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The New Haven Enterprise - Innovator
Eli Whitney Blake
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Business New Haven
1/24/2000
By:
Priscilla Searles
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Eli Whitney Blake, nephew of Eli Whitney, had a major impact on American construction, and his invention of the stone-crusher made our present highway system possible.
Born in Westborough, Mass., Blake graduated from Yale in 1816, studying under Benjamin Silliman, Jeremiah Day and Timothy Dwight, and then attended Judge Reeve's famous law school in Litchfield. In 1835 Blake and his two brothers, Philos and John, built a hardware factory in Westville. Blake was the first to introduce mortised locks built into the door in place of the old box locks which were fastened on the outside of doors, along with other improvements in builders' hardware. Blake Brothers continued until 1880.
The development of the stone-crusher came about as a result of a challenge. In 1851, Blake was placed on a New Haven town commission charged with laying two miles of macadam pavement on Whalley Avenue, from New Haven to Westville. He observed the waste of labor in producing the crushed stone needed for the road: It took two days to produce one cubic yard of broken stone, all done with a sledgehammer.
Blake pondered a solution. “The importance of a machine to do the work became immediately obvious and from that time for a period of seven years, scarcely a day, or an hour, passed in which my mind was not mainly occupied with the subject.”
Blake's stone-crusher, patented in 1858, took the largest of the stones and crushed them to the required size using two upright steel jaws which closed with a force of 27,000 pounds per square inch. The first machine, capable of producing various sizes of crushed stone, worked exactly the way Blake had hoped and is the basis of present-day stone-crushers.
The availability of crushed stone made the production of concrete financially feasible, giving birth to what was know as “The Age of Concrete.” Railroads soon discovered the use of crushed stone for roadbeds, and mining companies used the machine to crush ore. Most importantly, improved roads were built, connecting cities and towns that had once been difficult to reach. The Completion of Independence in New Haven, a history produced by the New Haven Colony Historical Society in 1975, says it best: Blake's “improvements and inventions were practical solutions to specific problems and resulted in an increase in American industrial productivity.”
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