Background
Simpson was born on November 15, 1809, in Newburyport, Massachusetts, the son of Paul Simpson and his wife, Abigail (Johnson), widow of J. S. Hodge; his father was a sea-captain who became a merchant.
capitalist inventor manufacturer
Simpson was born on November 15, 1809, in Newburyport, Massachusetts, the son of Paul Simpson and his wife, Abigail (Johnson), widow of J. S. Hodge; his father was a sea-captain who became a merchant.
Michael was educated in the schools of Newburyport until he was fifteen, when he went to Boston and entered the employ of a shipping firm.
In the small ventures clerks were allowed to make, Simpson and a fellow employee named Coffin were so successful that before either was twenty-one they owned one-third of the cargo of a ship bound for Calcutta and had established their own business. Much of it consisted in the importing of wool from South America. This wool was cheap but not suitable for spinning because of the dirt and burrs embedded in it, and constant efforts were being made to devise machinery for combing out these foreign materials.
By 1831 Simpson had bought out his partners, and later he disposed of the business to the New England Worsted Company, of Saxonville, Massachusetts. His contacts with this concern brought the mechanical problems of manufacture more directly to his attention, and in 1833 he happened to see a machine for burring wool designed by a French inventor named Samuel Couillard. This he bought and improved, patenting the improvements July 7, 1837. The English rights to it he then sold for ten thousand pounds.
The panic of 1837 threw the Saxonville mills into the hands of their creditors, of whom he was one, and he became their agent, commencing, in 1839, the manufacture of bunting, in addition to blanket and worsted yarns. On July 4, 1848, at the inauguration of work on the Washington Monument at the capital, he presented the Washington National Monument Society with what is said to have been the first American bunting flag made in the United States. The mills did not prosper, however, and so Simpson bought a two-thirds interest and assumed their management and most of the financial responsibility for their operation. With machinery improved or invented by him they gradually became extremely profitable, and in 1854 he bought a carpet factory in Troy, New York, moved it to Roxbury, Massachusetts, equipped it with machinery that gave it an advantage over its competitors till the patents had expired, and conducted it in conjunction with the Saxonville mills.
Simpson gave liberally to educational and civic enterprises. He contributed $50, 000 in 1880 to build a jetty at the mouth of the Merrimac River; to Wellesley College he donated in 1881 an infirmary, Simpson Cottage; he made by far the largest donation towards the building of an addition to the Newburyport Public Library, which was opened in 1882 and called The Simpson Annex; he also gave sums for the construction of roads, the sprinkling of the streets in summer, and other public purposes.
Simpson died in Framingham, Massachusetts, on December 21, 1884.
As an employer of labor Simpson was remarkably considerate and generous, allowing the grounds of his extensive Saxonville estate to be used as a park by his employees, and on one occasion, when the mills were burned down, paying wages to all of his force who applied for work, even when there was nothing for some of them to do.
Simpson was married, December 24, 1832, to Elizabeth Kilham, of Boston, by whom he had several children; after her death, he married, June 1, 1882, Evangeline Marrs, of Saxonville.