Category: Industrial Revolution 1865-1900

Marcus A. Hanna Biography

from the Ohio Historical Society

Marcus Alonzo Hanna was a prominent politician and United States Senator from Ohio during the late nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries.

Hanna was born on September 24, 1837, at New Lisbon, Ohio. His parents were members of the Society of Friends, and Hanna adopted their religious beliefs, as well as their hatred of slavery. In 1852, the Hanna family moved to Cleveland, Ohio, where Hanna attended high school. One of his classmates was John D. Rockefeller. In 1857, Hanna enrolled in the Western Reserve College, but he was expelled the following year for participating in a prank.

After leaving college, Hanna became a salesman for his father’s wholesale grocery business. He played a minor role in the American Civil War, serving as one of Ohio’s Hundred Days Men in 1864. He saw no combat while serving on garrison duty at Washington, DC. and left the army with the rank of second lieutenant. Upon completion of his brief military service, Hanna returned to Cleveland, where he managed his father’s business. He also began to refine oil. In 1867, his oil refinery caught fire and was destroyed. Hanna transferred money from his other business ventures, causing them all to fail. Later in that same year, he took a job with Rhodes & Co. a business owned by his father-in-law. The company was involved in coal and iron mining in Ohio and nearby states.

Hanna recovered financially and invested in the Globe Shipbuilding Company, which built large steel freighters for use on the Great Lakes. During the 1880s, he also briefly owned the Cleveland Herald newspaper. Hanna established the Union National Bank in 1884, and helped create Little Consolidated, a company that specialized in street railway transportation.

After becoming a successful businessman in the 1880s, Hanna began to participate in politics. He was a life-long supporter of the Republican Party. In the first presidential election in which Hanna voted, he cast his ballot for Abraham Lincoln. Hanna utilized theHerald to endorse Republican issues. By the middle 1880s, Hanna was one of the most powerful Republicans in Ohio, although he had never served in an elected office. He was a close ally of Ohio Governor Joseph Foraker, but the two men became bitter enemies after Hanna allied himself with John Sherman and William McKinley.

During the late 1880s and 1890s, Hanna donated large amounts of money to Sherman and McKinley to assist them in their campaigns for political office. In 1891, Hanna’s efforts helped secure Sherman’s reappointment to the United States Senate and McKinley’s election as Ohio governor. In 1894, Hanna stepped down as the head of his many companies and dedicated himself to electing McKinley President of the United States. In the election of 1896, Hanna served as the chairman of the Republican National Committee and used more than 100,000 dollars of his own money to secure McKinley’s nomination.

He also established a grassroots movement to help McKinley win the presidency. He brought pressure on businessmen across the United States and warned them that the Democratic Party’s candidate, William Jennings Bryan, opposed large businesses. Hanna’s efforts won McKinley the presidency. His actions earned him a reputation as an unscrupulous person, who favored the wealthy over the poor.

Upon becoming president, McKinley offered Hanna a position in the cabinet. Hanna refused, preferring to seek an appointment to the United States Senate. McKinley appointed Senator John Sherman as Secretary of State and this opened up a Senate seat. Ohio’s governor, Asa Bushnell, immediately appointed Hanna to the Senate. After a controversial election within the Ohio legislature, Hanna was reappointed to the Senate in 1898. As a senator, Hanna was President McKinley’s strongest ally in the Congress. His greatest success was convincing the Congress to build the Panama Canal. Upon McKinley’s death in 1901, Hanna remained one of the nation’s most powerful Republicans. In 1903 and 1904, many Republicans contemplated nominating Hanna for the presidency rather than Roosevelt. Hanna withdrew from consideration and supported Roosevelt’s nomination.

In 1903, the Ohio legislature reappointed Hanna to the Senate. Shortly after returning to Washington, DC, Hanna became ill. He died on February 15, 1904.

 

James A. Garfield Bio

From the Ohio Historical Society

James Abram Garfield was the 20th President of the United States. Elected in 1880, he served only six months before being assassinated in office on September 19, 1881.

Garfield was born on November 19, 1831, in Orange, Ohio. Garfield’s father died in 1833, and James spent most of his youth working on a farm to care for his widowed mother. At the age of seventeen, Garfield took a job steering boats on the Ohio and Erie Canal.

Garfield received minimal schooling in Ohio’s common schools. In 1849, he enrolled in the Geauga Seminary in Chester, Ohio. After briefly serving as a teacher, Garfield attended the Western Reserve Eclectic Institute (now Hiram College) in Hiram, Ohio. He transferred to Williams College, in Williamstown, Massachusetts, and graduated in 1858. He returned to Hiram College in that same year as a professor of ancient languages and literature. He also served as Hiram’s president until the outbreak of the American Civil War. In 1859, Garfield began a political career, winning election to the Ohio Senate as a member of the Republican Party.

