At the end of his apprenticeship, his employer offered to set him up in business as a coach-builder, lending him the necessary capital. Many years later, Mr. Cooper told the story thus:—

"I was about to accept his generous offer, when an incident occurred which changed my decision. Mr. Woodward had just completed one of the finest coaches ever built in New York, for a gentleman who was supposed to be one of the richest men in the city. But a day or two before the coach was to be delivered the gentleman died, and it was then found that he was insolvent. This made me hesitate. If I should accept my employer's kind offer and have such a misfortune happen to me in the sale of an elegant and expensive coach, I should consider myself a slave for life, since the law of imprisonment for debt had not then been abolished. So I changed my plans, and went to Hempstead, Long Island, to visit my brother."

The visit to Hempstead became a prolonged residence. He obtained work at $1.50 a day (then regarded as high wages) in a factory making machines for shearing cloth, and after nearly three years had saved enough money to purchase the right for the State of New York to a patented machine for that purpose. He used to tell, in his old age, of his elation when he effected his first sale of a county-right, for which he received five hundred dollars from Mr. Vassar, of Poughkeepsie, afterwards the founder of Vassar College.

The manufacture and sale of the new shearing-machine, into which Mr. Cooper introduced many additional improvements, was a prosperous business, especially during the war of 1812, when domestic woolen goods were in great demand. He married, December 18, 1813, Sarah Bedell, a lady of Huguenot descent, who made for him a happy home during fifty-seven years.[1] He bought a house in Hempstead, expecting to remain there; and in the household, as in business, he gave rein to his ardent and versatile inventive faculty. One of his domestic contrivances rocked the cradle, fanned away the flies, and played a lullaby to the baby. He sold the patent in Connecticut to a Yankee peddler for a horse and wagon, and the peddler's stock, including a hurdy-gurdy. Another invention was a machine for mowing grass, constructed on the principle of his cloth-shearing machine.

But after the war, the domestic woolen mills were shut down, and there was no sale for Mr. Cooper's machines. So he first turned his factory into a furniture shop, and then, selling it for what he could get, he moved to New York, and started in the grocery business, buying for this purpose a long lease of the ground where the Bible House now stands, opposite the Cooper Union on Ninth Street. Upon this ground he erected several buildings, one of which he used as his office. The business was profitable; but the real foundation of Mr. Cooper's wealth was laid when, at the age of thirty-three, he purchased a glue factory, situated where the Park Avenue Hotel now stands, and established himself as a glue manufacturer. The business speedily acquired and held for half a century practically the whole trade of the country in glue and isinglass,—a monopoly fairly earned by the cheapness and excellence of its product.

Mr. Cooper's inventions improved the quality and reduced the cost of his product, while his energy, industry, and frugality steadily increased his surplus cash, and enabled him, without borrowing capital, to extend his sphere of operations. For many years, he carried on his glue business without bookkeeper, agent, or salesman. Dawn found him at the suburban factory (on what is now Thirty-Second Street) lighting the fires and preparing for the day's work; at noon, he drove in his buggy to the city, where he made his own sales and purchases; and all his evenings he spent at home, making up his accounts, answering his correspondents, studying out new inventions, or talking and reading to his wife and children.

By these simple, old-fashioned methods he built up a business and accumulated a fortune too large to be thus administered. It would have been impossible for one head to carry the details of work and management, for one pair of eyes to superintend each part of the work, or for one pair of feet, however tireless, to travel all the ways which lead to and from a great modern industrial establishment. Still less could financial direction and protection be compassed by the simple scheme which Mr. Cooper, in his old age, recalled with pride. "I used," he said once, "to pay all my debts every Saturday night; and I knew that what I had left was my own!" This could not have been strictly true; but it doubtless expressed an old man's memory of the way he began, and the principles he had followed, with that horror of debt which dated from the time when debtors could be put in jail. Fortunately for Mr. Cooper, his son Edward, and his son-in-law, Abram S. Hewitt, were at hand to undertake the management of his business enterprises at the time when his own simple methods would have proved inadequate, so that his inventive genius, adventurous courage, and, above all, intense philanthropy, were backed with ample means.

In this account of his business ventures (though of much later date than those already mentioned) the part played by Peter Cooper in the development of the American iron industry and in the construction of the first transatlantic submarine telegraph may be recorded.

