Blue View - Elwood Haynes, an American Inventor

I love discovering the stories of American inventors, engineers, and visionaries whose genius and perseverance resulted in something meaningful in America’s history. If you’ve followed our blogs awhile, you may remember some of the several Blue Views I’ve devoted to these personal heroes of mine.

For example, there was Octave Chanute, a gifted civil engineer who, in 1882, designed and built, among a host of other structures, the railroad bridge over the Kinzua Valley in Pennsylvania, which for many years, was the highest and longest railroad bridge in the world. He was also an early aviation pioneer who heavily influenced the work of the Wright brothers.

Then there was Philo T. Farnsworth who was born in a log cabin in the tiny town of Beaver, Utah, and who invented the first television and television camera; John Stevens who, starting from very humble beginnings, built the Great Northern Railway; and Wilbur Wright, whose genius and perseverance enabled man to fly.

We spent a day in Kokomo, Indiana while taking a lay day from our bike trek (Marcie will give you the complete skinny on our visit there next week), and learned about another interesting inventor, Elwood Haynes.

Natural Gas Innovation

Elwood started his career in the natural gas industry which was just beginning to boom in the late 1880s. While the field superintendent of a gas and oil company, he oversaw the construction of the first long-distance gas pipeline connecting the Trenton Gas Field in eastern Indiana with Chicago, a distance of 150 miles. A problem that was soon discovered with the pipeline was that moisture in the gas would freeze in the winter, causing pipe blockages. Elwood figured out that the moisture could be removed from the gas by passing the pipeline through a refrigerated section… the moisture would condense and collect in the bottom of the cooled section of the pipe, where it could be drained off. He also invented a metering device for measuring the amount of gas flowing through the pipe, as well as a small thermostat that could be used in homes to control the temperature.

Motorcars

Around 1890, Elwood started thinking about developing a horseless carriage. He contemplated designing a steam-powered vehicle, but decided that mounting a steam boiler on a small carriage would be unworkable and unsafe. He also looked into building an electric vehicle, but the available battery technology was impractical for his purposes.

At the time, one of the little-used byproducts of the natural gas production was gasoline… the excess gasoline in the natural gas was usually drained off and dumped, where it eventually evaporated. In the summer of 1893, however, he visited the Chicago World Fair, where he first viewed a working gasoline engine. A small internal combustion engine looked to be the perfect solution for his horseless carriage. The engine was small yet powerful, and could make use of all that wasted gasoline. He purchased a one-horsepower, two-cycle gasoline engine and began designing a carriage around it.

An aside - the German inventor, Karl Benz, also had an exhibit at the fair, where he demonstrated what was one of the world’s first gasoline powered motor cars, and for which he held a patent. Whether Elwood actually knew of Benz’s invention is unknown. BTW, Benz’s patent was for Germany only, which is why dozens of new motorcar companies soon cropped up in the U.S. as well as other countries.

He took his sketches and design drawings to two local machinists, the brothers Elmer and Edgar Apperson, and hired them for forty cents an hour to build his new machine. On July 4, 1894, he road-tested his first car, the Pioneer. It was well publicized, and when a large crowd turned out to watch, he feared someone might be injured by the new contraption, so had it towed out into the country. The road test was a success, and most historians credit him with building the first manufacturable automobile in the U.S.

After several improvements, Elwood formed a partnership with the Apperson brothers named the Haynes-Apperson Motorcar Company to begin manufacturing the new automobilie. The Appersons split off to start their own company a few years later, and the renamed Haynes Automobile Company went on to produce tens of thousands of automobiles.

Another aside - an Austrian inventor, Siegfried Marcus, built what is now acknowledged as the world’s first gasoline powered motorcar in 1875, predating Benz’s car by a year. He also invented several other automotive innovations, some of which are still used today. Unfortunately, since he was of Jewish descent, when the Nazis rose to power, they expunged all references to him and his inventions from their history books, destroyed all his work and removed all memorials to him, giving credit to Karl Benz instead.

Metallurgy

With his automobile company thriving, Elwood had the time and resources to devote to his interest in metallurgy. He developed an alloy he named Stellite, which is a very hard, corrosion resistant, cobalt-chromium-tungsten alloy. It was used by the military in WWI for a host of specialized applications – machine gun barrels, for example, making him a millionaire. Since then, Stellite has found a number of other uses as well, including high-quality cutlery, internal engine parts, medical implants, and aircraft/spacecraft parts, and is still being produced today. He also developed one of the first stainless steel alloys, which he patented, and which is also still being used today.

Later in Life

Later in life, Elwood became involved in the prohibition movement, making substantial donations to the Prohibition Party. He ran, unsuccessfully, for the U.S. Senate in 1916 as a prohibition candidate, and stayed active in the party until prohibition was voted into law in 1920. He also became more philanthropic, donating time and money to his church, as well as the local and national YMCA, and creating scholarships at his Alma Mater, Worcester Polytech.

In early 1925, he contracted influenza, which, coupled with an earlier diagnosis of congestive heart disease, caused his death on April 13, 1925. His mansion in Kokomo passed in and out of the family until his daughter, Bernice, bought it back in 1965, and donated it to the city. Kokomo opened it as the Elwood Haynes Museum in 1967.

We discovered this very well-done museum when we were wandering around Kokomo on our lay day. And here’s a shout-out to the museum’s very knowledgeable curator, Al Taylor, who patiently showed us around and shared his considerable knowledge with us.

We’re quite excited about next week’s Blue View which was written by a great guest blogger - I’ll be back in two weeks. See you then...