y with the locomotive crank and thus save two-fifths of the
steam, in 1830 he designed and constructed (largely after plans made two
years before) the first steam locomotive built in America; though only a
small model it proved the practicability of using steam power for
working that line. The "Tom Thumb," as Cooper called the locomotive, was
about the size of a modern hand-car; as the natural draft was far from
sufficient, Cooper devised a blowing apparatus. Selling his Baltimore
works, he built, in 1836, in partnership with his brother Thomas, a
rolling mill in New York; in 1845 he removed it to Trenton, New Jersey,
where iron structural beams were first made in 1854 and the Bessemer
process first tried in America in 1856; and at Philippsburg, New Jersey,
he built the largest blast furnace in the country at that time. He built
other foundries at Ringwood, New Jersey, and at Durham, Pennsylvania;
bought iron mines in northern New Jersey, and carried the ore thence by
railways to his mills. Actively interested with Cyrus Field in the
laying of the first Atlantic cable, he was president of the New York,
Newfoundland & London Telegraph Company, and his frequent cash advances
made the success of the company possible; he was president of the North
American Telegraph Company also, which controlled more than one-half of
the telegraph lines of the United States. For his work in advancing the
iron trade he received the Bessemer gold medal from the Iron and Steel
Institute of Great Britain in 1879. He took a prominent part in
educational affairs, strongly opposed the Roman Catholic claims for
public funds for parochial schools, and conducted the campaign of the
Free School Society to its successful issue in 1842, when a state law
was passed forbidding the support from public funds of any "religious
sectarian doctrine." He is probably best known, however, as the founder
of the Cooper Union (q.v.). Cooper was an early advocate of the
emancipation and the enlistment in the Union army of Southern negroes,
and he upheld the administration of Lincoln. Though he had been a
hard-money Democrat, he joined the Greenback party after the Civil War,
and in 1876 was its candidate for the presidency, but received only
81,740 out of the 8,412,833 votes cast. He died in New York city on the
4th of April 1883. He published _The Political and Financial Opinions of
Peter Cooper, with an Autobiography of his Early Life_ (1877), and
_Ideas for a Scienc