COOPER, PETER (1791-1883), American manufacturer, inventor and philanthropist, was born in New York city on Feb. 12, 1791. He received practically no schooling, but worked with his father at various trades. At 17 he was apprenticed to a coach builder in New York city. On coming of age he got employment at Hempstead (L.I.), making machines for shearing cloth; three years afterwards he set up in this business for himself. After the war of 1812 he turned his shop into a furniture factory; soon sold this and for a short time was engaged in the grocery business on the site of the Bible house, opposite Cooper Union; and then in vested in a glue and isinglass factory. About 1828 he built the Canton ironworks in Baltimore, Md., the foundation of his great fortune. In 183o he designed and constructed the first steam locomotive built in America, the "Tom Thumb," which was about the size of a modern hand-car. He built, in 1836, a rolling mill in New York; in 1845 he removed it to Trenton, N.J., where iron structural beams were first made in 1854 and the Bessemer proc ess first tried in America in 1856; and at Philippsburg, N.J., he built the largest blast furnace in the country at that time. He built other foundries at Ringwood (N.J.), and at Durham (Pa.), bought iron mines in northern New Jersey and carried the ore thence by railways to his mills.
Actively interested with Cyrus Field in the laying of the first Atlantic cable, he was president of the New York, Newfoundland and London Telegraph Com pany, and his frequent cash ad vances made the success of the company possible; he was also president of the North American Telegraph Company, which con trolled more than one-half of the telegraph lines of the United States. For his work in advancing the iron trade he received the Bessemer gold medal from the Iron and Steel Institute of Great Britain in 1879. He took a prominent part in educational affairs, and conducted the campaign of the Free School Society to its successful issue in 1842, when a State law was passed forbidding the support from public funds of any "religious sectarian doc trine." He is probably best known, however, as the founder of the Cooper Union (q.v.). Though he had been a hard-money Democrat, he joined the Greenback Party after the Civil War, and in 1876 was its candidate for the presidency. He died in New York city on April 4, 1883. He published The Political and Financial Opinions of Peter Cooper, with att Autobiography of his Early Life (1877), and Ideas for a Science of Good Govern ment, in Addresses, Letters and Arbicles on a Strictly National Currency, Tariff and Civil Service (1883).
There is a brief biography by R. W. Raymond, Peter Cooper (Boston, 'goo).