Isaac Doolittle (August 3, 1721 – February 13, 1800) was an early American clockmaker, inventor, engineer, manufacturer, militia officer, entrepreneur, printer, politician, and brass, iron, and silver artisan. Doolittle was a watchmaker and clockmaker, known for making and selling at his shop in New Haven, Connecticut, one of the first brass wheel hall clocks in America,"American Clock Making", Scientific American, Munn & Company, 1896, Volume 74, p. 387 where he also crafted and sold scientific instruments, and is regarded as "the first native practitioner" of silversmithing in the Connecticut Colony.Bohen, Peter, and Hammerslough, Philip, and Eisenbarth, Erin, Early Connecticut Silver, 1700–1840, Wesleyan University Press, 2007, p. xvi He was also an engraver and printer of both legal forms and currency, and became the first American to design, manufacture, and sell a printing press in 1769.Steiner, Bruce, E., Connecticut Anglicans in the Revolutionary Era: A Study in Communal Tensions, Hartford: American Revolution Bicentennial Commission of Connecticut, 1978, p.23 Somewhat late in life, he became a successful self-educated bell-foundryman, learning the difficult craft of casting large metal bells.
Doolittle was an important figure in the religious life of Connecticut as an Episcopal Churchwarden and co-founder of Trinity Church on the Green in New Haven. Called a "good Whig" by Yale President Ezra Stiles,Stiles, Ezra, The Literary Diary of Ezra Stiles, ed. Franklin Bowditch Dexter, 3 vols. (C. Scribner’s and Sons, 1901), 3:111. he was an active Patriot during the American Revolution. Perhaps his most notable contribution is his having designed and crafted in 1775 the moving and brass parts for David Bushnell's submersible vessel Turtle, the first submarine used in combat. In making the watch work triggering mechanism for Bushnell's explosive underwater magazine, Doolittle created the first mechanical time bomb, while his two-blade propeller was the first practical and applied use of a propeller in watercraft.Stein, Stephen K. The Sea in World History: Exploration, Travel, and Trade [2 volumes], Editor Stephen K. Stein, ABC-CLIO, 2017, Volume 1, p. 600Manstan, Roy R.; Frese, Frederic J., Turtle: David Bushnell's Revolutionary Vessel, Yardley, Pa: Westholme Publishing. . OCLC 369779489, 2010, pp. xiii, 52, 53
Doolittle was well known in his time as an "ingenious mechanic", or what would be called an engineer today.Morgan, William James, and Clark, William Bell, and Crawford, Michael J., Naval documents of the American Revolution, Volume 1, Naval History Division, Dept. of the Navy, 1964, Letter from Benjamin Gale of Yale from Killingsworth to Benjamin Franklin, August 7, 1775, p. 1089 His many pioneering innovations are associated with the popular notion of Yankee ingenuity, for which he has been called "The First Yankee".Olsen, Neil C. “Isaac Doolittle: The First Yankee.” Connecticut History Review, vol. 59, no. 2, 2020, pp. 38–71. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/10.5406/connhistrevi.59.2.0038. Accessed 19 Feb. 2021.
Early life
Isaac Doolittle was born in Wallingford, Connecticut, the son of Joseph and Elizabeth (Holt) Doolittle.Jarvis, Lucy Cushing, Sketches of Church Life in Colonial Connecticut: Being the Story of the Transplanting of the Church of England Into Forty Two Parishes of Connecticut, with the Assistance of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, Tuttle, Morehouse & Taylor Company, 1902, p. 117 At an early age he apprenticed under the clockmaker Macock Ward in Wallingford, but moved to New Haven about the time he married Sarah Todd of Wallingford on November 10, 1743. He opened a shop across from Yale College on Chapel Street,Hoopes, Penrose R., Connecticut Clockmakers of the Eighteenth Century, Charles E. Tuttle Company, 1986, p.9 where he repaired, made, and sold not only clocks and watches, but "compasses, sea and land surveyors scales and protractors, gauging rods, walking sticks, silver plated buttons turned upon a horn, and a variety of other work".Hoopes, p. 72
First Warden of Trinity Church
After opening his clock, instrument, and silversmith shop in New Haven, Doolittle became quite wealthy. Around 1749, he was appointed along with Enos Alling by the Anglican missionary priest and educator the Reverend Samuel Johnson, D.D., as one of two church wardens of Trinity Church on the Green, the first Church of England parish in Puritan-dominated New Haven, where the Congregationalist Church was the established state religion of the colony and Yale College in the town was seen as "The School of the Prophets" and the bastion of Puritan orthodoxy. Against strong and determined Puritan opposition, in 1752, he and fellow warden Alling obtained a deed for a plot from innkeeper Samuel Mix, Jr., and oversaw the construction of the first Trinity Church in 1752–1753, with Doolittle contributing more money to its construction than any of its other founding members.Beardsley, Eben Edwards, The History of the Episcopal Church in Connecticut: From the settlement of the colony to the death of Bishop Seabury, Hurd and Houghton, 1874, p. 172 He continued on in the role of warden, guiding the parish for much of the next 35 years, from 1750 to 1765, from 1770 to 1777, and again from 1783 to 1785.Croswell, Frederick, “A History of Trinity Church, New Haven, by Frederick Croswell, esq., Read March 8, 1868”, Papers of the New Haven Colony Historical Society, New Haven Colony Historical Society, 1865., Appendix A
French and Indian War
