John Ireland Howe

Doctor John Ireland Howe (July 20, 1793 – September 10, 1876) was an inventor and manufacturer. He was born in Ridgefield, Connecticut. He began the study of medicine in 1812; he then worked as a resident physician at the New York Almshouse.

In 1828, he moved to New York City where he continued in his practice of medicine.

Rubber During his residence in New York, he experimented on India-Rubber, where he invented and patented a process for preparing rubber compounds. And in 1828 after obtaining the patent for the rubber compound, he attempted to market his rubber product but was unsuccessful in his attempt.

In 1829, Howe settled in North Salem N. Y. where he built a factory for the manufacture of the rubber compound, which was abandoned soon thereafter, owing to the lack of a successful product. Howe was quoted: “So far as I know, I was the first person who attempted to utilize rubber by combining other substances with it, but I did not happen to stumble upon the right substance."

Howe's innovation was to mechanize the entire process into one machine: a rotary table, its motion controlled by cams, moved the pins from one station to the next. An 1839 article described the process:

The apparatus . . . is one of the most ingenious and beautiful pieces of mechanism in the whole circle of the arts. It is impossible for me to give you any adequate description of it. Those who have any fondness for mechanical ingenuity must see it for themselves. Generally, I may state that the wire from which the pins are to be made is passed in at one end of the machine, cut in the requisite length, and passed from point to point, till the pins are headed and fitted for the process of silvering and putting up. The whole process may be distinctly seen, and as one pair of forceps hands the pin along to its neighbour, it is difficult to believe the machine is not an intelligent being.'

Manufacturing Howe established the Howe Manufacturing Company in 1833 in New York City and moved it to Derby, Connecticut, in 1836. In 1839, three pin machines were in operation, producing 72,000 pins per day. In 1845, the company employed 30 men and 40 women and produced pins worth $60,000.

Howe's machine-made pins were not, at first, cheaper than hand-made pins, and Howe fought to receive tariff protection to keep British pins out of the country.

He retired from the manufacturing business in 1865 and died in Birmingham, Connecticut in 1876. His grave is in Oak Cliff Cemetery in Derby. Howe's home on Caroline Street in Derby, Connecticut is listed on the National Register of Historic Places as John I. Howe House.