Background
Thomas Augustus Watson was born in Salem, Massachussets, the son of Thomas R. Watson, the foreman in a livery stable, and Mary (Phipps), his wife.
(Thomas A. Watson was born on January 18, 1854, in Salem, ...)
Thomas A. Watson was born on January 18, 1854, in Salem, Massachusetts, and died December 13, 1934, at more than four-score years. At the age of 13 he left school and went to work in a store. Always keenly interested in learning more and in making the most of all he learned, every new experience was to him, from his childhood on, an opening door into a larger, more beautiful and more wonderful world. This was the key to the continuous variety that gave interest to his life. In 1874 he obtained employment in the electrical shop of Charles Williams, Jr., at 109 Court Street, Boston. Here he met Alexander Graham Bell, and the telephone chapter in his life began. This he has told in the little book herewith presented. In 1881, having well earned a rest from the unceasing struggle with the problems of early telephony, and being now a man of means, he resigned his position in the American Bell Telephone Company and spent a year in Europe. On his return he started a little machine shop for his own pleasure, at his place in East Braintree, Massachusetts. From this grew the Fore River Ship and Engine Company, which did its large share of building the U. S. Navy of the Spanish War. In 1904 he retired from active business. When 40 years of age and widely known as a shipbuilder, he went to college, taking special courses in geology and biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. At the same time he specialized in literature. These studies dominated his later years, leading him in extensive travels all over the world, and at home extending to others the inspiration of a genial simplicity of life and of a love for science, literature and all that is fine in life.
https://www.amazon.com/Babyhood-Telephone-Thomas-Augustus-Watson-ebook/dp/B075FBTR72?SubscriptionId=AKIAJRRWTH346WSPOAFQ&tag=prabook-20&linkCode=sp1&camp=2025&creative=165953&creativeASIN=B075FBTR72
Thomas Augustus Watson was born in Salem, Massachussets, the son of Thomas R. Watson, the foreman in a livery stable, and Mary (Phipps), his wife.
The boy went to the public schools of Salem until he was fourteen years old and then went to work. He received three honorary degrees.
In 1872 he got a job in Boston in the electrical shop of Charles Williams, Jr. , at 109 Court Street. A number of inventors had their models made at Williams' shop, and in 1874 Watson did some work for Alexander Graham Bell, with whom he worked thereafter during all the experimental period of the telephone and the years that followed until it was commercially established. When the first telephone organization was formed in 1877, Watson was given an interest in the business and when Bell went to Europe he became the research and technical head of the Bell Telephone Company. In the spring of 1881 Watson resigned from the Telephone Company and went to Europe for a year. Watson settled in East Braintree, Massachussets, with the idea of becoming a farmer, but his mechanical inclination asserted itself and with Frank O. Wellington as a partner he opened a machine shop and began to build engines and ships. In 1896 they undertook their first contract for the United States government, the destroyers Lawrence and Macdonough; these were followed by the lightship for Cape Hatteras and the cruiser Des Moines. The increasing size of the ships they were building made it necessary, in spite of hard times, to move down to deeper water and to increase the size of their shipyard. An additional consideration influencing Watson's decision to make this move was the large number of unemployed people to whom the new yard would be able to give work. Interest in these people also brought Watson into public education and for a while into politics, in which he worked for better social conditions. In February 1901, the shipyard was incorporated as the Fore River Ship & Engine Company. Among the vessels it produced were the battleships Rhode Island, New Jersey, and Vermont; two steel schooners, the seven-masted Thomas W. Lawson and the six-masted William L. Douglas; and two vessels for the Fall River Line, the Providence and the Boston. The competition of foreign shipbuilding produced a situation which took the control of the company out of Watson's hands, however, and in 1904 he resigned and retired from business. Admiral Frank T. Bowles then took charge of the further development of the concern until the World War, when the plant was sold to the Bethlehem Steel Company. When Watson was forty, and recognized as a prominent shipbuilder, he and his wife entered the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as students, taking special courses in geology and literature. In geology he became the respected associate of professional scientists, while in literature he became well known as an interpreter of poetry and drama. He was for sometime the president of the Boston Browning Society. For a season he was an actor in the company of Sir Frank Benson in England and he had speaking parts in the Shakespeare Festival at Stratford-on-Avon, Apr. 7-May 6, 1911. He became a proficient student of music and painting. No less did he continue to follow the developments of electrical science and the work of the telephone engineers; nor did his inquiry fail to include problems of philosophy and religion. Ever since as a child he first ventured through the alley from the stable yard out into the world, he found the range of his experience immeasurably exhilarating and inspiring; in 1926 he published his autobiography, to which he gave the title Exploring Life. He died at his winter home at Passagrille Key, Fla.
(Thomas A. Watson was born on January 18, 1854, in Salem, ...)
He was a fellow of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers.
On September 5, 1882, he married Elizabeth Seaver Kimball of Cohasset, Massachussets; they had four children.
