Burden Iron Works - History

History

Henry Burden was an inventive genius. He built an industrial complex in South Troy that featured the most powerful water wheel in the world.

Burden's horseshoe machine, invented in 1835, and was capable of making 60 horseshoes a minute, was a technological wonder. His rotary concentric squeezer, a machine for working wrought iron, was adopted by iron industries world wide. His hook-headed spike machine helped fuel the rapid expansion of railroads in the U.S.

Henry Burden was born in Scotland and emigrated to the U.S.in 1819. Burden started in the Troy iron industry in 1822, as superintendent of the Troy Iron and Nail Factory, on the Wynantskill in South Troy. Burden's inventions, which automated work that was previously done by hand, made the factory extremely profitable. Burden soon became the sole owner of the factory and renamed it H. Burden and Sons.

Henry Burden realized that Troy's strategic location as a hub of rail and water transportation networks made it possible to produce and ship an enormous quantity of finished goods-fifty one million horseshoes per year, for instance.

The most impressive example of an American overshot water wheel was built by Henry Burden in 1851 to drive his automatic horseshoe and spike manufacturing plant at Troy, New York. This was not the largest water wheel of its type so far as diameter was concerned, being exceeded in this respect, though probable not in power. A larger water wheel is at Laxey on the Isle of Man and at Greenock, Scotland, the latter supplied by Shaw's Waterworks with water from an elevated reservoir. The Burden Water Wheel was sixty-two feet in diameter and twenty-two feet in breath, was supplied by a small stream, the Wynantskill, whose natural fall of some fifty feet was increased substantially together with provision of storage capacity for year round operation by a dam and related structures of conduit and penstock of ingenious design. It weighed 250 tons and could produce 500 horsepower when spinning 2.5 times a minute. The water wheel itself was of what came to be termed the "suspension" type, familiar to us in the bicycle wheel, with iron rods in tension replacing the usual arms. It was made almost entirely of iron, save for the drum or soling of the wheel and its buckets. The appearance of the water wheel and the details of its construction and of the elaborate gearing by means of which the power was taken off and conveyed to the mill are shown in the drawings. This gigantic prime mover was continuously in service night and day for nearly one half of a century. Following its abandonment in the 1890s, it lay idle for another twenty years before its final collapse. A local poet had called it 'the Niagara of Water-wheels'