Monday, February 16, 2009 10:21 PM CST
Book reveals the inventive side of President Lincoln
By ARLENE MANNLEIN, Staff Writer
It all started with his forest ranger job at the Lincoln Home National Historic Site in Springfield a dozen or so years ago.
“That was where it started. Ever since, I’ve been a Lincoln student.”
Now, Jason Emerson, historian, author and journalist, has written his second book that touches Lincoln. “Lincoln the Inventor” was just published by the Southern Illinois University Press.
Nobody has ever really addressed the story of Lincoln receiving a patent for his invention, said Emerson from his home near Syracuse, N.Y.
“It has always been just kind of a little footnote,” Emerson said in the relating of Lincoln’s life.
“Lucky for me, all of a sudden, everybody is interested in the fact he was an inventor.”
Not only was Lincoln an inventor, he is the only United States president to ever receive a registered patent. Both items are rather unknown, something which Emerson said he finds rather shocking.
By description, Lincoln’s patent was for a technical device to buoy vessels over shoals. The inflatable chambers would allow the boat to float free, Emerson explained. That meant the vessel’s cargo didn’t have to be removed, saving time and money.
According to Emerson’s book, Lincoln applied for the patent in 1849, working with a local mechanic to build an 18-inch model of a ship fitted with his device.
“Lincoln hand-carved some of the model himself with his pocketknife,” it says in the book’s frontispiece.
By the way, Emerson was fortunate to have an opportunity to see the new Smithsonian Institution’s American History Museum exhibit on the invention, courtesy of the exhibit’s curator, Harry Rubenstein.
“He used my manuscript; it was really exciting.”
Emerson said what was originally scheduled to be a children’s story became “Lincoln the Inventor.”
“I didn’t really think that the story of Lincoln’s invention would sustain much more than a short story,” Emerson said.
But after having it rejected by a children’s magazine, he decided to look into it again, digging more and more into history and finding more and more, such as Lincoln’s lecture on discoveries and inventions.
Among other things he learned, Emerson said, was how Lincoln’s mind worked, describing him with “a very mechanical mind, a mechanical genius. (That thinking) carried into his education, law practice, his time as president.
“One thing that I found interesting was that he was very logical, even mathematical, even in his writings, even in his speeches.”
Emerson’s “The Madness of Mary Lincoln” was awarded the 2007 Book of the Year honor by the Illinois State Historical Society. Emerson wrote this book, the only one written about her madness, he said, after discovering lost letters from the mentally ill Mary Todd Lincoln. He found them in a steamer trunk in the attic of the home of the children of Robert Todd Lincoln’s attorney.
“That was amazing, finding those letters of hers,” he said.
“I treat her with a lot of sympathy. She and her husband loved each other very much,” Emerson said, though she alienated everybody with her sense of entitlement.
Emerson does take exception, however, with those elevating Mary Lincoln to the status of sharing political partnership with her husband.
“That is completely untrue, but people want to believe it. Mary Lincoln did not even believe in female suffrage.”
Emerson originally contracted with SIU Press to write a biography of Robert Todd Lincoln, which is in progress. In the meantime, he’s editing an unpublished manuscript written about Mrs. Lincoln in the 1920s by the woman who owned the letters, discovered with Mary Todd Lincoln’s letters.
Thinking that too many Lincoln biographies already are out there, Emerson had this to say: “I’ll never write a biography of Lincoln.”
Contact Arlene Mannlein at amannlein@herald-review.com or 421-6976.
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