Peter Cooper

Peter Cooper ( born February 12, 1791 in New York City, † April 4, 1883 ) was an American industrialist, inventor and philanthropist.

Life and work

Cooper was the son of Dutch immigrants, went briefly to school and was integrated into the domestic Hutfertigung. He learned the trade of carriage builder. However, his technical skills caused him soon to create something new. In 1828, he founded a successful business venture to manufacture glue and isinglass.

Self-taught, Cooper went down in the history of railway construction, when he in 1830 the first American locomotive, the Tom Thumb constructed, which he had ready in his Canton ironworks in Baltimore. The locomotive allowed a radius of curvature of less than 100 feet to pass through and therefore could be used successfully in the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad.

In 1840 he was elected to the City Council of New York. He did particularly excels in the fight against corruption.

In 1845 he submitted the first U.S. patent for the manufacture of gelatin. The product soon became known nationwide under the brand name Jell -O. In the same year he opened a mill for the manufacture of steel beams in Trenton (New Jersey). There also the first standardized steel beams were rolled for building construction.

With four other people, he founded the New York, Newfoundland and London Telegraph Company. In 1858 he succeeded deploy the first transatlantic cable, thus enabling a fast message traffic between the U.S. and Europe, together with Samuel Morse.

Cooper was socially engaged and funded several projects for arms training. He founded in 1859 the Cooper Union for progress in science and art.

In 1876 Cooper participated in the elections for the U.S. presidency, in which he no chance the United States Greenback Party represented that it had set itself the goal to fire up the printing presses to facilitate farmers and other poor populations the repayment of loans. He scored only 1 percent of the vote.

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