Word: coopered
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...book's distinction is that it takes readers so quickly and intimately into the Cooper and Hewitt families that it virtually adopts them. Its weakness is that, through its 316 pages, no connecting thread guides the narrative, and the discursive anecdotes include ancient and doubtful ones, as well as the stories which throw their mellow light on the strange people, mores and morals of the administrations of General Grant...
Across its span of years-through Peter Cooper's 92, Abram Hewitt's 80, Edward Hewitt's 77-the picture unfolds of a day of unchecked productivity, where wealth was the reward of ingenuity, and the common good was the result of wealth, when patents, like decorations for heroism, were signed by the President, and the capitalist who backed a new mechanical device to better the lot of mankind (and make a private fortune) was the equal of a general, a commissar, a duke, or a mechanic...
Spawning Inventions. All of the Coopers and Hewitts were inventors. They spawned ideas like salmon. Each had his pet idea, like a spoiled child, which he labored over more & more as it failed to work out, and which he grew more & more fond of as the other successful ideas raced on to practical accomplishment while the failure stayed in the laboratory. Old Peter Cooper's pet was a continuous chain drive for boats. He planned an endless chain, run by water power, along the Erie Canal. He got Governor Clinton's approval, and set up an experimental unit...
Alexander Graham Bell came to the Cooper house to show old Peter Cooper his telephone. The Hewitt boys studied it, cut out a wooden earpiece, made coils and a magnet, got a piece of black enameled iron from a tintype photographer for a diaphragm, and ran wires to the bed of their brother Erskine, who had scarlet fever, found they could talk to him without breaking quarantine. The doctor was astonished. Thomas Edison demonstrated his talking machine to Peter Cooper, and the boys copied that too. They used their telephone diaphragm and the cook's rolling pin, which they...
...Forgery. Cooper Hewitt's favorite discovery was the transformation of polyphase alternating current to direct current through the mercury vapor transformer. He decided suddenly, circa 1910, that "if a path of electric current were established across a tube which had a single negative electrode and multiple positive electrodes, and the positive electrodes were each connected with a different phase of the alternating current, the positive impulses would be conducted successively to the negative electrode which was already in operation with its surface resistance broken down, but the negative impulse could not be transferred to the positive electrode because here...