The grandfather built the first American locomotive; he was one of the most ardent supporters of Cyrus Field in the great project of an Atlantic cable, and he was for a score of years the president of a cable company. His was the curious, constructive mind. As a boy he built a washing machine to assist his overworked mother; later on he built the first lawnmower and invented a process for rolling iron, the first used in this country; he constructed a torpedo-boat to aid the Greeks in their revolt against Turkish tyranny in 1824. He dreamed of utilising the current of the East River for manufacturing power; he even experimented with flying machines, becoming so enthusiastic in this labour that he nearly lost the sight of an eye through an explosion which blew the apparatus to pieces.
Watching a Test of the Hewitt Converter.
Lord Kelvin in the centre.
It will be seen, therefore, that the grandson comes naturally by his inclinations. It was his grandfather who gave him his first chest of tools and taught him to work with his hands, and he has always had a fondness for contriving new machines and of working out difficult scientific problems. Until the last few years, however, he has never devoted his whole time to the work which best pleased him. For years he was connected with his father's extensive business enterprise, an active member, in fact, of the firm of Cooper, Hewitt & Co., and he has always been prominent in the social life of New York, a member of no fewer than eight prominent clubs. But never for a moment in his career—he is now forty-two years old, though he looks scarcely thirty-five—has he ceased to be interested in science and mechanics. As a student in Stevens Institute, and later in Columbia College, he gave particular attention to electricity, physics, chemistry, and mechanics. Later, when he went into business, his inventive mind turned naturally to the improvement of manufacturing methods, with the result that his name appears in the Patent Records as the inventor of many useful devices—a vacuum pan, a glue clarifier, a glue cutter and other glue machinery. He worked at many sorts of trades with his own hands—machine-shop practice, blacksmithing, steam-fitting, carpentry, jewelry work, and other work-a-day employments. He was employed in a jeweller's shop, learning how to make rings and to set stones; he managed a steam launch; he was for eight years in his grandfather's glue factory, where he had practical problems in mechanics constantly brought to his attention. And he was able to combine all this hard practical work with a fair amount of shooting, golfing, and automobiling.
Most of Mr. Hewitt's scientific work of recent years has been done after business hours—the long, slow, plodding toil of the experimenter. There is surely no royal road to success in invention, no matter how well a man may be equipped, no matter how favourably his means are fitted to his hands. Mr. Hewitt worked for seven years on the electrical investigations which resulted in his three great inventions; thousands of experiments were performed; thousands of failures paved the way for the first glimmer of success.
His laboratory during most of these years was hidden away in the tall tower of Madison Square Garden, overlooking Madison Square, with the roar of Broadway and Twenty-third Street coming up from the distance. Here he has worked, gradually expanding the scope of his experiments, increasing his force of assistants, until he now has an office and two workshops in Madison Square Garden and is building a more extensive laboratory elsewhere. Replying to the remark that he was fortunate in having the means to carry forward his experiments in his own way, he said:
"The fact is quite the contrary. I have had to make my laboratory pay as I went along."
Mr. Hewitt chose his problem deliberately, and he chose one of the most difficult in all the range of electrical science, but one which, if solved, promised the most flattering rewards.