The manufacture of iron was one of the early industries of the American colonies, and after the Revolution it was prosecuted with increased activity in small and primitive establishments. With its development into scientific forms on a large scale Mr. Cooper was both directly and indirectly connected. His Ringwood estate in New Jersey had been the scene of the operations of the Ringwood Company in 1740, and of its successors,—Hasenclever (1764) and Erskine (1771); and the Durham furnace, on the Delaware River in Pennsylvania (on the site of the Durham Iron Works of Cooper & Hewitt), made its first blast in 1727. Mr. Cooper himself was engaged in 1830 in the manufacture of charcoal iron near Baltimore, and in 1836, together with his brother Thomas, he operated a rolling-mill in New York (on Thirty-Third Street, near Third Avenue). At this mill anthracite was used for puddling in 1840. In 1845 the business was removed to Trenton, N. J.; and in the new rolling-mill—then the largest in the United States—built at Trenton for the manufacture of rails, the first iron beams for buildings were rolled in 1854. By the erection of blast furnaces at Phillipsburg and Ringwood, N. J., and Durham, Pa., and the addition of wire mills, bridge shop, chain shop, etc., to the works at Trenton, the purchase of iron and coal lands, and the development of numerous mines, the firm of Cooper & Hewitt achieved high rank among the ironmasters of America; and the Iron and Steel Institute of Great Britain conferred upon Peter Cooper in 1879 the "Bessemer gold medal" for his services in the development of the American iron trade. In 1890 the same honor was given to Mr. Abram S. Hewitt in recognition of the experiments at Phillipsburg as early as 1856 to test the new invention of Bessemer, of his introduction of the open-hearth steel process into the United States, and of other services rendered to the steel industry,—in all of which he may be said to have followed, with the advantages of a wider culture and ampler means, the example set by Mr. Cooper.

One of the boldest yet wisest and most profitable operations of Mr. Cooper was his investment in the Atlantic cable enterprise of Cyrus Field. He was already past middle age when this audacious scheme began to be dreamed of. In 1842 Morse had laid down an experimental cable from Castle Garden to Governor's Island in New York harbor, and claimed as a practical inference that a telegraphic communication on his plan could "with certainty be established across the Atlantic."[2] In 1851 the first cable was laid between France and England, and others rapidly followed on ocean lines over short distances. The principle was thus established, and the doubts as to its practical application to a line of at least twenty-five hundred miles were of such a character as to seem more serious to scientific men than to American capitalists of Mr. Cooper's type. In March, 1854, the New York, Newfoundland, & London Telegraph Company was organized, and Mr. Cooper became (and remained for twenty trying years) its president. There was little difficulty in raising the money for the eighty-five miles of cable which were to be laid under the Gulf of St. Lawrence, or in obtaining from the British colonies favorable charters granting exclusive privileges, land grants, and even subsidies. Yet the construction of the land line across Newfoundland to the terminus at Heart's Content proved difficult and costly, and the St. Lawrence cable was lost in laying. Yet additional capital was subscribed; and a couple of years later the Newfoundland line, the St. Lawrence cable, and another submarine link of thirteen miles across the Straits of Northumberland had been successfully finished. Nothing remained to be done except the procuring of means and the devising of successful methods for the installation of the Atlantic cable itself, without which all this preliminary expenditure would have been thrown away.

The capital estimated as necessary for making and laying the cable was raised by Mr. Field in England, where the Atlantic Telegraph Company was formed to construct and operate the line under concessions from the parent Newfoundland company. All classes in England felt a sentimental interest in the romantic enterprise; and the subscribers to the new stock included such men as Thackeray and others of equal note, outside of business circles altogether.

The company proceeded with vigor,—secured from the governments of Great Britain and the United States guaranties of subsidies and the free use of ships for laying the cable; contracts for the cable and its insulating covering were executed; and by the end of July, 1857, the British Agamemnon and the American Niagara had each twelve hundred and fifty miles of it on board. In August they connected the two halves of it in mid-Atlantic, and in September the shore end was landed at Heart's Content.

The sequel is familiar history. A few messages had been sent and received, when the current grew weaker and weaker, and at last failed entirely. The result was a strong reaction in popular sentiment. It was even questioned whether any messages had actually crossed the Atlantic. Fortunately this doubt could be conclusively disproved,—especially in England, where it was known that the British government had wired by the cable before its failure news of great political importance. The British company indeed courageously proceeded to make another cable; but when this parted in mid-ocean during the process of laying it even British tenacity of purpose was daunted, and for some two years the enterprise seemed to be dead. Meanwhile public opinion on this side was far more unfavorable, and the parent company found itself without means or credit. To retain its privileges it must pay additional money, and to make those privileges worth anything capital must be raised for a third attempt to lay the transatlantic line.

Without describing in detail the difficulties and anxieties of this period, it may be said that the intelligent courage of Peter Cooper saved the enterprise, while it secured to him a large pecuniary reward; for he perceived that the real problem had been solved by the first apparent failure; that the failure of a cable in use or the loss of a cable in laying it were mere incidental misfortunes which more thorough precautions and better luck would preclude; and he backed with his own faith and money the undaunted enthusiasm and persuasive eloquence of Mr. Field, whose expenses he paid for another journey to England, and who succeeded at last in raising there the funds for the third and successful attempt. Moreover Mr. Cooper upheld the credit of the Newfoundland company, personally paying the drafts drawn upon it, and taking its bonds as his security. It is too much to say that the Atlantic cable would never have been laid, but there can be no doubt that the enterprise would have been long suspended, without this timely aid. The third cable was a success; the lost second was recovered and made useful; and now the thing is easy which thus seemed so problematical. If Peter Cooper received in the end a handsome sum from this investment, who could grudge him the wealth so acquired?