In 1792, the year that Kentucky became a state, there came to Lexington a man named Nathan Burrows, who was a pioneer, not only as a settler, but as an inventor of the manufacture of hemp and a machine for cleaning it. He failed to reap any real benefit from this, but later manufactured a mustard that took a premium at the World's Fair in England in 1851.

Another resident of Lexington, John Jones, in 1803 invented a machine for sawing stone, and a speeder spindle.

It remained for a Kentuckian, Dr. Joseph Buchanan, while a student of medicine at Lexington in 1805, to originate the conception of the music of light to be accomplished by means of harmonific colors, luminously displayed, and to invent an instrument that produced its music from glasses of different chemical composition.

Lexington, then the Athens of the West, was for many years the home of a native Kentuckian, a Mr. Barlow, whose fertile mind made him the most celebrated of this group of interesting inventors. Having built a steamboat at Augusta, after his removal to Lexington, he invented in 1826-1827 a steam locomotive for a railroad with a car attached for two passengers, with power to ascend an elevation of eighty feet to a mile. An oval track was constructed for it in a room. It was opened to the public for exhibition and several took rides at fifty cents a ticket on the first "railroad train" ever run successfully in western America. This was sold to a Mr. Samuel Robb, who exhibited the novelty at various cities including Louisville, Nashville, Memphis, and New Orleans; at the latter place it was burned while on exhibition. In 1837 Mr. Barlow built another locomotive and likewise sold it to a person who traveled and exhibited it.

The versatile mind of Mr. Barlow also produced a nail and tack machine, which was at once purchased and put into use by some capitalists. His rifled cannon, invented in 1840, patented later, caused Congress to appropriate three thousand dollars for an experimental gun, which, when finished and tested, was of greater accuracy and range than was even expected, and which is believed to have suggested most of the rifled guns since patented in both America and Europe.

The crowning invention of this great genius was his wonderfully complex production, a planetarium, that perfectly imitated the motions of the solar system, the first and only instrument of the kind in the world. This was so perfected as to produce the minute relative revolutions of the planets. The first instrument was sold to Girard College, Philadelphia. A number of small ones were later made for colleges and institutions, and one large one for the Military Academy at West Point, one for the Naval Academy at Annapolis, and one for New Orleans.

Some of these brought two thousand dollars each. One was exhibited at the World's Fair Exhibition, Paris, France, 1867, as Kentucky's contribution, and received the highest premium awarded any illustrative apparatus.