Peter Cooper - Early Life

Early Life

Peter Cooper was born in New York City of mixed Dutch, English and Huguenot descent, the fifth child of John Cooper, a Methodist hatmaker from Newburgh, New York He worked as coachmaker's apprentice, cabinet maker, hatmaker, brewer and grocer, and was throughout a tinkerer: he developed a cloth-shearing machine which he attempted to sell, as well as an endless chain he intended to be used to pull boats on the Erie Canal, which De Witt Clinton approved of, but which Cooper was unable to sell.

In 1821 Cooper purchased a glue factory on Sunfish Pond for $2,000 in Kips Bay, where he had access to raw materials from the nearby slaughterhouses, and ran it as a successful business for many years, producing a profit of $10,000 within 2 years, developing new ways to produce glues and cements, gelatin, isinglass and other products, and becoming the city's premiere provider to tanners, manufacturers of paints, and dry-goods merchants. The effluent from his successful factory eventually polluted the pond to the extent that in 1839 it had to be drained and filled.