Cooper, PETER

Cooper, PETER, manufacturer and philanthropist, born at New York, 12th February 1791, assisted his father in his successive occupations of hatter, brewer, and brickmaker, and served an apprenticeship to a carriage-builder, 1808-12. He next made independent ventures as a machinist, cabinetmaker, and grocer, and established a glue factory on Long Island. He erected large iron-works in Baltimore in 1828, and in 1830 constructed there, from his own designs, the first locomotive engine ever built in America. He afterwards built an iron-wire factory in New York, and large blast-furnaces in Pennsylvania; and he was largely instrumental in bringing about the laying of the Atlantic cable. To provide the working-classes with educational advantages, of which he himself had enjoyed so few, he erected and endowed the Cooper Union (1854-59), one of the most useful institutions in New York, where free lectures, reading-room, art collections, and technical schools have been provided. In 1876 he received the Independent nomination for president. He died in New York, 4th April 1883. See Life by Mrs Carter (1889).