More about Oberlin Smith and the Ferracute Machine Co.

Born in Cincinnati, Ohio on 22 March 1840, Oberlin Smith moved to Bridgeton before the Civil War, got his training here as an engineer, and lived here for the rest of his life. In an era of remarkable American industrial founders and many celebrated industrial enterprises, he stands out for his humanity, creativity, generosity and public spiritedness, right here at home.

On our dedicated Smith/Ferracute page, CHABA remembers his founding the Ferracute Machine Company here in Bridgeton, and how his firm helped create the design technology for metal forms that fueled the rise in manufacture of consumer metal products in Detroit, like bicycles, automobiles and household machines. But in the 1870s and 1880s, when his intense creative activity included--among other things--new kinds of looms, locks, and an automatic garage door opener, he also began his career as a relentless thinker, with a gift for basic humanity, writing thoughtful essays on time, space and eternity while contributing to the technology of everyday life.

Smith is typically remembered, in fact, for a new venture in his career that also began in the 1880s. After an invitation to visit Thomas Edison’s northern New Jersey laboratory to explore Edison's recently-invented phonograph and microphone, he was inspired to begin his own experiment with the recording of sound. It involved a method different from Edison's (etching a groove in a sheet of tinfoil): using varying levels of magnetization on the surface of a steel wire, and ultimately proposing a method both simpler and more complex than Edison's: a string or thread, woven discretely with tiny bits of chopped-up wire that wouldn't touch each other and cancel each other out.

His invention (which he also had the foresight to write about at the time) was the first ever to propose using magnetism to record sound. We bold and italicize that thought because Smith's invention was clearly way ahead of its time. Its practical use awaited much later developments, like coating metal powder on a plastic base, the method eventually used for audio tapes, video tapes, and computer floppy discs in the 20th century.

Smith's genius was ultimately acknowledged by later engineers, but we don't know that he actually ever constructed the device. Many of his records were later accidentally destroyed, and while some survive (in the Hagley Museum in Delaware and at Rowan University in Glassboro, NJ), they have not yet been exhaustively studied by biographers. Still, Smith himself--who quite remarkably decided that he would never get around to patenting his idea, let alone producing it--actually offered it to the public--freely on the pages of the engineering magazine Electrical World in 1888, and (if nothing else) contributed to the spread of his fame as an engineer.

He did not rest on his laurels, of course. Ferracute became a leader in its field, and Smith enjoyed a host of diverse leadership activities: local (director of a Bridgeton bank), national and international. He was President of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers [1899], New Jersey Commissioner to the Pan-American Exposition [1901], and member of the New Jersey Department of Conservation and Development [1915].

In 1900, he made one of his major contributions to the future cultural and environmental life of Bridgeton when the upland watershed that had provided waterpower to the original Bridgeton iron mills came up for sale. Smith lent his critical vocal support to preserving the over 1000 acres that now make it one of the largest urban parks in the state, home to one of the state's first public zoos and of course an extraordinary and beneficial feature of Bridgeton public life. Smith was also on the State Water Commission when the city's own water department was moved from Bridgeton's west side into the park. Although much diminished now, its original elegant arte-nouveau buildings and water-features were celebrated for the rest of the 20th century.

Smith's later career included such varied and generous activities as membership in the National Geographic Society, board membership of the Advisory Council of Simplified Spelling, and Vice Presidency of the Men’s League for Women Suffrage. He was President of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers in 1899 and New Jersey Director to the Pan-American Exposition in 1901. He continued relentlessly to invent--including such ordinary lifesavers as an egg-timer, and was named to the New Jersey Inventors Hall of Fame in 1990. He died in Bridgeton 19 July 1926. and rests and is memorialized in its capacious and historic Broad Street Cemetery.

The City of Bridgeton, at one time, supported the historic preservation movement to "Save the Ferracute," and hired the esteemed firm of Watson & Henry to develop a preservation study (the same that wrote the project-supporting plans for saving the Nail House). From its own founding, CHABA led the same movement--for many years offering an "Obie" award to students at Bridgeton High School aiming for science careers. The loss of the last surviving building to fire in 2020, during the height of the pandemic, put something of a damper on the coalition between City and nonprofit that had fueled the movement.

Maybe it is time to revive it?

Deepest thanks to...

• ...author and historian Arthur Cox, who--along with Thomas Malin--wrote the definitive history of the Bridgeton-based Ferracute Machine Company, featuring the extensive research on its founder that forms the basis of this blog. Ferracute: The History of an American Enterprise, published in 1985, covers the full story of the machine-manufactory established in 1877. Cox also curated a significant collection of documents and memorabilia related to the company, utilized for his research and later archived. Scion of a prominent and artistic local family, he was an authority on Ferracute history and had a uniquely deep understanding of its impact on the Bridgeton area. 

• ​Comments welcome!