Peter Cooper's body was marked by the falls, mauls, hauls, and scars of burns and explosions. Surely if God does not look us over for medals and diplomas, but for scars, then Peter Cooper fulfilled the requirements.
When seventeen years old, he went down to New York and apprenticed himself to a coachmaker, Woodward by name. He was to get his board, washing and mending, and twenty-five dollars a year. It was a four-year contract—selling himself into service and servitude. The first two years he saved twenty dollars out of his wages. The third year his employer voluntarily paid him fifty dollars; and the fourth year seventy-five. In short, the young man had mastered the trade.
Woodward's shop was at the corner of Broadway and Chambers Street, which was then the northern limit of the city. Just beyond this was a big garden, worked by a prosperous and enterprising Irishman who supplied vegetables to ship-captains. This garden later was transformed into City Hall Park, and here the city buildings were erected, the finest in America for their purpose. The Irish still command the place.
New York City then had less than forty thousand inhabitants. Peter Cooper was to see the city grow to two million. For seventy-one years after his majority he was to take an active and intelligent interest in its evolution, tinting its best thought and hopes with his own aspiration.
The building of coaches then was a great trade. It was stagecoach times, and a good coach was worth anywhere from three hundred to a thousand dollars. The work was done by small concerns, where the proprietors and their 'prentices would turn out three or four vehicles a year. To build the finest coaches in the world was the ambition of Peter Cooper.
But to get a little needed capital he hired out to a manufacturer of woolen cloth at Hempstead, Long Island, for a dollar and a half a day. A dollar a day was good wages then, but Cooper had inventive skill in working with machinery. He had already invented and patented a machine for mortising the hubs of wagon-wheels. Now he perfected a machine for finishing woolen cloth. As the invention was made on the time of, and in the mill where he worked, he was given only a one-third interest in it.
He went on a visit to his old home at Peekskill and there met Matthew Vassar, who was to send the name of Vassar down the corridors of time, not as that of a weaver of wool and the owner of a very good brewery, but as the founder of a school for girls, or as it is somewhat anomalously called, "a female seminary."
Peter Cooper sold the county-right of his patent to Matthew Vassar for five hundred dollars. It was more money than the father had ever seen at one time in all his life.
The War of Eighteen Hundred Twelve was on, and woolen cloth was in great demand, the supply from England having been shut off.
Opportunity and Peter Cooper met, or is the man himself Opportunity?