Background
Uriah Atherton Boyden was born on February 17, 1804, at Foxborough, Norfolk County, Massachusets. He was the son of Seth and Susanna (Atherton) Boyden.
Uriah Atherton Boyden was born on February 17, 1804, at Foxborough, Norfolk County, Massachusets. He was the son of Seth and Susanna (Atherton) Boyden.
After attending country school, Uriah Boyden assisted his father in farming and blacksmithing.
Boyden had little formal education but his Yankee ingenuity and initiative enabled him to pick up quickly the main principles of applied science and technique.
At the age of twenty-one, Uriah Boyden went to Newark, New Jersey, to work for his oldest brother, Seth Boyden, who was a manufacturer and inventor of note. He returned to New England and took part under James Hayward in the first survey for the Boston and Providence Railroad. Later he worked at the drydock in the Charlestown navy-yard under Col. L. Baldwin, and still later at Lowell in the construction of the Suffolk, Tremont, and Lawrence mills, and the Boston and Lowell Railroad.
This was an era of industrial expansion for New England and of pioneer experiment in engineering particularly railroading and hydraulic development.
At the age of twenty-nine, he opened an office in Boston as an engineer. From 1836 to 1838, he supervised the construction of the Nashua and Lowell Railroad. But it was not in railroading that he was to make his mark. He became an engineer for the Amoskeag Manufacturing Company and designed hydraulic works at Manchester, North Hampshire.
In 1844, when he was forty, he devised a turbine waterwheel for the Appleton cotton mills at Lowell. This was based on a design of Fourneyron, a Frenchman and the inventor of the outward-flow turbine, but Boyden's improvements made a more efficient design. Tests showed that his turbine, which was for seventy-five horsepower, delivered seventy-eight percent of the power expended.
Two years later, he designed for the same company three turbines of 190 horsepower each. His compensation was to depend in a sliding scale upon the performance of the turbines. Tests, which Boyden also improved and systematized, showed an efficiency of eighty-two percent so that he was paid $5, 500.
Among the improvements was a well-designed scroll penstock, a suspended top bearing, and a diffuser showing the principles of the modern flaring draft-tube.
The science of hydraulics had not advanced much beyond the empirical stage, and as most of the formulas were known to Boyden, his work was along sound engineering lines. In his later years, he retired from active practice and devoted his time to the study of pure science an unusual procedure for a practical, "uneducated" engineer.
In particular, he investigated the velocity of light, the compressibility of water, and the subject of "caloric" or heat. One elaborate experiment consisted of tests to determine the velocity of sounds traveling through the conduit pipes of the Charlestown and Chelsea waterworks.
It is interesting to note that as early as 1826 when he was twenty-two years old, the New Jersey Eagle published an article by him entitled "An Attempt to Explain the Cause of the Warmth at the Poles of the Earth. " In 1874, he deposited $1, 000 with the Franklin Institute, to be awarded to any resident of North America who should determine whether light and other physical rays travel at the same rate a rather naive proposal. He gave $1, 000 to the town of Foxborough, which was later used to finance a small library called the Boyden Public Library.
At his death most of his fortune, more than a quarter of a million dollars, was left to a Board of Trustees to be used for establishing observatories on mountaintops.
Uriah Atherton Boyden was a Boston inventor and mechanical engineer, and the brother of Seth Boyden. He designed a water turbine that became known as the Boyden turbine. He was the inventor of the hook-gauge, which with his other inventions he patented and which thereby contributed to his ample income. The principle with which his name is most commonly associated is the spiral approach, which has the advantage of admitting water to the turbine at a uniform velocity. The Boyden waterwheel soon became well known throughout the country and was adopted in many mills and power-plants; he has been called the father of American mixed-flow hydraulic turbine design but this title probably is not deserved although Boyden might have liked to appropriate it. His will left about a quarter of a million dollars to a suitable astronomical institution that would build an observatory on a mountain for the better atmospheric seeing conditions than those available at lower altitudes. In 1927, Boyden Station was moved to South Africa due to better weather conditions and became known as the Boyden Observatory. The Boyden Public Library in Foxboro, Massachusetts is also named after him. The National Museum of American History in Washington, DC is home to the Uriah A. Boyden Papers.
Boyden never joined the American Society of Civil Engineers.
Uriah Atherton Boyden lived frugally at a hotel in Boston an old-fashioned figure of a man with fringe whiskers.
Uriah Atherton Boyden was never married.
