(Excerpt from Locks and Builders Hardware: A Hand Book for...)
Excerpt from Locks and Builders Hardware: A Hand Book for Architects For the proper exposition of the subject of Builders' Hardware, especiallv in its practical relation to the work of the architect, it became necessarv to refer, specifically and in detail, to concrete examples of the product it embraces. To have omitted all such reference would have made the volume of little practical value to have selected diverse examples from the product of various manufacturers would have been confusing, illogical and contrary to actual practice if the product of one establishment was to be used for purposes of illustration it was expedient that the author should avail of the one with which he is most familiar. There fore he has not hesitated to avail franklv of the product of the works operated under his management. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.
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(This book was digitized and reprinted from the collection...)
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Henry R. Towne was the son of John Henry Towne and Maria R. (Tevis) Towne. He was born on August 24, 1844 in Philadelphia, Pa. He was a direct descendant in the ninth generation from William Towne who emigrated from Yarmouth, England, and settled at Salem, Massachussets, about 1640.
Educated in private schools, he was in his first year at the University of Pennsylvania.
In 1866 he went to Europe, where he traveled and studied engineering under the tutelage of Robert Briggs, an American engineer, and took a special course in physics at the Sorbonne, Paris.
The University of Pennsylvania awarded him an honorary master's degree.
When the Civil War began, and he thereupon entered the drafting room of the Port Richmond Iron Works, one of his father's companies. He worked there for nearly two years. In 1863 he was put in charge of the erection of machinery made for the Federal government in the navy yards of Boston, Portsmouth, and Philadelphia. From 1864 to 1866, he superintended the erection and installation of all the machinery in the monitors Monadnock and Agamenticus, both designed by John Ericsson.
Towne and Briggs made numerous engineering investigations; the results of one of these, connected with the transmission of power by belts, they published later in the Journal of the Franklin Institute (January 1868).
Returning to Philadelphia in 1867, Towne entered the mechanical shops of William Sellers & Company, and while working there was introduced by his father in the summer of 1868 to Linus Yale of Shelburne Falls, Massachussets, who had gone to Philadelphia seeking capital and business management for the manufacture of locks of his invention. Soon afterwards Towne's father brought about the formation of the Yale Lock Manufacturing Company, with Yale as president and Towne as manager. The new company immediately selected a site in Stamford, Connecticut, and began the erection of a modest factory. The enterprise was but three months old, however, when Yale suddenly died, leaving Towne, then only twenty-four, to carry the burden alone.
He conducted the business successfully for many years, relinquishing the presidency of the company in 1916 to become chairman of the board of directors, in which capacity he served until his death.
Towne's great success was due to the fact that he perceived the production advantage in Yale's pin-tumbler lock, which Yale himself considered a minor invention. The tumbler mechanism was contained in a small cylinder separate from the bolt-work case and bulkier part of the lock. This fact permitted, as Towne realized, thousands of locks to be made by quantity production methods, all alike except for the tumbler cylinder, so that any cylinder set to any combination might be added to any bolt case to make the complete lock. Furthermore, the small flat key used offered an advantage over the larger, bulkier key of the ordinary bolt lock.
From the day of the founding of the original company, reorganized in 1883 as the Yale & Towne Manufacturing Company, the enterprise had a wide influence on the lock and hardware industry of the United States. In 1876 there was added the manufacture of chain blocks, electric hoists, and later, for a time, large cranes and testing machines. Towne was, in fact, the pioneer builder of cranes in the United States, organizing a department for their manufacture in 1878, and developing a large business, which he sold in 1894 to the Brown Hoisting Machine Company of Cleveland, Ohio. He also undertook, in 1882, the building of the Emery testing machines, which he continued until 1887, when he sold this branch of the business to William Sellers & Company of Philadelphia.
Towne possessed the unique combination of engineering ability and technical training with executive capacity and foresight. He was among the first industrialists of the United States to extend the scope of the engineer to include the economics of engineering and the essential union of production and management.
He was a director of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York (1914 - 19); president of the Morris Plan Company (1914 - 18); and a director in a number of other banking and industrial institutions.
He contributed numerous short papers to technical journals, and was the author of A Treatise on Cranes (1883), and Locks and Builders Hardware (1905).
In his last years he was active in endeavoring to provide a technical museum for New York City. The project was not realized during his lifetime, but he bequeathed a large sum of money, from which gift resulted the establishment in 1926 of the New York Museum of Science and Industry.
Henry R. Towne died on October 15, 1924. In his will, Towne bequeathed over two million dollars to the establishment of the Museums of the Peaceful Arts in Manhattan.
(Excerpt from Locks and Builders Hardware: A Hand Book for...)
(This book was digitized and reprinted from the collection...)
He was an influential member of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers and its president in 1889-90; for five years (1908 - 13) he was the energetic head of the Merchants' Association of New York.
He was a he was a member of St. Anthony Hall.
On March 12, 1868, he married Cora E. White, and at the time of his death in New York was survived by a son.
His wife Cora E. White, whom he had married in 1868, died in 1917.
