was much interested in and invented processes for curing, preserving, and drying tobacco, beet sugars, and fruits.
The United States Government employed him as an expert on high explosives. During the World War he served as chairman of the executive committee of the Mayor's Committee on National Defense in New York City. He was interested in the perfection of sound-detecting devices on American warships to detect approaching submarines. For many years he gave attention to problems in the detection and prevention of crime. He was thoroughly conversant with the Bertillon system of measurements and its application. He was consulted by Scotland Yard in difficult cases of crime detection, particularly such as involved chemistry. His reputation in this field, as well as in technical engineering, was international. Benjamin died in 1927.
Achievements
Connections
Benjamin married, first, Jane Seymour of Ogdensburg, New York, in 1875; second, Mrs. Grace (Smith) Tremaine of Buffalo, New York, in 1901.