Henry Burden was born on April 22, 1791 in Dunblane, Stirlingshire, Scotland, the son of Peter and Elizabeth (Abercrombie) Burden. As a youth, while working for his father, a small farmer, he is said to have given evidence of marked inventive talent.
Henry attended the local school of William Hawley, a mathematician, and afterward studied mathematics, drawing, and engineering at the University of Edinburgh.
In 1819, bearing letters from the American minister at London to Stephen Van Rensselaer and Senators Benton and Calhoun, Burden came to America. At Van Rensselaer's suggestion he went to Albany, where he found work in making agricultural implements in the establishment of Townsend & Corning. He invented an improved plow, which took the first premium at three county fairs, and a cultivator which is said to have been the first to be put into practical operation on this side of the Atlantic.
In 1822, a year after his marriage, he moved to Troy to become the superintendent of a small and ill-equipped plant, the Troy Iron and Nail Factory, and by his executive ability and his inventive skill he gradually transformed it into one of the largest iron factories in the country. In 1825 he received a patent for a machine for making wrought iron spikes.
An improvement was added to the machine in 1834, and another in 1836 (patented in 1840), by which it was altered to make the hook-headed spike, which soon came into general use in track-laying on all American railways. The patent was bitterly contested in litigation lasting for twenty years between Burden and the Albany Iron Works, but in the end Burden won a complete victory. The most widely known of his inventions was the horseshoe machine, first patented in 1835, and successively improved in 1843, 1857, and 1862, which produced virtually all the horseshoes used by the Federal armies in the Civil War.
In 1840 Burden patented the "rotary concentric squeezer, " for rolling puddled iron into cylindrical bars, a machine declared by the commissioner of patents to be the most important invention in the manufacture of iron which had been reported to the patent office. From the beginning of Burden's connection with the Troy Iron and Nail Factory, and as rapidly as his means would permit, he bought its stock, so that by 1835 he owned half of it and by 1848 was sole owner. He thereupon established the partnership of H. Burden & Sons, which continued till his death.
He had early shown a deep interest in steam navigation, and in 1825 had made suggestions to the Troy Steamboat Association that later were largely adopted in the building of the Hendrick Hudson, which in 1845 made the trip from New York to Albany in seven and a half hours. His later years were passed in the general supervision of his immense and ever-growing establishment.
In 1833 he built for the Hudson traffic a passenger and freight boat of two cigar-shaped hulks, with a thirty foot paddle-wheel in the center. It was lost, however, in an accident the following year. He was an advocate of larger and faster boats for the Atlantic trade, and in 1846 was instrumental in the formation by Glasgow capitalists of Burden's Atlantic Steam Ferry Company, of which nothing came.
In his closing years he was doubtless Troy's most prominent citizen; and his death evoked from all classes a chorus of exceptional tributes. He died of heart disease in his suburban home of Woodside, and the body was interred in the family vault in the Albany Rural Cemetery.
Henry Burden's rank as an inventor was high and he also had the good fortune, which was rare among inventors, to reap the rewards of his creations, by reason of his ownership of a factory. Among his invetions are: an improved plow, manufactured the first cultivator in this country, a machine for making hook-headed spikes for railroads, a self-acting machine for making iron into bars, and a machine for making horseshoes, which received an iron rod and turned out comleted horseshoes at a rate of 60 per minute. Also, one of the innovations credited to Burden was the placing of sleeping berths on the upper decks.
In his religious affiliation Henry Burden was a Presbyterian. He even built the Woodside Presbyterian Church in 1869 on land owned y Erastus Corning, as a memorial to the wife of Henry Burden, who died in 1860.
Burden is described as a tall and well-made man, with a large head, prominent though regular features, a wide and high forehead, deep-set eyes, and a mouth which betokened a kindly and cheerful disposition.
On January 27, 1821, he was married in Montreal to Helen McOuat, whom he had known in Scotland.
1824–1915
1803–1860
1826–1891
1838–1913
1833–1906
1830–186
1822–1866
1828–1846
1840–1917
