Background
Hudson was born at Kidsley Park, in the village of Smalley near Derby, England, in 1810. He was the son of Daniel Smith and Anne (Roper) Hudson.
Hudson was born at Kidsley Park, in the village of Smalley near Derby, England, in 1810. He was the son of Daniel Smith and Anne (Roper) Hudson.
After attending the Friends' School at Ackworth, Hudson began, when about sixteen years old, to learn the trade of machinist.
He became greatly interested in the steam locomotive and to gratify this interest he went to New Castle and worked for a number of years in the locomotive shop of Robert Stephenson & Company, the foremost establishment of the kind then in England. Believing that greater opportunity in locomotive building was to be found in the United States, he emigrated to New York in 1835 and shortly thereafter went to Troy, N. Y. , where he found employment as a locomotive engineer on the Troy & Saratoga Railroad. He remained but a short time, then moved to Buffalo, N. Y. , and became an engineer of the Rochester & Auburn Railroad. After several years on this road he was made engineer of the state prison at Auburn, N. Y. He remained here eleven years, successfully managing the engineering and construction work of the institution as well as building two locomotives. In 1849 he resigned this position to accept that of master mechanic of the Attica & Buffalo Railroad and three years later he was offered and accepted the superintendency of the locomotive works of Rogers, Ketchum, Grosvenor & Company and moved to Paterson, N. J. In 1856 these works were incorporated as the Rogers Locomotive & Machine Works and Hudson was made mechanical engineer and superintendent, a position which he held until his death.
In the course of his career he devised many improvements in locomotives which he assigned to his company, all tending toward simplification of details, better methods of assembly, and greater service of finished product. Before 1860 he designed and patented a unique feed water-heater; an improved rocking grate; and a new method of riveting boiler plates, and in 1861 he patented the application of cast-iron thimbles to the ends of boiler tubes to prevent leaking. His inventions in the decade from 1860 to 1870 included an improved valve gear; a link-motion; a spark arrester; safety valves and levers; a double-end or tank locomotive; and an equalizing lever or radius bar. Between 1870 and the date of his death he obtained seven additional patents for different plans of tank locomotives and also one for a compound locomotive. In his published work, Locomotives and Locomotive Building (1876, 1886), he gave a brief history of the improvement in locomotive construction.
Hudson became a citizen of the United States on October 22, 1841.
His most important inventions, probably, were the radius bar which permitted an uninterrupted movement of the locomotive truck in passing around curves, and his double-end locomotives which could be conveniently and safely run both ways and had sufficient flexibility to round sharp curves easily. This type of locomotive found extensive service in the suburban traffic of many railroads and upon the elevated railroads of New York.
He married Ann Elizabeth Cairns of Lanton Hill, Jedburgh, Scotland, at Kingston, N. Y. , on October 6, 1836, who with one daughter survived him.
