Background
Joseph Dixon was born on January 18, 1799 at Marblehead, Massachusetts, United States, where his father and grandfather before him were born.
Joseph Dixon was born on January 18, 1799 at Marblehead, Massachusetts, United States, where his father and grandfather before him were born.
Dixon's education was meager, but he possessed a restless brain and in his early youth displayed remarkable mechanical ingenuity.
He began to study medicine, but he discontinued that because of his lost faith in drugs.
Dixon took up printing, but not having the money to buy metal type, he made type of wood, incidentally becoming a skilled wood-carver and, in turn, mastering wood-engraving and lithography. The desire to possess metal type brought about his invention of a matrix for casting it, and the further necessity of providing a receptacle in which to melt the type metal caused him to undertake experiments with the mineral graphite. Early in 1820 Dixon was looked upon as a chemist, presumably because of his constant experimental work with crucibles, which he tested with intense fires, and of the then popular conception of an individual so engaged.
He proved to his own satisfaction that graphite was an ideal material to use in crucibles to withstand high temperatures, but he recognized, too, that the market for such a product was extremely limited. In his experiments, however, he had observed a number of other properties of the mineral and he proceeded to devise products for which there was a market, namely, lead pencils and stove-polish. In 1827, therefore, he established at Salem, Mass. , a factory for the manufacture of these materials and continued there, it is said, for twenty years. His products were marketed by peddling in which he was helped by Francis Peabody, and supported by the profits, he went on inventing. His interest in lithography led him to devise a photolithographic process; when he found that it afforded a ready means of counterfeiting banknotes, he and Peabody devised and patented, on April 20, 1832, a process in which colored inks could be used to prevent counterfeiting. In the thirties Dixon perfected also a process for making collodion, and as a result of his studies of the work of Daguerre, a camera equipped with a reflector to rectify the position of the image.
In 1847 Dixon gave up his Salem location and erected a plant in Jersey City.
He apparently decided, too, that the time was ripe to introduce the graphite crucible, and accordingly in March and April 1850, patents No. 7, 136 and No. 7, 260 were granted him on uses of graphite crucibles in pottery and steel making, respectively. Again, on November 2, 1858, he obtained patent No. 21, 948 the title of which is “Improvement in Manufacturing Steel. ” From this time until his death he was compelled to devote more of his time to the manufacturing end of the business than to research but even so, his mechanical ingenuity was called upon for most of the improvements about the factory. A single instance of this is recorded in patent No. 54, 511, granted to him in 1866 for a wood-planing machine for shaping the wood form of pencils. The few spare moments that he had for research were, always used to good advantage, evidence of which is his patent of September 2, 1866, No. 57, 687, for a galvanic battery.
With his demise the business passed into the hands of men of his own training who retained the original name of the company.
Dixon married Hannah Martin of Marblehead on July 28, 1822.