Joseph Chessborough Dyer
American inventor
Joseph Chessborough Dyer (November 15, 1780 – May 3, 1871) was an American inventor.
Biography
Dyer was the son of Captain Nathaniel Dyer of the Rhode Island navy. He was born at Stonnington Point, Connecticut, on November 15, 1780. He was educated at the common school of Opdike's Newtown, now called Wickford, Rhode Island. His mother died from hardships she underwent during the storming and burning of New London under Benedict Arnold. Dyer had a turn for mechanics, and when quite a lad constructed an unsinkable lifeboat, in which he and his father took excursions along the coast. At the age of sixteen he entered the counting-house of a French refugee named Nancrède, to part of whose business he subsequently succeeded. He first came to England in 1802, and was frequently in the country from that date until his final settlement there in 1811, when he married Ellen Jones, daughter of Somerset Jones of Gower Street, London. Thenceforward he devoted himself to mechanics, and was active in introducing into England several American inventions, which became exceedingly profitable to him and others. One of the first of these was Jacob Perkins's plan for steel-engraving (1809); then followed fur-shearing and nail-making machines (1810), and the carding engine (1811).
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This entry incorporates text from “Joseph Chessborough Dyer” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.