During the Civil War, Garfield resigned his position at Hiram College and joined the Union Army. He began as lieutenant-colonel of the Forty-Second Ohio Volunteer Infantry and fought in the Battles of Shiloh and Chickamauga. He resigned from the army on December 5, 1863, with the rank of major general.

Garfield resigned his commission because Ohio voters had elected him to the United States House of Representatives. He served nine consecutive terms in the House of Representatives before he was elected President of the United States in 1880. In Congress, Garfield was a supporter of the Radical Republicans. He opposed President Andrew Johnson’s lenient policy toward the conquered Southern states and demanded the enfranchisement of African-American men. He was appointed by the Ohio legislature to the United States Senate in January 1880. He declined the office, because he was elected president a few months before he was to claim his seat in the Senate.

Garfield served for only four months before he was shot by Charles J. Guiteau. Guiteau had sought a political office under Garfield’s administration and was refused. Angered by his rejection, Guiteau shot Garfield while the president waited for a train in Washington, DC. Garfield lived for two more months, before dying on September 19, 1881. While Garfield accomplished little as president, his death inspired the United States Congress and his successor, President Chester A. Arthur, to reform the public service system with the Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act in 1883. Rather than having the victors in an election appoint unqualified supporters, friends, or family members to positions, the Civil Service was created to assure that at least some office holders were qualified for their positions.

Charles Brush Used Wind Power 120 Years Ago

Article on Charles Brush from the Plain Dealer.

The link is here

Charles Brush used wind power in house 120 years ago: Cleveland innovations

Published: Thursday, August 11, 2011, 8:03 AM     Updated: Thursday, August 11, 2011, 8:19 AM
Peter Krouse, The Plain Dealer
brush wind dynamoView full sizeWestern Reserve Historical SocietyCleveland inventor Charles Brush constructed this wind dynamo in 1888 in the back yard of his mansion in Cleveland.

This story is part of a midsummer series about lesser-known inventions, ideas and innovations that originated in Northeast Ohio. If you have suggestions for future stories, please email your ideas to metrodesk@plaind.com.


All the excitement about wind turbines spinning in Lake Erie or dotting Ohio’s farmland probably would have been embraced by Cleveland inventor Charles Brush.

After all, he had the idea first, more than 100 years ago.

Brush’s windmill dynamo was featured in the Dec. 20, 1890, edition of Scientific American, where it was hailed as the only “successful system of electric lighting operated by means of wind power” known at the time.

Brush, whose contribution to the advancement of electric power includes work on development of the arc light and the dynamo, built the wind-powered generator in the backyard of his mansion at East 37th Street and Euclid Avenue.

The contraption was an engineering feat.

Scientific American was fascinated

“Every contingency is provided for, and the apparatus, from the huge wheel down to the current regulator, is entirely automatic,” reads the account in Scientific American.

Unlike today’s wind turbines, with three steel, streamlined blades protruding from a gear box at the top of a tall shaft that can be more than 200 feet high, Brush’s turbine used a fan-shaped wheel that contained 144 blades made of cedar “twisted like those of screw propellers” on a tower that stood 60 feet tall, according to the article.

It looked more like a giant weathervane. But it worked.

The wheel operated a pulley system connected to a dynamo, which generated electricity that flowed to 12 batteries in Brush’s basement. One turn of the wheel corresponded with 50 revolutions of the dynamo.

At capacity, the windmill generated about 1,200 watts of electricity, enough to illuminate the house and about 100 incandescent lights.

For all its ingenuity, Brush’s windmill didn’t make economic sense.

“The reader must not suppose that electric lighting by means of power supplied in this way is cheap because the wind costs nothing,” the Scientific American article reads. “On the contrary, the cost of the plant is so great as to more than offset the cheapness of the motive power. However, there is a great satisfaction in making use of one of nature’s most unruly motive agents.”

‘Father of wind energy’

Brush’s first wind turbine is an important part of today’s efforts to promote Cleveland as a potential hub for the construction of offshore wind turbines.

The Lake Erie Energy Development Corp. plans to have five 4.5-megawatt turbines installed off the shores of Cleveland by 2013, said Steve Dever, Cuyahoga County’s representative on the wind consortium’s board.

Dever has detailed the demonstration project to organizations across Europe. He shows snapshots of a NASA wind turbine developed at the space agency’s Plum Brook test center in Sandusky and the giant modern turbine erected at Lincoln Electric’s headquarters in Euclid. The last slide in his presentation is a photo of the Brush windmill.

“Having the historical piece, it really helps to tell the Cleveland story,” Dever said.

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