Peter Cooper

Peter Cooper married Sarah Bedell in 1813. The couple had six children but only two survived to adulthood. As an adult, his son Edward joined Cooper in his business ventures as did his daughter’s husband, Abram.

He lived a long life and died on April 4, 1883 at the age of 92.

Peter Cooper was born on February 12, 1791, in New York City, New York, to John Cooper, a Methodist hatmaker, and his wife Margaret Campbell, as their fifth child. He was of Dutch, English and Huguenot descent.

He did not receive much formal education and spent much of his boyhood working with his father in various industrial settings. In the early 19th century vocational skills were considered more important than academic qualifications.

As a teenager, he became adept in the trades of hat-making, brewing and brick making among others. He was a quick learner with an unquenchable thirst for knowledge.

He was apprenticed to a coach maker in New York City when he was 17. He proved himself to be a hard worker and greatly impressed his master. By the end of his apprenticeship he was offered a loan to go into coach making on his own. However, the young Peter was interested in gaining experience in other trades as well.

Peter Cooper was interested in being an entrepreneur from a young age and once his apprenticeship with the coach maker ended, he went into the business of manufacturing and selling cloth-shearing machines he had designed himself.

His business performed well during the period of the Second War of Independence in 1812. The profits, however, started declining once the war was over. He converted his facility into a furniture factory to stay in business, and eventually sold it off.

After engaging in a couple of other businesses, he purchased a glue factory on Sunfish Pond for $2,000 in Kips Bay, in 1821. There were several slaughterhouses nearby from where he could easily source raw materials for making glue and related products like gelatin and isinglass.

He became a highly successful industrialist and greatly expanded his business. Soon he garnered a large clientele comprising the city’s biggest tanners, manufacturers of paints, and dry-goods merchants. By 1828, he had transferred the control of the business to his son and son-in-law in order to explore newer ventures himself.

Cooper purchased 3,000 acres of land in Maryland in 1828 and began to develop it. He discovered the presence of iron ore on his property and sensed that he could build a successful business from this ore. He founded the Canton Iron Works in Baltimore to provide ore to the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad for making iron rails.

Peter Cooper is best remembered for designing and building the ‘Tom Thumb’, America’s first steam locomotive in 1830. It was a four-wheel locomotive with a vertical boiler and vertically mounted cylinders that drove the wheels on one of the axles with an engine fueled by anthracite coal.