III
BUSINESS VENTURES
At the end of his apprenticeship, his employer offered to set him up in business as a coach-builder, lending him the necessary capital. Many years later, Mr. Cooper told the story thus:—
"I was about to accept his generous offer, when an incident occurred which changed my decision. Mr. Woodward had just completed one of the finest coaches ever built in New York, for a gentleman who was supposed to be one of the richest men in the city. But a day or two before the coach was to be delivered the gentleman died, and it was then found that he was insolvent. This made me hesitate. If I should accept my employer's kind offer and have such a misfortune happen to me in the sale of an elegant and expensive coach, I should consider myself a slave for life, since the law of imprisonment for debt had not then been abolished. So I changed my plans, and went to Hempstead, Long Island, to visit my brother."
The visit to Hempstead became a prolonged residence. He obtained work at $1.50 a day (then regarded as high wages) in a factory making machines for shearing cloth, and after nearly three years had saved enough money to purchase the right for the State of New York to a patented machine for that purpose. He used to tell, in his old age, of his elation when he effected his first sale of a county-right, for which he received five hundred dollars from Mr. Vassar, of Poughkeepsie, afterwards the founder of Vassar College.
The manufacture and sale of the new shearing-machine, into which Mr. Cooper introduced many additional improvements, was a prosperous business, especially during the war of 1812, when domestic woolen goods were in great demand. He married, December 18, 1813, Sarah Bedell, a lady of Huguenot descent, who made for him a happy home during fifty-seven years.[1] He bought a house in Hempstead, expecting to remain there; and in the household, as in business, he gave rein to his ardent and versatile inventive faculty. One of his domestic contrivances rocked the cradle, fanned away the flies, and played a lullaby to the baby. He sold the patent in Connecticut to a Yankee peddler for a horse and wagon, and the peddler's stock, including a hurdy-gurdy. Another invention was a machine for mowing grass, constructed on the principle of his cloth-shearing machine.
But after the war, the domestic woolen mills were shut down, and there was no sale for Mr. Cooper's machines. So he first turned his factory into a furniture shop, and then, selling it for what he could get, he moved to New York, and started in the grocery business, buying for this purpose a long lease of the ground where the Bible House now stands, opposite the Cooper Union on Ninth Street. Upon this ground he erected several buildings, one of which he used as his office. The business was profitable; but the real foundation of Mr. Cooper's wealth was laid when, at the age of thirty-three, he purchased a glue factory, situated where the Park Avenue Hotel now stands, and established himself as a glue manufacturer. The business speedily acquired and held for half a century practically the whole trade of the country in glue and isinglass,—a monopoly fairly earned by the cheapness and excellence of its product.
Mr. Cooper's inventions improved the quality and reduced the cost of his product, while his energy, industry, and frugality steadily increased his surplus cash, and enabled him, without borrowing capital, to extend his sphere of operations. For many years, he carried on his glue business without bookkeeper, agent, or salesman. Dawn found him at the suburban factory (on what is now Thirty-Second Street) lighting the fires and preparing for the day's work; at noon, he drove in his buggy to the city, where he made his own sales and purchases; and all his evenings he spent at home, making up his accounts, answering his correspondents, studying out new inventions, or talking and reading to his wife and children.