Education
As a youth he studied chemistry in England, France, and Germany, becoming a manufacturer of drugs in his native land.
As a youth he studied chemistry in England, France, and Germany, becoming a manufacturer of drugs in his native land.
In 1858 he moved to New York and became associated with Schieffelin Brothers & Company, wholesale druggists.
He obtained several patents for devices and methods relating to the production of oil.
Depression following the speculation of the period 1859-65 forced him to close his refinery in 1866, but he remained in Titusville and turned his attention to the manufacture of nitroglycerin.
His advertisements in the Scientific American, which show him to be the only manufacturer in America offering nitroglycerin in quantity, won the interest of the Massachusetts commissioners who were building the Hoosac Tunnel and they invited him to North Adams to furnish the explosives for the work.
By the end of the year the plant was completed.
Up to this time most of the nitric acid used in the United States was imported from abroad, but Mowbray began to make his own.
He also manufactured the insulation (guttapercha) and fuses needed for the work.
Mowbray manufactured over a million pounds of nitroglycerin, with such care and success that he dominated the explosives market in the northeastern and central parts of the United States long after the modern type of dynamite was introduced.
When the train reached Fargo, N. Dak. , the cans were carried to a Red River steamboat by Indians, the only help available.
Finding that an explosive of less shattering power would be better for some work, Mowbray developed a method of diluting nitroglycerin with finely divided scales of mica.
In 1886 he turned his attention to research in ammunition and contracted with Sir Hiram Stevens Maxim [q. v. ] of the Maxim-Nordenfeldt Guns and Ammunition Company of England to turn over to that concern all patents for smokeless powder that might result from his experiments.
He received patents for a long series of improvements in explosives, the earliest being No. 76, 499 (Apr. 7, 1868) and the last, No. 443, 105 (Dec. 23, 1890).
During the last year of his life he directed his experiments from his bed, one of his assistants being Hudson Maxim [q. v. ].
Strong and masterful to the world, to me he showed a surprising tenderness and affection, and never do I recollect an unkind word or action on his part.
We became close comrades.
He had a wonderful way of smoothing out youthful trouble, clearing away the unessentials, and setting forth the thing so simply that all the clouds disappeared. "
[A. P. Van Gelder and Hugo Schlatter, Hist.
of the Explosives Industry in America (1927), with portrait; Florence Millard Mowbray, H. Siddons Mowbray (privately printed, 1928); Atlantic Giant Powder Co. , Complainant, v. George M. Mowbray et al. , Defendant; Pleading and Evidence (1876); Boston Transcript, June 23, 1891. ]
He supplied, without accident, the one hundred thousand pounds required for the building of the Canadian Pacific Railway in lots of twenty thousand pounds, fifty pounds to a can.
He is quoted as saying (Mowbray, post, p. 11): "There was never, to my mind, a man quite like my foster father.
Mowbray and his wife, Annie Fade, had no children of their own, but adopted Mrs. Mowbray's five-year old orphaned nephew, who as Henry Siddons Mowbray q.v. became a distinguished painter.
Mowbray and his wife, Annie Fade, had no children of their own, but adopted Mrs. Mowbray's five-year old orphaned nephew, who as Henry Siddons Mowbray q.v. became a distinguished painter.
Mowbray and his wife, Annie Fade, had no children of their own, but adopted Mrs. Mowbray's five-year old orphaned nephew, who as Henry Siddons Mowbray q.v. became a distinguished painter.
