Eli Whitney Blake, Sr.

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Eli Whitney Blake Sr. 1795-1886

Eli Whitney Blake Sr. (born January 27, 1795 in Westboro , Massachusetts , † August 18, 1886 in New Haven (Connecticut) ) was an American entrepreneur and inventor of the steam-powered stone crusher.

Life

Blake was the son of Elihu Blake, a farmer, and Elizabeth Whitney, sister of the inventor of the cotton gin, Eli Whitney . He had four brothers and three sisters. His famous uncle sponsored Blake to attend Yale College, from which he graduated in 1816. He was a member of the Skull & Bones Society. His brothers Charles Thompson Blake ´47 and Henry Taylor Blake´48 also graduated from Yale College. He then attended law school in Litchfield, Connecticut, but soon left when his uncle asked him to help him run his arms factory near New Haven called Whitneyville in Hamden, Connecticut. As Whitney's right-hand man, Blake gained a wealth of hands-on engineering and construction experience.

On July 8, 1822, Blake married Eliza Maria O'Brien of New Haven. They had twelve children, including five daughters, one died in childhood, and seven sons (one died in childhood and two others in their mid-twenties). All six sons attended Yale College - like their father.

After Eli Whitney died in 1825, Blake ran the Whitney arms factory with his brother Philos for ten more years. They modernized their equipment, including the oldest milling machine and drilling machine that has been preserved to this day. After 10 years, the Blake brothers handed over the arms factory to the trustees, Henry W. Edwards and James Goodrich, who made the flintlock muskets for the US Ordnance Department for another eight years.

Services

In 1835 the Blake brothers left Whitney's and started a hardware factory with their other brother John in nearby Westville under the name "Blake Brothers". They also made various home appliances. The brothers invented and registered patents for door locks (1833 and 1836) handles (1840) closures (1843), bed frames with castors and corkscrews (1860) as well as door hinges and hinges. After the death of Philos and John, the company was closed.

While serving on the New Haven City Committee, in 1851 he was commissioned to build a two-mile gravel road to Westville. Blake found that a hammer was the only tool available to break up the stones for road construction. He worked on a machine on every single detail on paper for seven years before building a perfectly functioning machine that could quickly and automatically crush stones of different sizes and shapes into the desired fragments. The steam powered machine had upright jaws, one moving toward the other with sufficient pressure (27,000 pounds per square inch) to crush basalt dolerite rock. In 1858 he applied for a patent (US patent # 20,542) and founded the "Blake Rock Crusher Company" to manufacture this machine.

It was widely used for crushing ore as well as in road construction, gravel for railroad construction and cement.

Eli Whitney Blake Medal 1795–1886

In 1872, Blake estimated that his 509 machines would have saved their owners over $ 55 million. "Blake crushers" are still in operation today. However, after numerous lawsuits in the 1860s and 1870s, Blake - like his uncle with the cotton gin - reaped little reward from the patent infringements. The patent was reissued in 1866 and extended for another 7 years in 1872.

Blake's interests were in both science and technology. He was a co-founder of the Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences and its president from 1850 to 1852. The Connecticut Academy is the third oldest learned society in the United States.

He was a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the world's largest scientific society, from 1874 until his death in 1886. Fellows are appointed. When he still produced muskets, he already published posts about mechanics and dynamics of fluids in the from Benjamin Silliman published journal " American Journal of Science and Arts " Blake put new views on the spread of sound waves through the atmosphere before and published these in 1848 and 1850 in the "American Journal". In 1882 he published his various contributions in a single volume as “Original Solutions of Several Problems in Aerodynamics”.

Works

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Litchfield Law School
  2. ^ Machine Tool History - Eli Whitney is credited with inventing the milling machine
  3. ↑ flintlock muskets  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.@1@ 2Template: Toter Link / www.veteranarms.comreproductionmuzzleloadersandflintlocks  
  4. ^ The Blake Rock Crusher - Today in History
  5. ^ Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences
personal data
SURNAME Blake, Eli Whitney
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American inventor of the "Blake Crusher"
DATE OF BIRTH January 27, 1795
PLACE OF BIRTH Westboro , Massachusetts
DATE OF DEATH August 18, 1886
Place of death New Haven (Connecticut)