Background
He was born on November 2, 1834 in Rochester, New York, United States, said to be the son of Isaac and Ruby (Clark) Sergeant. His parents moved to Ohio when he was young.
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Henry Clark Sergeant
Edit ProfileEducation
In Ohio he received a common school education.
Career
After studies he went to work in a machine shop. This stimulated his inventive faculties, especially in the direction of special machinery for systematic manufacture. Although he was only eighteen years old, he designed some special machines for the manufacture of wheel spokes, hubs, and felloes, and obtained contracts for his employer for making such wheel parts in quantity. Two years later he was made a partner in a wagon-wheel manufactory but, disliking factory routine, he soon resigned and spent the succeeding six years in a variety of commercial pursuits.
He began serious inventive work as well and secured his first patent in 1854 for a steam boiler feed. This was followed by a number of others. During this sixteen-year period he lived in many places; in fact, over the forty-year period between 1854 and 1893 he lived in twenty-six different cities and towns.
Gradually working eastward, he came to New York City in 1868 and there established a machine shop of his own, building a variety of machines and developing many crude ideas brought to him by other inventors. When the business grew he formed the partnership of Sergeant and Cullingworth and took new quarters in a shop owned by Jose F. de Navarro. To this shop came Simon Ingersoll about 1870 to develop his idea of a rock drill. The future of such a machine attracted Sergeant and, while it is not known just how much he contributed to the success of the original Ingersoll drill, at least one patent was issued jointly to the two men.
At all events, he induced Navarro to buy out Ingersoll and organize the Ingersoll Rock Drill Company, through which the drill was introduced into rock excavating. Meanwhile he turned his attention to operating the drill by means of compressed air rather than steam and to improving the air compressor; in the course of a few years his improved drills had entirely supplanted the older steam drills. In 1883, however, he sold his interest in his shop and in the Ingersoll Drill Company and went to Colorado to engage in silver mining, but he came back east two years later with an entirely new rock drill, patented in 1884, that had a novel valve motion, and formed the Sergeant Drill Company, with a manufactory in Bridgeport, Connecticut.
Two years later his company and the Ingersoll company joined as the Ingersoll-Sergeant Rock-Drill Company with Sergeant as president, but within a short time he disposed of the bulk of his interests and went abroad to live. After several years he returned, this time as a director in the Ingersoll-Sergeant company, to devote his whole time to invention, and in the succeeding years he perfected among many others his most notable inventions: the "auxiliary" and the "arc" valves; the "tappet" drill; the Sergeant release rotation for rock drills; and the piston inlet valve for air compressors.
He dead in Westfield, New Jersey.
Achievements
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His first patent was for steam boiler feed, later he got a patent for the invention of a marine engine governor later adopted by the United States navy; four patents on steam boilers and pumps; one on a gas regulator in 1862; three for brick machines in 1867; and one for a fluting machine in 1869. Being the head of Ingersoll-Sergeant Rock-Drill Company, he perfected among many others his most notable inventions: the "auxiliary" and the "arc" valves; the "tappet" drill; the Sergeant release rotation for rock drills; and the piston inlet valve for air compressors.
Connections
He had married Caroline Luckhaupt in Columbus, Ohio, on March 19, 1860. They had four children.
