Spirit of Democracyt, Woodsfield, Ohio dated August 24, 1886

Eli Whitney Blake, inventor of the Blake stone crusher and a nephew of Eli Whitney, the inventor of the cotton gin, died last week.

Contributed by Linda

Eli Blake (10507653)

Suggested edit: Hi there! Here's a longer biography for Eli's page. Hooray for reclaiming lost history! Rock on.
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Inventor and manufacturer born in Westboro, Massachusetts, the son of Elihu Blake, a farmer, and Elizabeth Whitney, sister of the cotton-gin inventor Eli Whitney. With the financing of his famous uncle, Blake graduated from Yale College in 1816. He then entered law school at Litchfield, Connecticut, but left when Whitney asked him to help run his arms factory near New Haven in the Whitneyville section of Hamden, Connecticut. As Whitney's right-hand man, Blake gained much practical experience in civil and mechanical engineering. In 1822 he married Eliza Maria O'Brien of New Haven; they had twelve children and sent five of their six sons through Yale.

After Whitney died in 1825, Blake and his brother Philos ran the Whitney Armory for ten years, modernizing its equipment to include what is now the oldest surviving milling machine. In 1835 they left the armory and joined another brother, John, in starting a hardware factory in nearby Westville. Blake Brothers made a variety of domestic hardware; the brothers invented and patented door locks (1833 and 1836), latches (1840), fasteners (1843), bedstead casters (1838), and corkscrews (1860). The firm closed about 1880, after the deaths of Philos and John. Eli had meanwhile turned to development of the Blake rock crusher, which was granted a U.S. patent (# 20,542) in 1858, and formed the Blake Crusher Company to produce the machines.

While serving on a New Haven town committee that had been appointed in 1851 to build two miles of macadam road to Westville, Blake found that a hand hammer was the only means available to break stone for roads. For seven years he worked out every detail on paper before constructing a perfectly functioning machine to crush stones of varied sizes and shapes and release the desired-size fragments rapidly and automatically. The steam-powered machine had vertical jaws, one of which moved toward the other with sufficient pressure (27,000 pounds per square inch) to crush trap rock (dolerite). It found widespread use in crushing metal ores as well as stones used in road beds, railroad ballast, and concrete. In 1872, Blake estimated, his 509 machines had already saved their users over $55 million. Blake crushers are still used today. But after numerous lawsuits in the 1860s and 1870s, Blake, like his uncle, reaped little reward from his infringed-upon patent, which was reissued in 1866 and extended by seven years in 1872.

Blake's interests ran to science as well as technology. He was an early member, and president from 1850 to 1852, of the Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences and a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science from 1874 to 1886. While still manufacturing muskets, he contributed articles on mechanics and fluid dynamics to Benjamin Silliman's American Journal of Science and Arts. Beginning in 1824 with an exhaustive treatise on cog wheel teeth, his topics included "The Crank Problem . . . " (1827) and "the Resistance of Fluids . . . " (1835). His 1848 article on " . . . the Flow of Elastic Fluids through Orifices" stemmed from disappointment in the power of a new steam engine at the Blake hardware factory. He concluded theoretically, and later experimentally, that the openings for the flow of steam from the cylinder should be twice as large as the rule then prescribed. In Britain Robert D. Napier and William J. M. Rankine later independently confirmed Blake's new rule. Blake propounded new views on the propagation of sound waves through the atmosphere in the American Journal of Science and Arts in 1848 and 1850. In 1882 he collected all his journal articles on the laws and properties of elastic fluids, together with a recently rejected paper on "sonorous waves," and printed them privately as Original Solutions of Several Problems in Aero-dynamics.

Blake died in New Haven. Since his time, the Blake stone crusher has not only paved the way to our modern highway system; its potential in skyscraper construction has become a concrete reality.

- Carolyn C. Cooper. "Blake, Eli Whitney"; http://www.anb.org/articles/13/13-00144.html; American National Biography Online Feb. 2000.
Contributor: Stacinator (49423547)