Among the numerous experiments between the year of the 

 Davv lectures and the world's first great fair were a considerable 

 number suggested bv Americans, and it should be no surprise 

 that most of these merely rephrased procedures previously tried 

 and published abroad. For example, note the patent claim 

 of William Edwards (see fig. 13), who, seeking to improve 

 the tanning of sole leather, in 1812 advocated the application of heat 

 to the tanning solution. To European tanners, the Edwards 

 formula had been familiar practice since at least the 1790's. 

 And Fessenden, in publishing Anthony Fay's English patent 

 in 1808, anticipated Edwards' efforts "to entirely extract the 

 tanning principle from the bark" thereby to produce "a saving 

 of bark and time in the process. "''* 



Samuel Parker, more original than Edwards, hopefully patented 

 (see fig. 14), besides a splitting machine, two Oliver Evans-like 

 systems in 1808 to reduce the work in both tanning and currying ''" 

 by means of machines designed to do "every part ot the business 

 at once." Parker, like so many manufacturers, foreign and do- 

 mestic, sought with equally poor success to save at once time, 

 labor, and ingredients. Certainly for Parker to have curried 

 leather mechanically by "extending, smoothing, consolidating, 

 splitting, scouring, cutting, cramping, oiling, stuffing, stamping, 

 or printing, blackening, sizing, sticking, striping, polishing, glazing 

 or finishing"''^ would have been no less a technical contribution 

 than Evans' automatic flour mill, Blanchard's profile lathe, or 

 Whitney's system of manufacture based on a process of inter- 

 changeable parts. 



Less fanciful than Parker's patent were those for leather split- 

 ting devices conceived, but sparsely employed, by Americans 

 before 1850. Seth Boyden, the father of one of the country's 

 leading early machinist-inventors, patented in 1809 the first 

 workable splitting machine, and quite naturally he knew it would 

 be "highly useful to Tanners and Curriers." '^'^ Boyden pointed 



^' For Edwards' patent see Restored Patents, vol. 3 (ISll-lSKi), p. 171, in the National Archives, 

 Washington, D.C. In addition see Fessenden, Register of Arts, pp. 15-18; and Bishop, vol. 1, 

 p. 453. For a list of tanning patents issued through 1883 see Depew, ed., 179S-1S95. One 

 Hundred Years of American Commerce, vol. 2, p. 496. 



"2 Restored Patents, vol. 2 (1804-1810), pp. 233-237, 241-244. In addition see Bryant, Shoe and 

 Leather Trade of the Last One Hundred Years, p. 127. 



8' Restored Patents, vol. 2, p. 474. 



^* Restored Patents, vol. 2, pp. 331-332. For additional material relating to the Hoydens, see 

 Bishop, vol. 2, p. 311; the American Machinist (Feb. 13, 1886), vol. 9, pp. 2-3; and the Dictionary 

 of American Biographv, vol. 2, pp. 528-529. 



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