Matthias W. Baldwin
| Matthias W. Baldwin | |
|---|---|
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| Born |
December 10, 1795 Elizabethtown, New Jersey |
| Died | September 7, 1866 (aged 70) Philadelphia, Pennsylvania |
Matthias William Baldwin (December 10, 1795 – September 7, 1866) was an American inventor and machinery manufacturer, specializing in the production of steam locomotives. Baldwin's small machine shop, established in 1825, grew to become Baldwin Locomotive Works, one of the largest and most successful locomotive manufacturing firms in the United States. The most famous of the early locomotives was "Old Ironsides", built by Matthias Baldwin in 1832.
Matthias W. Baldwin was born December 10, 1795 in Elizabethtown, New Jersey. He was the youngest of five children born to a prosperous carriage builder named William Baldwin. Following his father's death in 1799, executors of the Baldwin estate proved unequal to the task, however, and his widow and children were left in difficult financial circumstances owing to their poor management.
Although he received a very satisfactory common school education, Baldwin's inclination and aptitude related to mechanical tinkering from an early age. Toys would be deconstructed and reassembled to learn their inner workings and spare bits and pieces of machinery would be put to new use in a makeshift workshop inside his mother's home.
In 1811 the 16-year-old Baldwin was made an apprentice jewelry maker to the Woolworth Brothers of Frankford, Pennsylvania. Apprenticeship in these days was a virtually coercive relationship marked by long hours of labor and miserable compensation. In 1817, shortly before the fixed term of his indenture was completed, Baldwin moved together with his mother to Philadelphia. There the budding jewelry maker was employed by the firm of Fletcher & Gardner, one of the leading jewelry manufacturers of the city.
Baldwin proved to be a valuable journeyman employee over the course of the next two years. In 1819 Baldwin quit Fletcher & Gardner and began to work as an independent silversmith. Baldwin quickly proved himself a skilled and innovative craftsman, and developed a revolutionary new technique for making gold plate. Rather than the painstaking application of gold leaf to base metal, Baldwin's method of manufacture made use of soldering a piece of gold to the base metal and rolling the two together until the requisite thickness was attained. Baldwin's technique came to gain wide acceptance as the industry standard although, unfortunately for him, it was never protected through acquisition of a patent.
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