Chapter 7: Cleveland the Cradle of Invention

It is a world-old belief that artists are not practical. But when the aesthetic mind is wedded to the scientific, it accomplishes great things. Leonardo Da Vinci could do more things well than any other man of the Renaissance. F. Hopkinson Smith of our own age was a water-colorist, novelist and lighthouse builder.

The destinies of Cleveland were influenced by a man of the Da Vinci type. Jeptha H. Wade was a successful portrait painter who lived in Adrian, Michigan. His scientific bent led him to experiment with the camera. He made the first daguerreotype taken in the Middle West.

On a chance visit to Baltimore, Wade witnessed Samuel F. B. Morse send a message over the first telegraph line. This proved the turning point of his life, He said farewell to the brush and palette. The insulator of the Morse instrument was imperfect. The young artist invented the Wade insulator, adding to the facility with which messages could be sent and received.

In 1847, Wade studied the construction and equipment of telegraph lines in the field. He strung the first line between Detroit and Jackson. He then ran lines from Detroit to Cleveland and Buffalo. The Wade line from Cleveland to St. Louis was completed in 1849.

A telegraph office had been opened in the old Weddell House on West Sixth Street. As the eager citizens gathered around the instrument installed on September 15, 1847, they were startled when it began to act apparently of its own accord. A witness wrote: “The machine all at once began to rattle like the bones of a skeleton under a galvanic battery and the line was reported in order.”

Mr. Wade consolidated the existing independent lines running out of Cleveland. This consolidation formed the kernel of the Western Union Telegraph Company. With the imagination of the artist, Wade proposed in 1861 a transcontinental telegraph line. He plans were considered nebular, altogether visionary and full of folly. Wade, undaunted, personally supervised the construction of a line to the Pacific.

In August, 1861, he sent a jubilant message over the newly constructed line to San Francisco. The route of the first transcontinental railroad followed the Wade wires. The Pacific Telegraph Company was consolidated with the Western Union under Mr. Wade’s directorship.

Mr. Wade, who made New York’s news San Francisco’s breakfast topic, was rewarded with great wealth. He enriched Cleveland with many generous gifts — Wade Park being his most notable memorial.

The motto of Victor Hugo was “More Light.” Charles Brush accepted this motto as his very own. Brush, a sturdy lad, was living on a farm at Euclid, east of Cleveland, in 1860. He attended school in Cleveland studying chemistry, physics and mathematics at the old Central High. He made curious experiments, to the amazement of his instructors.

At thirteen, he had discovered the relationships between magnets, and constructed a telescope, grinding the lenses and fitting them into the instrument. In 1867, Charles Brush displayed an intense interest in the discussions of an electric light which had been created in Paris, by current from a battery.

The young man went to the University of Michigan. He applied himself to two problems: first, how to construct a dynamo to give the amount and kind of current to operate the lamps in a circuit; second, to find how to work a lamp without its flickering.

In 1876, he gave the world the Brush dynamo, a horse treat-mill on a farm east of Cleveland supplying the power. His first arc lamps consisted of two carbon lamps slightly separate. The current jumped from carbon to carbon, giving off “a dazzling white light.” Twelve arc lamps were installed in Monumental Park, now the Public Square.

On the evening of April 29, 1879, the new lights sent rays over the assembled citizens. Many of them looked at the lights through smoked glasses to protect their eyes. The most emphatic protest against the arc lamp was voiced by women who affirmed that it lighted their complexions to disadvantage. David Belasco now lights his stages to complement the types of coloring of his women stars.

The Brush arc lamp has given a sense of security to the people of nearly every city in the world. It has lighted the dark corners from which crept the menace of crime and vice. The Brush dynamo is the grandparent of the tremendous modern generators, the lesser suns of the world, furnishing light, heat and power.

The Brush Company has for many years supplied the world with the materials for this method of lighting. Eventually Brush, Thompson and Edison merged the production of their inventions to form the General Electric Company.

