Matthias W. Baldwin

Matthias William Baldwin ( born December 10, 1795 in Elizabethtown, New Jersey, USA, † September 7, 1866 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA ) was an American industrialist.

Baldwin was born the youngest of five children of a wheelwright in Elizabethtown, New Jersey. After the early death of his father he learned the trade of gold and silver smith, he exercised from 1819. Already in 1825 he gave up his job to become part owner of a company for engraving and bookbinding tool whose sole owner, he was in 1827. In the same year he married Sarah C. Baldwin, a distant cousin.

On April 25, 1831 presented Baldwin's newly founded company Baldwin Locomotive Works in Philadelphia and a model railway with two carriages that could hold four passengers. The locomotive with coal from local promotion was instead of the usual coke heated. This aroused the interest of the local railway company Philadelphia, German Town, and Norristown Railroad, which soon gave the first locomotive in order. The result was the famous 1832 steam locomotive Old Ironsides, one of the first successful American steam locomotives.

The Baldwin Locomotive Works, which were used from 1912 in Eddystone, most recently the world's largest steam locomotive producer, who also supplied machines to Europe, Asia and Africa.