Peter Cooper

• Born: February 12, 1791
• Birthplace: New York, New York
• Died: April 4, 1883
• Place of death: New York, New York

American industrialist, inventor, and philanthropist

Cooper employed his inventing genius and commercial acumen to establish one of the great industrial fortunes of the early United States. With foresight, he used his wealth for civic and philanthropic ventures, notably founding Cooper Union College of New York City.

Sources of wealth: Patents; manufacturing; real estate; investments; steel

Bequeathal of wealth: Children; educational institution

Early Life

Peter Cooper was born in 1791 in New York City, the fifth of nine children of John and Margaret Cooper. When Cooper was a boy, his father moved the family to Peekskill, New York, where John took up a dozen livelihoods as a farmer, shopkeeper, shoemaker, hatmaker, furrier, beekeeper, builder, brewer, and brick maker, among other occupations. The engines of Cooper’s future success—mechanical innovation and a shrewd business sense—can be traced to his father’s enterprises. However, while John barely made a living for his family, Cooper’s ventures would flourish wildly. Although Cooper received little schooling, he tinkered endlessly, his boyhood inventions including a double-wheel washing machine. At seventeen he became an apprentice to a New York City carriage maker.

First Ventures

Cooper’s talent for combining mechanical skill with industrial enterprise brought him successive fortunes. Finishing his apprenticeship, he engaged in various ventures. He manufactured a cloth-shearing machine. He opened a furniture shop and a grocery. He bought property and rented out apartments. He patented numerous inventions, including improvements to the construction of steam boilers, marble tabletops, and salt makers. In 1827, Cooper purchased a struggling glue factory with the proceeds from his enterprises. Experimenting with various ingredients, he patented high-quality glues that could compete with the costly European imports. Capturing the import market, Cooper was soon earning a spectacular income of $100,000 a year.

Cooper added to the factory’s success by devising an inexpensive brand of isinglass—a transparent gelatin used in foods—and by inventing and marketing the first instant table gelatin, the forerunner of the fabulously successful product Jell-O.

In 1828, Cooper began speculating in real estate, buying three thousand acres in Maryland near the newly incorporated Baltimore and Ohio Railroad. When the railroad made slow progress, Cooper built a makeshift prototype steam locomotive out of industrial materials on hand—the famous Tom Thumb. After a demonstration drive of Tom Thumb, which showed the potential of railroad steam engines on America’s rough terrain, Cooper was able to sell his land at many times the purchase price, acquiring his second fortune. Maintaining meticulous accounts of the growth of his wealth his entire life, Cooper estimated his fortune in 1833 at $123,459, the rough equivalent of $70 million in 2010.

Mature Wealth

By 1846, Cooper had accumulated a fortune of $385,500. In 1837, he built an iron foundry in New York, moving it to Trenton, New Jersey, in 1845 to accommodate its rapid expansion and twenty-five thousand employees. Improving every facet of the iron-making process, Cooper became an innovator in an industry that would make several of America’s greatest fortunes: iron- and steelmaking. In 1853, his company pioneered the production of iron rails and lightweight structural iron beams necessary for building New York City skyscrapers. In the 1870’s, the company pioneered the open-hearth method of steel production, a process whereby metal is efficiently converted into steel by burning out the impurities in a hearth (basin) heated by a furnace. Out of his profits, Cooper helped finance the laying of the first successful transatlantic cable in 1866.

In 1856, Cooper’s real estate and stock holdings were worth more than $1.1 million. His wealth had grown almost tenfold in two decades, and he had become one of the United States’ wealthiest industrialists. Cooper, his wife Sarah, and their children lived in a mansion in fashionable Gramercy Park in Manhattan.

Cooper increasingly turned his attention to philanthropic and civic matters. With his belief in scientific progress, democracy, and the benefits of public education, he conceived of endowing a college that would offer a free education to all qualified students, as well as night classes for workers and auditoriums for civic discourse and debate. He purchased a city block at Seventh Street between Third and Fourth Avenues, near the Astor Library and Astor Place Opera House. In 1858, an imposing brownstone building was completed at the site at a cost to Cooper of $630,000. In 1859, the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art opened to students and laborers alike, regardless of sex, religion, or race. With free tuition and night classes, it was an instant success and a prototype for future American universities. Cooper Union also had a dramatic effect on the political world, when on February 27, 1860, Abraham Lincoln advanced his nomination for president with his brilliant “Cooper Union” address.

