Peter Cooper: Having been convinced that the proposed Baltimore and Ohio Railroad would drive up prices for land in Maryland, Cooper used his profits to buy three-thousand acres of land there in 1828 and began to develop them, draining swampland and flattening hills, during this, he discovered iron ore on his land. Seeing the B&O as a natural market for iron rails to be made from his ore, he founded the Canton Iron Works in Baltimore, and when the railroad developed technical problems, he put together the Tom Thumb steam locomotive for them in 1830 from various old parts, including musket barrels, and some small scale steam engines he had messed with back in New York. The engine was a huge success, prompting investors to buy stock in B&O, and enabled the company to buy Cooper 's iron rails, making him his first fortune. …show more content…
Cooper later moved the mill to Trenton, New Jersey on the Delaware River to be closer to the sources of the materials the works needed. His son and son-in-law, later expanded the Trenton facility into a giant complex employing two-thousand people, in which iron was taken from raw material to finished product. Cooper also operated a successful glue factory in Gowanda, New York that produced glue for a long while. A glue factory was originally started in association with the Gaensslen Tannery, there, in 1874, though the first construction of the glue factories plant, originally owned by Richard Wilhelm and known as the Eastern Tanners Glue Company, began May 5, 1904. Gowanda, therefore, was known as America 's glue capital. Cooper owned a number of patents for his inventions, including some for the manufacture of gelatin, and he developed standards for its production. The patents were later sold to a cough medicine manufacturer who developed a pre-packaged from which his wife named it,