John Isaac Hawkins (1772–1855) was a British-American inventor and civil engineer who twice emigrated to and ultimately died in the American state of New Jersey.
Early life Hawkins was born on March 14, 1772 at Taunton, Somerset, England,R. L. Tafel, Documents Concerning Swedenborg, p. 1217 the son of Joan Wilmington and her husband Isaac Hawkins,Thompson, Reminiscences, pp. 11, 14 a watchmaker. The father, Isaac Hawkins, would become a Wesleyan minister, but was expelled by John Wesley; and after moving the family to Moorfields in London he was a minister in the Swedenborgian movement, which John Isaac would also follow.Tafel, Documents Concerning Swedenborg, pp. 1216, 1218Peter J. Lineham, The Origins of the New Jerusalem Church in the 1780s, Bulletin of the John Rylands Library. 1988;70(3):109–122; online as PDF, at pp. 115–6.
First emigration to America John Isaac emigrated to the United States about 1790,Thompson, Reminiscences, 14 attending the College of New Jersey,Robert Palmieri, Margaret W. Palmieri and Igor Kipnis, Encyclopedia of Keyboard Instruments, 2nd Edition, Taylor & Francis, 2003, vol. 2, p. 167 where he studied medicine and later, chemical filtration.
Hawkins married in New Jersey and lived at Bordentown and Philadelphia. In his own account, he was influenced by work of Georg Moritz Lowitz to try charcoal for filtration purposes, and ran an exhibition on the topic, with Raphaelle and Rembrandt Peale, in the Philadelphia Exchange Coffee House.John Claudius Loudon (editor), The Architectural Magazine, vol. 5 (1838), p. 659; Google Books. He operated a non-vocational craft school in Bristol, Pennsylvania from about 1800;Steven M. Gelber, Hobbies: Leisure and the Culture of Work in America, p. 200-1 and he collaborated on inventions with Rev. Burgess Allison.A. W. Skempton (editor), A Biographical Dictionary of Civil Engineers in Great Britain and Ireland: 1500–1830 (2002), pp. 305–6; Google Books.
In London Hawkins returned to England in 1803,Gerald T. Koeppel, Bond of Union: Building the Erie Canal and the American Empire and opened a London sugar refinery. He also worked as a patent agent and consultant at this period. He set up a museum of "useful mechanical inventions", featuring a number of his own, as reported in the Monthly Magazine in 1808.Monthly Magazine and British Register, vol. 25 (1808), p. 445; Google Books. He also continued inventing and performed "experiments of a delightfully awful character".Thompson, Reminiscences, 14–15 As a Swedenborgian, he associated with Manoah Sibly, becoming secretary of the "London Conference" in 1814 when Sibly was president.Carl Theophilus Odhner, Annals of the New Church (1904), p. 241;archive.org. He took an interest in phrenology from 1815, for the rest of his life.Roger Cooter, The Cultural Meaning of Popular Science: phrenology and the organization of consent in nineteenth-century Britain (1984), p. 285; Internet Archive. Hawkins and his wife adopted from the workhouse a child, James Chalmers, orphaned after his parents had entered the Poyais scam of Gregor MacGregor; he died young.The Phrenological Journal and Miscellany, vol. 7 (1832), p. 14; Google Books.
Hawkins joined the Institution of Civil Engineers in 1824. In 1825, he went to Vienna to superintend the construction of a beet sugar works there, and subsequently did the same in Paris.Thompson, Reminiscences, 16 Back in London, where his wife Anna died in 1838,The Intellectual Repository for the New Church (July/Sept. 1817), continued as The Intellectual Repository and New Jerusalem Magazine (1839) p. 277; Google Books. he superintended the construction of the Thames Tunnel under Isambard Kingdom Brunel.Thompson, Reminiscences, 17 Hawkins also served as president of the Anthropological Society of London, a phrenological group.Waterloo page on the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland.The Phrenological Journal and Miscellany, no. 49, vol. 10 (1837)), p. 244; Google Books.The Christian Physician and Anthropological Magazine (1835); archive.org.
Reemigration to America Later in life Hawkins fell into debt and concluding that America presented a better opportunity to profit from his patents, he decided to reemigrate, departing in autumn 1848.Tafel, Documents Concerning Swedenborg, p. 1218 Returning to New Jersey, "as a gray old man" he lived with his third wife "who was barely out of her teens". Lectures there for local ladies could not survive their disapproval of his display of human skulls or the preserved organs of his deceased adopted son, his only child, whom he had dissected following the boy's death at age seven.Thompson, Reminiscences, 16–18 He published the Journal of Human Nature and Human Progress, but this was short-lived, and he died in povertyTafel, Documents Concerning Swedenborg, p. 1219 and relative obscurity at Rahway or Elizabethtown, New Jersey, 28 June 1855.