Cleveland manufactures three-fourths of the carbon materials used in the United States. At Nela Park is the first establishment for the exclusive study of the distribution of light. Equipped like a great educational institution, the Nela Park laboratory has achieved many wonderful decorative and practical effects with illumination. Daylight is re-created at night through Nela inventive genius.

Charles Caleb Colton said: “There are two metals, one of which is omnipotent in the cabinet, and the other in the camp — gold and iron. He that knows how to apply them both may indeed attain the highest station.” Cleveland men have applied their knowledge of iron with intelligence and colossal energy.

The city’s mammoth iron and steel industries began in Nathaniel Doan’s blacksmith shop in 1798. A small foundry was opened in 1828 by John Ballard and Company. In 1834 the iron interests became “big business” and the Cuyahoga Steam Furnace Company was incorporated. A blast furnace was erected that was “blown” by steam instead of horse-power.

The canal built by Alfred Kelley was utilized in bringing iron ore from central Ohio. The first locomotive that pulled a train in the Middle West was constructed by the Cuyahoga Steam Furnace Company and shipped to Michigan. In 1841, this company molded the first cannon made in Cleveland. The great swamps which furnished bog iron ore in those years are now devoted to the cultivation of onions. But it was not local ore that made Cleveland powerful.

The discovery of iron ore in the Lake Superior region inaugurated Cleveland’s romantic rise in the world of metals. Dr. J. L. Cassells, a Cleveland chemist, made a journey in 1846 to the Lake Superior region. He went to seek silver gut found iron ore deposits vast enough to enrich the nation. Iron ore was shipped from Lake Superior to Cleveland in 1852. The first cargo consisted of six barrels — not considered worth the freight.

One of Cleveland’s iron masters in the ’60s was Henry Chisholm. Iron became gold at his touch. Mr. Chisholm’s first activities in Cleveland were in the building of docks and piers. He then turned to iron making, concentrating on nails, bolts, screws, spikes and tools.

In 1857, Mr. Chisholm established a rolling mill and blast furnace in Newburg. He did not fear innovations, and used the Bessemer converter, which was then considered an experiment. The early railroads took all of the rails that could be turned out. Mr. Chisholm died in 1880, leaving behind him an industry whose employees constituted a city of themselves.

There are more than two hundred foundries and about two hundred machine shops and metal mills in Cleveland. The city has earned the title of “The Sheffield of America.”

The flesh of the motor car is steel. Gasoline is its food. So it is natural that Cleveland should send over the highways of the world thousands of motor cars of its own make, and into the air, motor-driven planes.

The Columbus of the automobile industry in Cleveland was Alexander Winton, another man from the heather-flecked land. At nineteen, this Scotch lad came to New York with his mother’s blessing and a love of work.

He followed the family’s historic occupation of marine engineer and sailed for two years. In 1884, Alexander Winton was employed in a Cleveland machine shop. He was interested in the improvement of the bicycle. And in the bicycle shop Mr. Winton, then a member of the company, began motor car experiments.

His first trial machine stalled in front of the Brush home on Euclid Avenue. And there is an amusing story of Mr. Brush’s arriving on the scene to assist and asking Mr. Winton, “Alex, can’t you make it go?” The automobile wizard called from under the machine, “Would I be here if I could?”

It was in 1896 that Mr. Winton completed his first car — a car built in his backyard. He worked on this car mostly at night and on holidays. The neighbors reckoned the period of his labors by sleepless nights. And when the machine finally snorted its way out of the yard into Bolton Place, the folk next door were as grateful and happy as the inventor — but for an entirely different reason. The uncalculating Tom Sawyers solicited a ride, but older people who
prized life and limb declined Mr. Winton’s invitation.

And in 1898, the car was put on the market — the first automobile sold in America. This machine, a phaeton, was sold to a mechanical engineer, Robert Allison of Port Carbon, Pa. The price was $1,000. It had one cylinder, carried two passengers and made a speed of ten miles an hour. The engine was cooled with ice, and infinite patience was required to start it. The erratic motion of one cylinder was unmusical to the ears of its builder, who gradually increased
the number of cylinders to six.

