Background
Matthias Nace Forney was born in Hanover, Pennsylvania, the son of Matthias Nace and Amanda (Nace) Forney.
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Matthias Nace Forney was born in Hanover, Pennsylvania, the son of Matthias Nace and Amanda (Nace) Forney.
He was educated in the public schools of Hanover and studied three years in a boys’ school in Baltimore.
At the age of seventeen he apprenticed himself to Ross Winans, a locomotive builder in Baltimore, and spent three years in the shop and one in the drafting room. He then became a draftsman for the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad in Baltimore and held this position for three years.
Feeling that the prospect for advancement was rather slight, he went into business in Baltimore late in 1858, but after three years of indifferent success he returned to his earlier employment, this time as a draftsman for the Illinois Central Railroad in Chicago.
In the course of his three years’ service here he designed, and in 1866 obtained a patent, for an “improved tank locomotive” which afterwards became known as the Forney engine. It was designed especially for suburban and city train service and was exclusively used on the New York, Brooklyn, and Chicago elevated railroads until superseded by the electric locomotive.
About 1865 Forney went to Boston to superintend the building of locomotives then being made for the Illinois Central by the Hinkley & Williams Works, and upon the completion of the work he remained with the company partly as a draftsman and partly as a traveling agent.
Late in 1870 he became an associate editor of the Railroad Gazette, published in Chicago. The publishing office was transferred to New York after the Chicago Fire of 1871, and in 1872 Forney purchased a half-interest in the journal and served as editor until the end of 1883, when ill health compelled him temporarily, to relinquish all active work.
As editor of the' Railroad Gazette, “he fought almost alone at the beginning against the general adoption of the narrow gauge, and was finally successful in turning the tide” (American Engineering and Railroad Journal, February 1908).
In 1886 he purchased the American Railroad Journal and Van Nostrand’s Engineering Magazine which he consolidated, edited, and published under the name of Railroad and Engineering Journal until 1893, and as American Engineer and Railroad Journal until he sold it in 1896.
He was a member of the Master Car Builders’ Association, and while secretary from 1882 to 1889 he brought about its reorganization so that it would be more in touch with railroad officials and railroad companies.
He was elected a life member in 1890. He was an honorary member of the American Railway Master Mechanics’ Association and was one of the organizers of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers.
In 1902 his “Reminiscences of Half a Century” was published in the Official Proceedings of the New York Railroad Club (vol. XII, no. 7).
In the course of his busy life he obtained thirty-three patents pertaining to the railway industry. Beside his tank locomotive he patented a number of improvements on railway car seats, an interlocking switch and signal apparatus, furnace doors, steam-boilers, feedwater-heaters for locomotives, and similar devices. In 1873 he published in the Railway Gazette and in 1875 in book form his Catechism of the Locomotive, which has been the instruction book of thousands of railroad men and has passed through several editions. He also was the author of the first edition of The Car- Builders’ Dictionary (1879), of a Memoir of Horatio Allen (1890), and of Political Reform by the Representation of Minorities (1894).
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He was active in the American Free Trade League, the American Peace Society of Boston, and the Citizens’ Union and Anti-Imperialists’ League of New York.
He was a member of the Master Car Builders’ Association, elected a life member in 1890. He was active in the American Free Trade League, the American Peace Society of Boston, and the Citizens’ Union and Anti-Imperialists’ League of New York. He was an honorary member of the American Railway Master Mechanics’ Association and was one of the organizers of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers.
He married in 1907, at the age of seventy-two, Mrs. Annie Virginia Spear of Baltimore, and died in New York City survived by his widow.