While continuing to oversee both his growing industries and Cooper Union, Cooper devoted much of the last quarter of his life to civic activities. Drawing upon a lifetime as a self-made industrialist and ardent democrat, he formed a theory of finance and government, eventually published in his collected works, Ideas for a Science of Good Government (1883). Cooper’s proposals rested on a theory of currency, which he believed had to be placed at the service of labor and the business cycle rather than affixed to a rigid standard of gold. In 1876, Cooper ran for president on the Independent Party, better known as the Greenback Party. His platform relied on “financial reform and industrial emancipation,” but its heart was the replacement of gold-backed currency by legal-tender dollars, or greenbacks, backed by the credit of the U.S. Treasury. His ticket received fewer than 100,000 votes nationwide, but the twentieth century would see the United States adopt a flexible, fiat currency that resembled Cooper’s ideas.

Sarah Cooper died in 1869, and Cooper died in 1883. Their son Peter assumed much of the management of the ironworks. Their daughter Amelia married Abraham Hewitt, who was wealthy in his own right and would serve as mayor of New York City from 1887 to 1888. In Cooper’s lifetime, he had endowed Cooper Union with some $1,550,000. In his will, he bequeathed the college an additional $155,350. He also left trusts of $250,000 for the benefit of his children and $350,000 for the benefit of his grandchildren, with the remainder of the trust eventually to be transferred to Cooper Union.

Legacy

Peter Cooper’s riches were the result of his many talents. He was a brilliant inventor who enriched the world with gelatin, industrial glues, and a prototype steam locomotive, among other inventions. He turned his best ideas into successive fortunes, demonstrating acumen both as a manufacturer and as an iron and steel industrialist—the most successful in nineteenth century New York. He remained unpretentious and practical. His greenback advocacy was not that of the wealthy eastern establishment, but, Cooper believed, of the common man looking for entrepreneurial opportunity free of debt and a slavish mercantilism. Most of all, in establishing Cooper Union, he showed that for a man of great wealth to be esteemed in American history, he had to be as imaginative and fruitful in bestowing his fortune as he had been in acquiring it.

Bibliography

Beckert, Sven. The Monied Metropolis: New York City and the Consolidation of the American Bourgeoisie, 1850-1896. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003. This scholarly study of the wealthiest residents of early New York City highlights Cooper as New York’s richest industrialist. With extensive maps and graphs showing the distribution and incomes of New York’s richest.

Gordon, John Steele. The Business of America. New York: Walker, 2001. One of the leading historians of American business highlights America’s most innovative businesspersons. Portrays Cooper as the first great philanthropist of American industrial fortunes.

Hedjuk, John. Education of an Architect—A Point of View: The Cooper Union School of Art and Architecture, 1964-1971. New York: Random House, 2000. An influential book by the chairman of the Cooper Union department of architecture, documenting the innovative projects of its students. Includes drawings, photographs, models, and manifestos.

Holzer, Harold. Lincoln at Cooper Union: The Speech That Made Abraham Lincoln President. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004. A recounting of Lincoln’s famous Cooper Union address of 1860, in which the future president decried expansion of slavery into the federal territories. Holzer makes a case for this speech as pivotal to Lincoln’s gaining the presidency.

Lienhard, John. How Invention Begins: Echoes of Old Voices in the Rise of New Machines. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. An account of mechanical inventions in Western culture. Chapter 13 recounts Cooper’s contributions to technology and education. Includes excellent illustrations.

Nevins, Allen. Abram S. Hewitt, with Some Account of Peter Cooper. New York: Harper Brothers, 1935. Reprint. New York: Octagon Books, 1967. The fullest account of Cooper’s life (and that of his son-in-law and business partner) by a prominent historian. Includes an appendix recording the growth of Cooper’s fortune according to his books.

Raymond, Rossiter W. Peter Cooper. 1901. Reprint. Freeport, N.Y.: Books for Libraries Press, 1972. This reprint of the one-hundred-page volume in the Riverside biographical series presents a nearly contemporaneous view of Cooper.