When John Quincy Adams arrived in England to take up his post as minister in 1815, the Industrial Revolution was in full flower. In home laboratories all over England, men were dreaming up strange and wonderful devices, and hoping to get rich off them. Many of these men—an endless stream of them, in fact—found their way to Adams’ office on Craven Street near the Strand, hoping that he could help bring their invention, inexplicably scorned at home, to the American market.
In July of 1815, a Captain Johnson, allegedly the agent for Robert Fulton, the great American inventor of the steam boat, came to show Adams his plans. He had, as Adams later recorded in his diary, “improved upon Fulton’s Torpedo-system to such a degree that he can fix a torpedo, at the bottom of any vessel in spite of any defence that she can make.” Captain Johnson had threatened his friend the Duke of York that he would bring his invention to the Americans if the British Navy refused to buy it. Similarly, and perhaps more plausibly, a gentleman came to peddle “a cork jacket, known as seaman’s friend”—a life jacket– which the Admiralty had also declined.
Robert Fulton and his steam boat
In his journal Adams generally described these “projectors” as pests, but he never turned one away. Adams’ father, John Adams, had been fascinated by the laws of science, though he had lacked the imaginative capacity of his friends Franklin and Jefferson to devise inventions of his own. So, too, was John Quincy Adams. In the 1790s he and his young fellow-members of the Crackbrain Club had carried out experiments to harness the power of electricity. In his travels through Silesia, in eastern Prussia in 1800, Adams had learned, and described, how the locals made glass and carded wool, and gazed in admiration at the ingenious contraptions of woodsmiths. He had, as well, a patriotic interest in anything which might improve American life.
Adams enjoyed humoring the more outlandish of the projectors. Mr. Studley and Mr. Service arrived at his doorstep in November, 1816–“extremely illiterate, but authors or possessors as they profess of innumerable useful and important inventions,” including “Gas-lights, iron pavements, a new method of bleaching flax, and I know not how many more improvements that are to change the face of the world.” The gentlemen spent more than an hour “descanting upon their various schemes, explaining them to me most unintelligibly.” They returned three weeks later with an expanded list of eight inventions. “I observed to them,” Adams noted drily in his journal, “that the Iron pavement was omitted. They said that they had not put that down, and there were many others which if they once got settled in America, and found encouragement, they should be able to introduce, to the great benefit of the Country. “Adams concluded that Studley and Service were artisans forbidden by law to leave the country, and were hoping to enlist the American minister in a scheme to escape to America. Inventing had become a craze, and thus, inevitably, a scam.
But it was not only that. Adams met visionary men who lacked the means to put their ideas into effect. Mr. Busby had dreamed up “a machine or Carriage to travel or to transport merchandize by land, with a velocity equal to one hundred miles an hour.” The machine required “only a road analogous to the iron railways now used in this Country.” (Steam engines were then being used to pull loads over rails, often in quarries.) Adams dismissed this would-be pioneer of train travel as “one of that numerous class of inventors who are mad with regard to their main objects and sober in all the calculations of detail to be carried into effect.”
A few of these men were true inventors. Gabriel Tigère, a French Canadian, came to enquire if he could obtain in the United States a patent for a species of writing paper he had invented. In recent years, Tigère explained, rogues had found that “oxy-muriatic acid”—what is now known as hydrochloric acid—could erase ink on a document without leaving a trace, thus enabling all manner of forgery and fraud. Tigère had developed a paper “from which the writing could not be taken out.” Adams, duly impressed, said that he would help him obtain a patent in the U.S., which in fact he tried to do once he returned home. Tigère did in fact receive a British patent for the manufacture of such paper.
Adams yearned to serve the cause of science. He daydreamed about devoting his life to the study of metals, or perhaps to writing a history and classification of inventions. He never did any of those things. At the end of his life he would, however, play a crucial role in the birth of the Smithsonian Institution. In fact, few politicians did as much as Adams to further the cause of scientific research.
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