SAXTON, JOSEPH

(b. Huntingdon, Pennsylvania, 22 March 1799; d Washington, D.C., 26 October (1873)

scientific instrumentation.

Saxton was the son of James Saxton and Hannah Ashbaugh. After leaving school at the age of twelve and working at his father’s nail factory in Huntingdon, he became apprenticed to a local watchmaker, David Newingham, from whom he apparently acquired his taste for precision crafts-manship. Newingham died soon afterward and in 1818 Saxton went to Philadeplhia, in the hope of using his talents for precision work.

His earliest major achievement in Philadelphia was a clock with unique temperature-compensating pendulum and an oil-less escapement. The Franklin Institute awarded him a silver medal for it in 1824. He also invented a device for shaping clock gear teeth into the ideal (epicycloidal) configuration and a “reflecting pyrometer and comparator” for checking the precision of pendulums: the city of Philadelphia awarded him the John Scott legacy medal for this device on 11 November 1841. He also made a cane gun in 1824; it was not muzzle-loaded but employed a metal-jacketed cartridge.

Saxton’s ingenuity led Isaiah Lukens, a leading mechanic and tower clockmaker in Philadelphia, to make him an associate. Together they built the clock that occupied the steeple of Independence Hall from 1828 until 1876, when it was moved to the town hall in Germantown, where it is still in operation. All of Saxton’s innovations had been installed in this particular clock.

In 1829 Saxton moved to London, where he built many of the permanent exhibits for the newly constructed Adelaide Gallery. An early visitor was Michael Faraday, whose electromagnetic discoveries inspired Saxton to build a highly regarded electric generator and electric motor. Other visitors included the physicist Charles Wheatstone and William Cubitt and Thomas Telford, two of London’s best-known engineers. Saxton built a water-current meter for Cubitt and the apparatus that Wheatstone used for determining the speed of current electricity. He also built the apparatus that Telford and his assistant John Macneill used to study water resistance, at various speeds, of canal boats.

In January of 1835 Franklin Peale commissioned Saxton to build a precision assay balance for the Philadelphia Mint. When it was completed he returned to Philadephia to take charge of the construction and maintenance of the balance scales at the mint. He occupied this post from 1837 until 1844. One of his balances is still on exhibit there.

In Philadelphia, Saxton pioneered in daguerreotype photography (1839) with a view of the state arsenal and the old Central High School. He also engraved a diffraction grating that enabled John William Draper to make the first photograph (a daguerreotype) of the diffraction spectrum (1844).

From 28 February 1844 until his death. Saxton was director of the U. S. Coast Survey Office of Weights and Measures, the forerunner of the National Bureau of Standards. Every state that had not previously been furnished with sets of federally approved weights, measures, and balance scales was supplied with set built, checked, and in many instances personally installed at the various state capitals by Saxton. His skill in making precision balances reached its zenith during these years. A set of them, exhibited at the 1851 Great Exhibition in London, brought him a gold medal-the highest award.

Saxton designed and built for the Coast Survey a gauge for recording tide levels, a current meter like the one he had made in London, a unique hydrometer, and a maximum-minimum thermometer for deep-sea observations. Each of these instruments was the first of its kind manufactured in America.

For engraving degrees on a circle, he and William Wurdemann devised an automatic dividing engine that eliminated the errors caused by the body temperature of the operator.

Saxton married Mary H. Abercrombie in 1850. He was a member of the American Philosophical Society, the Franklin Institute. and a charter member (1863) of the National Academy of Sciences.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

I. Original Works. Saxton’s patents are Great Briian. 6351 (1832) and 6682 (1834); U.S., 3806, 22982, 23046, and 44460. See also National Archives Patent No. 5446X (1829). For descriptions of his exhibits, see the quarterly catalogs of the Society for the Illustration and Encouragement of Practical Science. Adelaide Gallery (London, 1832–1835): and the Society’s Magazine of Popular Science and Journal of the Useful Arts, 1–4 (1836–1840), which contains material on Saxton’s work, some probably written by him.

See also “Notice of Electro-Magnetic Experiments”, in Journal of the Franklin Institute, 14 (1832), 66–72; “Description of Revolving Keeper Magnet for Producing Electrical Currents,” ibid., 17 (1834), 155-156; and “On the Application of the Rotating Mirror to the Aneroid Barometer,” in Proceedings of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, 12 (1858), 40–42.

A MS scrapbook and diary of his life in London are in the Smithsonian Institution archives: Record Gp. 104, A MS letter (2 Oct. 1825) is in Proctor papers. University of Virginia library.

Saxton’s daguerreotype of the state arsenal and the old Central High School is at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia. The Historical Society of York Country, York, Pennsylvania, has a ruling machine of his construction.

II. Secondary Literature. On Saxton and his work, see Joseph Henry’s notice in Biographical Memoirs. National Academy of Sciences, 1 (1877), 287–316; J. Saxton Pendleton, Joseph Saxton, 1799–1873 (Reading, Pa., 1935); C. W. Mitman, in Dictionary of American Biography, XVI (New York, 1943), 400; and Thomas Coulson, in Journal of the Franklin Institute259 (1955), 277–291.

Arthur H. Frazier