Reunion Of The Free Soilers Of 1848: At Downer Landing, Higham, Massachusetts, August 9, 1877 (1877)
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Samuel Downer was an American manufacturer. He was an industrial pioneer of his time.
Background
Samuel Downer was born on March 8, 1807 in Dorchester, Massachusetts. He was the eldest of the four children of Samuel and Catherine (Ayers) Downer. His grandfather, Eliphalet Downer, had been a surgeon in the Revolution; his father, Samuel, was a successful merchant and eminent horticulturist who had developed new species of apples, pears, and cherries.
Education
He attended the public schools of his native town until the age of fourteen, when he began an apprenticeship with the shipping house of Downer & Baldwin.
Career
Upon attaining his majority he joined his father under the firm name of Downer & Son, but after three years associated himself with Silas P. Merriam in the wholesale trade with the West Indies. This partnership was dissolved in 1834, and Samuel joined with his father and Capt. William R. Austin in the manufacture and sale of sperm and whale oils and candles, a business which he directed after the retirement in 1844 of the elder partners.
Downer, like other oil men of his time, was interested in finding a substitute for sperm oil, the only known lubricant for fine machinery, and when his attention was called, about 1854, to hydrocarbon oils, he purchased control of a Waltham concern which had a patent for “Coup oil” and with his assistants, Luther and William Atwood and Joshua Merrill, commenced a series of experiments which resulted not only in an acceptable hydrocarbon lubricating fluid but in kerosene oil suitable for illumination. Atwood and Merrill, while in Scotland on a commission from Downer, discovered new methods of obtaining oil from coal and of purifying it so that it could be used for lighting. Further experiments upon their return to America led Downer to embark heavily in the manufacture of hydrocarbon illuminating oil distilled from albertite, the bituminous coal obtained from Albert County, New Brunswick. To Downer and his assistants belongs the credit of introducing on a wide scale hydrocarbon lubricating and illuminating oils in America. The industry was assuming large proportions when it was suddenly disrupted by the discovery of petroleum wells in Pennsylvania.
Nothing daunted, Downer founded the Downer Kerosene Oil Company, invested in it most of his fortune, and set out for Pennsylvania to exploit the new discovery. Here he “roughed it” for six years, founded the town of Corry, and established a successful refining business with branches in New York and Boston. Important patents were taken out in the Boston refinery by Merrill, and the products extended to include naphthas, paraffines, and other oil products. It was Downer’s technical advisers, the Atwoods and Merrill, who were responsible for the notable improvements in refining processes ; his own contribution to the rapid introduction of mineral oil illumination was in the field of promotion and business.