Cooper offered his block of land to the city, gratis, provided a school would be built according to his plans. His offer was smilingly pigeonholed.
In Eighteen Hundred Fifty-four, when Peter Cooper was sixty-one years old, he began the building of his model school on his own account.
His business affairs had prospered, and besides the glue-factory he was making railroad-iron at Ringwood, New Jersey, and Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. These mills were very crude according to our present-day standards. But Peter Cooper believed the consumption of iron would increase. Bridges were then built almost entirely of wood. Peter Cooper built his bridges of rolled iron "boards," as they were first called, riveted together. But he found it difficult to compete with the wooden structures.
When he began building Cooper Union, he found himself with a big stock of bridge-iron on hand for which there was no market. The excavations were already made for the foundations, when the idea came to Peter Cooper that he could utilize this bridge-iron in his school-building and thus get an absolutely fireproof structure. The ability of Peter Cooper to adapt himself to new conditions, turning failure into success, is here well illustrated.
Not until he had accumulated an overstock of bridge-iron did he think of using iron for the frames of buildings. It was the first structural use of iron to re-enforce stone and brick, in America.
Cooper Union was nearly five years in building. A financial panic had set in, and business was at a stand-still. But Peter did not cheapen his plan, and the idea of abandoning it never occurred to him.
The land and the building cost him six hundred thirty thousand dollars and came near throwing him into bankruptcy. But business revived and he pulled through, to the loss of reputation of many good men who had persistently prophesied failure. Be it said to the credit of his family that the household, too, partook of the dream and lent their aid.
Altogether, the assets of Cooper Union are now above two million dollars.
The ideal man in the mind of Peter Cooper was Benjamin Franklin. He wanted to help the apprentice—the poor boy. He saw many young men dissipating their energies at saloons and other unprofitable places. If he could provide a place where these young men could find entertainment and opportunity to improve their minds, it would be a great gain. Peter Cooper thought that we are educated through the sense of curiosity quite as much as in reading books. So Cooper Union provided a museum of waxworks and many strange, natural-history specimens. There was also an art-gallery, a collection of maps and statuary; and a lecture-hall was placed in the basement of the building. Peter Cooper had once seen a panic occur in a hall located on a second story and the people fell over one another in a mass on the stairway. He said a panic was not likely to occur going upstairs. This hall is a beautiful and effective assembly-room, even yet. It seats nineteen hundred people, and the audience so surrounds the speaker that it does not impress one as being the vast auditorium which it is.
Cooper Union has always been the home of free speech. Next to Faneuil Hall it is the most distinguished auditorium in America, from a historic standpoint.