Turning gunstocks was, of course, only one of the many uses of
Blanchard's copying lathe. Its chief use, in fact, was in the
production of wooden lasts for the shoemakers of New England, but
it was applied to many branches of wood manufacture, and later on
the same principle was applied to the shaping of metal.
Blanchard was a man of many ideas. He built a steam vehicle for
ordinary roads and was an early advocate of railroads; he built
steamboats to ply upon the Connecticut and incidentally produced
in connection with these his most profitable invention, a machine
to bend ship's timbers without splintering them. The later years
of his life were spent in Boston, and he often served as a patent
expert in the courts, where his wide knowledge, hard common
sense, incisive speech, and homely wit made him a welcome
witness.
We now glance at another New England inventor, Samuel Colt, the
man who carried Whitney's conceptions to transcendent heights,
the most dashing and adventurous of all the pioneers of the
machine shop in America. If "the American frontier was
Elizabethan in quality," there was surely a touch of the
Elizabethan spirit on the man whose invention so greatly affected
the character of that frontier. Samuel Colt was born at Hartford
in 1814 and died there in 1862 at the age of forty-eight, leaving
behind him a famous name and a colossal industry of his own
creation.
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