The Winton Company stands in a proud relationship to the city of its nativity. It is manufacturing the same car, in the same city, under the same name, and by the same owners as in its beginning.

Cleveland’s annual production of automobiles is now placed at eighty-five thousand cars. The industry is shared by ten active companies with a capital of over fifty million dollars. The annual output is valued at forty million dollars, double the value of all the goods manufactured here in 1870.

Forty years ago, Worcester R. Warner and Ambrose Swasey began producing machine tools. Since they joined their forces, these two honored Cleveland citizens have made the name of Warner and Swasey the symbol of highest achievement in the making of scientific equipment and instruments.

As early as 1886 they set a world’s record in the building of the thirty-six-inch refractor of Lick Observatory.

Three of the most famous astronomical instruments in the world have been since erected by Warner and Swasey. The universe is viewed through Cleveland lenses at the Yerkes Observatory, the Naval Observatory in Washington, the National Observatory at Argentina, and the Canadian Government Observatory at Victoria. No great material reward has come to them through the making of scientific instruments. Mammoth machines and tools bring profits with which Warner and Swasey make their contributions to science. “From telescopes to turret lathes” suggest the range of Warner and Swasey achievement.

Oil has the habit of making men rich. It lavishly rewards its diggers and refiners. The plain native name of petroleum is given in textbooks as “rock oil.” John D. Rockefeller beyond all other men has guided and influenced the production of “Rock oil.”

Mr. Rockefeller left high school at fourteen to work in a Cleveland commission house. A commentator says: “He went in as an errand boy and clerk. He became a partner and manager.” In 1862, when he was twenty-three years of age, Mr. Rockefeller went to work for Samuel Andrews, a chemist and refiner of crude oil. From that time onward, he progressed with a consistency that made him the marvel of the commercial world.

In this period the organization of the oil industry commenced. The oil company with which Mr. Rockefeller was connected shared part of the second story of the Cushing block, Public Square and Euclid Avenue. The ground-floor was occupied by the dry-goods store of what is now the William Taylor Son and Company.

Mr. Rockefeller, with his genius for leadership, attracted men of might. Harkness, Flagler, Andrews, and Huntington came to him. These men solved the difficult problems of the refining and distribution of oil. They eliminated chance to a large degree.

They stimulated regularity in production and reduced waste. They utilized the byproducts, and like conjurers created absolutely new lubricants and chemicals. Eight thousand miles of tank cars, two hundred and fifty oil steamships and more than fifteen thousand tank stations in America and Europe were established by the Rockefeller interests.

King Kerosene, Cleveland’s gift to the world, has largely abdicated his throne in favor of Prince Gasoline. Today there is an annual production of a billion gallons. The automobile, motor boat, aeroplane and other vehicles of swift movement demand gasoline in ever-increasing quantities. And the industry which had its inception in Cleveland seems equal to the call.

Cleveland, being a lake port, has long been a well-painted town. Sailors have ever been known as active painters. A well-painted ship is their pride and when on land, sailors paint from force of habit. You have but to go to Salem and other old sailing towns to see the almost overly painted houses gleaming white in the sunlight. Of course in the forefather days of the Western Reserve there were many shabby, weather-worn buildings. Lorenzo Carter, however, painted his tavern red, the color being produce by mixing red clay and oil.

In the early ’60s, an enterprising clerk in a dry-goods store became mentally saturated with paints and oils. Henry Sherwin opened a shop and experimented with paint grinding. He formed a partnership with E. P. Williams in 1870. The company had the munificent capital of two thousand dollars. From the first mixing of colors on a stone slab, came the paint grinding mill, resembling the old-fashioned flour mill.

Some grinders were perfected. The quality improved and the quantity increased through the years. The slogan of Sherwin-Williams paint expresses the magnitude of the business — “It covers the earth.”

Today there are thirty-three paint plants in Cleveland, getting their supplies from India, Argentina and China. Many porcelain-like enamels and varnishes have been originated in Cleveland the cradle of invention.