Inventor
During much of this time, and afterwards, Porter was a prolific inventor. During 1825-1826 he published four editions of A Select Collection of Valuable and Curious Arts, and Interesting Experiments. He built a portable camera obscura that let him make silhouette portraits in less than 15 minutes. (He charged 20 cents apiece for them.) He experimented with a wind-powered gristmill, a washing machine, a corn sheller, a fire alarm, a rope-making machine, and a camera. He invented clocks, railway signals, churns, a distance measuring appliance, a horsepower mechanism, a churn, a life preserver, a cheese press, and a revolving rifle. Typical of his inability to capitalize on his genius, he sold the rights to the revolving rifle to Samuel Colt for $100, and the design was permanently shelved.
Read more about this topic: Rufus Porter
Famous quotes containing the word inventor:
“I have defeated them all.... I was left with some money to battle with the world when quite young, and at the present time have much to feel proud of.... The Lord gave me talent, and I know I have done good with it.... For my brains have made me quite independent and without the help of any man.”
—Harriet A. Brown, U.S. inventor and educator. As quoted in Feminine Ingenuity, ch. 8, by Anne L. MacDonald (1992)
“Blessed be the inventor of photography! I set him above even the inventor of chloroform! It has given more positive pleasure to poor suffering humanity than anything else that has “cast up” in my time or is like to—this art by which even the “poor” can possess themselves of tolerable likenesses of their absent dear ones. And mustn’t it be acting favourably on the morality of the country?”
—Jane Welsh Carlyle (1801–1866)
“Only an inventor knows how to borrow, and every man is or should be an inventor.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)