American inventor, born in Marblehead, MA, on the 18th of January 1799; died in Jersey City, NJ, on the 17th of June 1869. His first invention was a machine for cutting files, developed before he was twenty-one years old, and he was the first person to take portraits with the camera. He built the first locomotive with the double crank; he made extensive and most important inventions in lithography, originating the process of transferring on stone, and inventing the process of photo-lithography. He became most widely known as the inventor of plumbago or graphite crucibles, and the founder of the graphite manufacturing plant at Jersey City that bears his name.