Pianino Hawkins was the first to see the importance of using iron in pianoforte framing. He was living in Philadelphia when he invented and first produced the pianino or cottage pianoforte – the "portable grand" as he then called it – which he patented in 1800. Thomas Jefferson bought one, of 5½ octaves, for $264.Charles H. Kaufman, Music in New Jersey, 1655–1860: a study of musical activity and musicians in New Jersey from its first settlement to the Civil War (1981), p. 161; Google Books.
There had been upright grand pianos as well as upright harpsichords, the horizontal instrument being turned up on its wider end and a keyboard and action adapted to it. William Southwell, an Irish pianomaker, had in 1798 tried a similar experiment with a square piano, to be repeated in later years by William Frederick Collard of London; but Hawkins was the first to make a piano, or pianino, with the strings descending to the floor, the keyboard being raised. His instrument was in a complete iron frame, independent of the case; and in this frame, strengthened by a system of iron resistance rods combined with an iron upper bridge, his sound-board was entirely suspended. An apparatus for tuning by mechanical screws regulated the tension of the strings, which were of equal length throughout. The action, in metal supports, anticipated Robert Wornum's in the checking, and later ideas in a contrivance for repetition. This bundle of inventions was brought to London and exhibited by Hawkins himself; but the instrument was poor in tone.
Other inventions, proposals and works
Patented (1802) an improved physiognotrace, a device by which one could quickly produce a silhouette portrait (i.e. a paper cut-out profile)."Explanation of Mr. Jn\o I. Hawkins Physiognotrace" Letter to T. Jefferson by Charles Wilson Peal (On website of Lewis and Clark Fort Mandan Foundation)“Moses Williams, Cutter of Profiles”: Silhouettes and African American Identity in the Early Republic by Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw Describes the methods of using the PhysiognotraceThe Mechanization of Likeness in Jeffersonian America by Wendy Bellion (MIT Communications Forum) Invented and obtained a patent in 1803 for the polygraph, a mechanism for producing a duplicate copy while a handwritten original was created. This is credited with being the first autopen.Andrea Seabrook, "Obama Wields His ... Autopen?" Charles Willson Peale made the first, and sold it to Benjamin Henry Latrobe. Latrobe then showed it to Thomas Jefferson, who took an interest in the invention.Murphy D. Smith, Due Reverence: antiques in the possession of the American Philosophical Society (1992), p. 37; Google Books. Experimented with machines for reproducing sculptures (1804).David Getsy, Sculpture and the Pursuit of a Modern Ideal in Britain, c. 1880–1930 (2004), p. 142; Google Books. Later Benjamin Cheverton took up the idea, making a reducing machine for sculptures (1828), and exhibiting it at the Great Exhibition of 1851.Mapping the Profession of Sculpture, Benjamin Cheverton. It was a type of engine lathe, explained by Hawkins in the British Association meeting, Section G, in 1837.Henry Christmas, George Augustus Frederick Fitzclarence, The Literary Gazette, vol. 21 (1837), p. 593; Google Books. For water filtration (1808)The Repertory of Arts, Manufactures, and Agriculture, vol. 13, issues 73–78 (1808), p. 43; Google Books. Experiments in 1810–11 for a brick pedestrian tunnel under the Thames, with Charles Wyatt, proposal to the Thames Archway CompanyThe Repertory of Patent Inventions (1826), pp. 31–6; Google Books.University of Rochester page on context for the Brunel tunnel. The mechanical pencil (1822); the rights were sold to Sampson Mordan and Gabriel Riddle.Sholto Percy, Mechanics' Magazine and Journal of Science, Arts, and Manufactures, vol. 27 (1837), p. 32; Google Books. Trifocal corrective eyeglass lenses, patented in 1827, also coining the name "bifocal" for the dual focal length lenses invented by Benjamin FranklinElisabeth Bennion, Antique Medical Instruments, Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1979, p. 244 Google Books. Sugar refining, by the method of Edward Charles Howard for whom he had worked.The Repertory of Patent Inventions vol. 5 (1828), p. 219; Google Books. The iridium-tipped gold pen (1834)."Pens", The New International Encyclopædia, vol. 13, New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1903, pp. 883–4 Platinum-nib pens with iridium tips sold at a guinea.William Mattieu Williams, Science Notes: John Isaac Hawkins and Brain Growth, in Gentleman's Magazine, vol. 258, January–June 1885, p. 510; archive.org. Translated A Treatize on the Teeth of Wheels from the French of Charles Étienne Louis Camus, and advocated involute profile for gears (by 1840)US Patent 5271289 – Non-involute gear, with reference to Hawkins's translation of "A Treatise on the Teeth of Wheels" Perfected Perkins' steam gun, intended to eliminate warfare by making resistance impossible.Thompson, Reminiscences, p. 15
References
Attribution R. L. Tafel, Documents Concerning the Life and Character of Emanuel Swedenborg, vol. 2, part 2, London: Swedenborg Society, 1877, p. 1217 Samuel Thompson, Reminiscences of a Canadian Pioneer for the Last Fifty Years: An Autobiography, Toronto: Hunter, Rose & Company, 1884, pp. 11, 14
External links