At the height of the French and Indian War the General Court of Connecticut appointed Doolittle Armourer (or Armorer) of the Connecticut Militia: in 1755, he served on the General Staff under General William Johnson from June 9 to August 6 and from September 10 to December 6, supporting Connecticut's war effort.Bates, Albert, Rolls of Connecticut men in the French and Indian war, 1755–1762, Connecticut Historical Society, 1903, Volume 1, p.3 He was again appointed Armorer in 1758, this time for Connecticut's Fourth Regiment under Colonel David Wooster.Hoadly, Charles J, The Public Records of the Colony of Connecticut [1757–1762], Lockwood & Brainard Company, 1880, p. 125 As armorer "he gained some experience in gunpowder production", which would prove vitally important to the Patriot war effort during the American Revolutionary War twenty years later.Kuslan, Louis I., Connecticut Science, Technology, and Medicine in the Era of the American Revolution, American Revolution Bicentennial Commission of Connecticut, 1978, p. 38 He designed an innovative nested bateau or lake boat for the 1755 amphibious attack on Fort Carillion and saw the construction of the Land Tortoise, a floating gunboat, skills he would use two decades later in the American Revolution.Olsen, "Isaac Doolittle: The First Yankee", 47, 60. He also gained firsthand knowledge of British leadership incompetence in the disastrous expedition against Fort Carillon as well as their superior naval capabilities in the successful Siege of Louisbourg of 1758.Nester, William, The Epic Battles of the Ticonderoga, 1758. Albany, New York: State University of New York Press, 2005, . OCLC 105469157, pp. 162–164
While he was armorer in the summers of 1755 and 1758, he was billeted with the provincial militia and British officers at the manor house of Fort Crailo. There he met the British Army surgeon Dr. Richard Shuckburgh, who composed the song Yankee Doodle while at the manor house in June of 1758. As the contemporary meaning of "doodle" was "a cant word, perhaps corrupted from do little" meaning "idler",Johnson, Samuel, A Dictionary of the English Language, 2 vols. (London, 1755), 1:638. and Doolittle was from the then rural and culturally backward town of Wallingford, it has been suggested in a 2020 paper that Isaac Doolittle was the ironic inspiration for the comic song.Olsen, "Isaac Doolittle: The First Yankee", 40–53.
Pre-Revolution business activities
By 1760, he had returned wholly to civilian endeavors. He was selling imported silver watches, and advertising his own manufactured clocks, bar iron, "screws for clothiers"Hoopes, p. 72 and surveyor's instruments and mariner's compasses in his Chapel Street shop. As the British Parliament's Iron Act 1750 prohibited iron and steel manufacturing, Doolittle was already exhibiting a resistance to the British he had so recently joined to fight the French.
In 1764, he was appointed tax collector in New Haven for "Proprietors of the Township of Ludlow, in the Province of New Hampshire.Hoopes, p. 71 He was also a sealer of weights and measures for town of New Haven, and printed Connecticut currency in his shop as well as government forms.
In 1769, after successfully duplicating the iron screw used in printing presses, he expanded his business to manufacture and sell the first printing press made in America, which he sold to William Goddard of Philadelphia. The Massachusetts Gazette and Boston Weekly News-Letter of September 7, 1768 described it as a "Mahogany Printing-Press on the most approved construction, which by some good judges in the Printing Way, is allowed to be the neatest ever made in America and equal, if not superior to any imported from Great-Britain".Massachusetts Gazette and Weekly New Letter, Boston [Mass.] : R. Draper, 1769–1776, September 7, 1768Hoopes, p. 71 He and his son Isaac Jr. produced about a dozen presses over the next 20 years, each taking 5 weeks to build and priced at 16 pounds sterling, half the price of a press imported from England.Amory, Hugh, and Hall, David D., A History of the Book in America: Volume 1: The Colonial Book in the Atlantic World, Univ of North Carolina Press, 2009, p. 168
In August 1774, Doolittle advertised in the New Haven newspapers that he had erected a bell-foundry, and was selling bells made to order. It was said that the town always treated the casting of a bell as a great event, and many came to “watch the furnace being tapped and the metal flaming into the molds.”Beals, Carleton, Our Yankee Heritage: The Making of Greater New Haven (New Haven, CT: Bradley & Scofield, 1957), 62. His move from small metal casting to large may have been motivated by the need for arms in the coming war: given his experience as a field armorer, it was a small step from molding bells to molding cannons.Olsen, "Isaac Doolittle: The First Yankee", 55. He would continue to cast bells almost until his death in 1800.
American Revolutionary War
Doolittle was a member of the New Haven Committee of Correspondence.Kellogg, A.H. editor, A National Register of the Society, Sons of the American Revolution by Sons of the American Revolution, Press of A. H. Kellogg, 1902, p. 180Hinman, Royal, A Historical Collection from Official Records, Files, &c., of the Part Sustained by Connecticut, During the War of the Revolution: With an Appendix, Containing Important Letters, Depositions, &c., Written During the War, E. Gleason, 1842, p. 39 When the war started in 1774, Doolittle, with his partners Jeremiah Atwater and Elijah Thompson, erected a gun powder mill in the nearby village of Westville, three miles north-west of New Haven, which turned out large quantities of gunpowder during the war to supply the patriot army and militias.Rockey, John L., History of New Haven County, Connecticut, Volume 1, W. W. Preston, 1892, p.197 He was also a paymaster for the militia.Munsell, Frank, American Ancestry: Embracing lineages from the whole of the United States, J. Munsell's sons, 1890, p. 105