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ceed slowly with their enterprise until
after the next presidential election. Mr.
Emery, not being willing to wait a year
for the turn of political events, returned
home and during the summer built cheese
presses on his own account.
In the autumn of 1861 Mr. Emery
asked Professor Drown, of the Rensselaer
Polytechnic Institute, for a letter to the
Secretary of War, Mr. Cameron. Edwin
D. Morgan was then governor of New
York and he also gave Mr. Emery a letter
to Mr. Cameron. Mr. Emery was desir-
ous of obtaining a position as engineer
in the army, a position which could ordi-
narily be held only by a West Point
graduate. Mr. Emery obtained an interview
with General Richard Delafield, who
had charge of all the fortifications in the
State of New York. General Delafield
requested Mr. Emery to make copies of
drawings of all these forts for him, which
he did. He also made drawings of several
batteries of field guns for the United
States Government which were built under
the superintendance of Mr. Emery
and paid for by the State of New York.
From 1 86 1 for several years Mr. Emery
spent much time experimenting on guns
and projectiles for the War Department.
Mr. Emery designed several sizes of projectiles,
submitted his plans to Admiral
Dahlgren, and made a number of projec-
tiles for several sizes of naval guns. Lieu-
tenant Mitchell having charge of firing
them. During this time Mr. Emery was
also making cotton presses and had embarked
in a venture to extract materials
from southern light wood or fat pine. He
worked out and patented a process by
which from one cord of that wood the
following products were obtained : Forty-
three gallons of turpentine, two barrels
of tar, one barrel of pitch, twenty-five
barrels of charcoal, five thousand cubic
feet of illuminating gas, six hundred gal-
ENCYCLOPEDIA OF BIOGRAPHY
257
lons of crude pyroligneous acid. Before
the enterprise could get well under way
the works were burned and with no in-
surance, so he was without funds to re-
build them. This was an early attempt to
utilize by-products which has since come
into such general use in many industries,
but at this time (1865) was much ahead
of common practice.
The next important work undertaken
by Mr. Emery was the designing of a
new system of scales. Mr. Philo Reming-
ton, of Ilion, New York, advanced the
money to build the first three scales under
this system, which, as has been most
truly and forcibly observed, was one of
the first great stones in the foundation of
Mr. Emery's fame. These three scales
were built in the Remington shops. One
of them was set up and loaded with seven
thousand pounds of iron. Its capacity
was twenty thousand pounds and with a
load of seven thousand pounds it was sensitive
to one-half an ounce. In 1873 Mr.
Emery met Mr. William Sellers, who was
reputed to be one of the best mechanical
engineers of his day. He saw him in
Philadelphia and showed him his scale
drawings. Mr. Sellers became much in-
terested, especially in one feature of the
invention, the absence of knife edges,
these scales dififering in this from the
ordinary balance or scale which has knife
edges which are rapidly injured by wear
and rust. Mr. Sellers was a manufacturer
of machine tools and it was he who
introduced Mr. Emery to Mr. J. H.
Towne, father of Henry R. Towne, who
later became famous as the head of the
Yale & Towne Manufacturing Company.
Mr. Emery said it would require $800,000
to develop the manufacture of these scales
in the way he contemplated.
Meanwhile, Mr. Emery had designed a
great one-thousand-ton testing machine to
go to Seller's bridge works. There was