John Isaac Hawkins

John Isaac Hawkins (1772–1855) was an inventor who practised civil engineering. He was known as the co-inventor of the ever-pointed pencil, an early mechanical pencil, and of the upright piano.

Hawkins was born 14 March 1772 at Taunton, Somerset, England, the son of Joan Wilmington and her husband Rev. Isaac Hawkins, a watchmaker. Isaac Hawkins became first a Wesleyan minister, but was expelled by John Wesley; and after moving the family to Moorfields in London was a minister in the Swedenborgian movement, which John Isaac would also follow. John Isaac emigrated to the United States about 1790, attending the College of New Jersey, where he studied medicine and later, chemical filtration.

Hawkins married in New Jersey, and was living at Bordentown and Philadelphia. In his own account, he was influenced by work of Georg Moritz Lowitz to try charcoal for filtration purposes, and ran an exhibition on the topic, with Raphaelle and Rembrandt Peale, in the Philadelphia Exchange Coffee House. He operated a non-vocational craft school in Bristol, Pennsylvania from about 1800; and he collaborated on inventions with Rev. Burgess Allison.

Hawkins returned to England in 1803, and opened a London sugar refinery. He also worked as a patent agent and consultant at this period. He set up a museum of "useful mechanical inventions", featuring a number of his own, as reported in the Monthly Magazine in 1808. He also continued inventing and performed "experiments of a delightfully awful character". As a Swedenborgian, he associated with Manoah Sibly, becoming secretary of the "London Conference" in 1814 when Sibly was president. He took an interest in phrenology from 1815, for the rest of his life. Hawkins and his wife adopted from the workhouse a child, James Chalmers, orphaned after his parents had entered the Poyais project of Gregor MacGregor; he died young.

...
Wikipedia