Youth and Education
Mason was born in 1808 in Mystic, Connecticut, the son of a blacksmith. As a boy, Mason spent time in his father's shops. He left home at the age of thirteen and worked as an operator in the spinning room of a small cotton factory in Canterbury, Connecticut. He was a born mechanical genius and could repair the most complicated machine in the mill. At the age of sixteen he went to East Haddam, where a mill for the manufacture of thread was being established, to start the machines. At seventeen he worked at the machine shop connected with the mill, where he stayed for three years. It was here he set up the first power loom in the country for the manufacture of diaper linen. He also constructed an ingenious loom for the weaving of damask table cloths.
Read more about this topic: William Mason (locomotive Builder)
Famous quotes containing the words youth and/or education:
“We live in an age when to be young and to be indifferent can be no longer synonymous. We must prepare for the coming hour. The claims of the Future are represented by suffering millions; and the Youth of a Nation are the trustees of Posterity.”
—Benjamin Disraeli (1804–1881)
“I envy neither the heart nor the head of any legislator who has been born to an inheritance of privileges, who has behind him ages of education, dominion, civilization, and Christianity, if he stands opposed to the passage of a national education bill, whose purpose is to secure education to the children of those who were born under the shadow of institutions which made it a crime to read.”
—Frances Ellen Watkins Harper (1825–1911)