Thus we
may regard John Stevens as the father of the American patent law.
John Stevens owned the old Dutch farm on the Hudson on which the
city of Hoboken now stands. The place had been in possession of
the Bayard family, but William Bayard, who lived there at the
time of the Revolution, was a Loyalist, and his house on Castle
Point was burned down and his estate confiscated. After the
Revolution Stevens acquired the property. He laid it out as a
town in 1804, made it his summer residence, and established there
the machine shops in which he and his sons carried on their
mechanical experiments.
These shops were easily the largest and bestequipped in the Union
when in 1838 John Stevens died at the age of ninety. The four
brothers, John Cox, Robert Livingston, James Alexander, and Edwin
Augustus, worked harmoniously together. "No one ever heard of any
quarrel or dissension in the Stevens family. They were workmen
themselves, and they were superior to their subordinates because
they were better engineers and better men of business than any
other folk who up to that time had undertaken the business of
transportation in the United States."*
* Abram S. Hewitt. Quoted in Iles, "Leading American Inventors",
p. 37.
The youngest of these brothers, Edwin Augustus Stevens, dying in
1868, left a large part of his fortune to found the Stevens
Institute of Technology, afterwards erected at Hoboken not far
from the old family homestead on Castle Point.
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