The History of the First Locomotives in America. From Original Documents, and the Testimony of Living Witnesses
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William Mason was an American inventor and manufacturer.
Background
William Mason was the son of Amos and Mary (Holdredge) Mason. He was born on September 2, 1808 at Mystic, Connecticut, but when he was six years old his parents moved to Stonington, where his father cultivated a small farm and worked as a blacksmith. William spent his boyhood helping in his father's shop and going to school occasionally in the winter time.
Career
When he was thirteen he began an apprenticeship in the spinning room of a cotton factory at Canterbury, Connecticut, but three years later entered a cotton-thread factory in Lisbon, Connecticut He was here only a year, but in that time he won a reputation as a skilled mechanic by repairing complicated machinery, and, though he was but seventeen years old, his services were requested to start the machinery in a new mill at East Haddam. This mission accomplished, he returned to his first employer, whose machine shop he now entered, and finished his apprenticeship at twenty. During the succeeding four years, from 1828 to 1832, he engaged in various occupations. Going to New Hartford, near Utica, N. Y. , he went to work for a company that failed a few months later. While there, however, he turned his attention to machinery for making diaper cloth, and after going back to Canterbury he designed and built the first power loom in the United States for the manufacture of this material. He next constructed an ingenious loom for weaving damask table cloths. Thereafter, as he told a friend, "I was fooling about for some time painting portraits, making fiddles, and one thing and another". In 1832 he was surprised to receive an order for some diaper looms, which he proceeded to fill by renting space in a shop in Willimantic, Connecticut, and having the frames made there. The making of these looms brought him a handsome profit. In 1833 his services were requested in Killingly, Connecticut, to work on a new device for spinning cotton since known as the ring frame. The device had been patented in 1828 but had ruined the manufacturer who tried to make it of practical use. Mason remodeled and perfected it within two years and brought about its extensive use in the textile industry. In 1835 he went to Taunton, Massachussets, to operate the shop of Crocker & Richmond, taking his ring frame machinery with him. The company failed in 1837, but Mason continued as foreman for Leach & Keith, the firm that succeeded it, and concentrated his attention on improvements in cotton machinery. Mason patented a speeder for cotton roving machines on May 4, 1838, and on October 8, 1840, secured the patent for his greatest invention, the "self-acting mule, " for spinning cotton and other fibrous materials. Two years later Leach & Keith failed and Mason purchased the establishment with the aid of a cotton machinery commission house of Boston. The prosperous times which succeeded the tariff of 1842 were favorable to Mason and his business grew rapidly, so that in 1845 he was able to build a new plant. Competition called for improvements on the self-acting mule, and on October 3, 1846, he received a second patent on this device. Gradually he added to the products of his plant and besides cotton and woolen machinery he made tools, cupola furnaces, blowers, gears, shafting, and Campbell printing presses, the methods of manufacture and the machinery used being chiefly of his own invention. In 1852 he began the building of locomotives, the first of which was completed October 11, 1853, and the seven-hundreth, just a week after his death. Ten years before he died he reorganized his company as the Mason Machine Works and, with the assistance of his sons, directed its affairs until his death. At that time the plant covered ten acres of land; a thousand people were employed; and the firm did more than a million dollars' worth of business annually.