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Smithsonian Institution, Published 1965. Hardcover, xix, 202 pp.; 29 cm; United States National Museum Bulletin 238, Museum of History and Technology; frontispiece portrait and 83 figures (photographs of machines and models, period engravings, patent drawings, portraits, and advertisements); endpaper maps of Philadelphia (Paxton, 1811, front; Hills, 1808, rear); appendix listing sources and the original American Machinist articles; index.
In Very Good condition, no dust jacket. Gray cloth boards, Smithsonian seal stamped in black on front board, black lettering on spine; mild shelf wear with some color loss at corner tips and spine ends, light soiling and a few small specks to boards. Binding tight. Endpaper maps toned; pages otherwise clean and unmarked. Sellers (1808-1899), grandson of the wire-mold maker Nathan Sellers and of Charles Willson Peale, grew up in his family's Philadelphia fire-engine and machine shops and set down his recollections in American Machinist between 1884 and 1893. Ferguson gathered the articles, added episodes from the Peale-Sellers papers at the American Philosophical Society, and annotated them. Part I covers the Philadelphia shops: Jacob Perkins, Oliver Evans, Patrick Lyon's fire engines, Isaiah Lukens and Joseph Saxton, the first and second U.S. Mints and the 1836 steam coining press, and the Redheffer perpetual-motion fraud. Part II follows the family paper business to the Gilpin mill on the Brandywine and on Sellers's 1832 visit to Maudslay, Brunel, Donkin, and Perkins in England. Part III takes in the Philadelphia and Columbia Railroad, the Allegheny Portage Railroad, the Cardington locomotive works, Baldwin, Phineas Davis, and Seth Boyden. Ferguson (1916-2004) was the Smithsonian's curator of mechanical and civil engineering and later president of the Society for the History of Technology. Contents: Preface; George Escol Sellers; Part I, Early Philadelphia Mechanics: Fire Engines and Leather Hose; Jacob Perkins in Philadelphia; Old Blind Hawkins; An Adventure in Learning; John White's Press-Screw Manufactory; The Philadelphia of Oliver Evans; Sellers and Pennock Fire Engine Works; Isaiah Lukens and Joseph Saxton; The United States Mints; Redheffer's Perpetual Motion Machine. Part II, On Papermaking in the United States and England: Nathan Sellers and Wire Working; A Visit to the Mills of the Brandywine; Papermaking by Hand and Machine; A Visit to England, I-IV (Maudslay and Brunel; Donkin's Bermondsey Works; Ibotson's Pulp Dresser; Perkins's Adelaide Gallery); An American Counterfeiter. Part III, Internal Improvements: Stage Line to Washington; Philadelphia and Columbia Railroad; The Portage Railroad; Cardington Locomotive Works; John Brandt, Master Mechanic; The Sellers Locomotive; Phineas Davis and the Arabian; Seth Boyden's Locomotives; George Escol Sellers Takes Leave of His Friends. Appendix: Sources of Sellers' Text; American Machinist Articles; Index.