Sturges Whitlock: 

Our Own Gutenberg

Ridgefield had its own Johannes Gutenberg, a man who invented a printing press that was so popular, his factory couldn’t keep up with the demand for it.

A fourth generation Ridgefielder, Sturges Selleck Whitlock was born in 1844 in the Bennett’s Farm section of town. His father, John, was a machinist and tinkerer, who taught his son the trade and apparently inspired  in him a desire to experiment.

Sturges grew up in Ridgefield, and probably attended the old Bennett’s Farm Schoolhouse.  As a young teenager, however, he studied at Jackson’s Academy, a private school that operated in the Turner House in Danbury (a hotel erected by retired circus owner Aaron Turner of Ridgefield). 

“He proved an apt and industrious scholar and left school at the age of eighteen, the possessor of a liberal education,” said a Whitlock family history.

He joined his father’s machine shop in Derby, learning both the skills and the business. In 1868, his father retired and Sturges took over, operating the shop for 20 years.

Meanwhile, he was coming up with ideas about improving the speed and performance of printing presses used for books, magazines and newspapers — all of which

were becoming increasingly popular after the Civil War. By 1877, he patented a new printing press design and began manufacturing them.

The presses became so sought-after, his factory could not keep up with the demand. For the first 10 years, he could produce about 100 units annually, each selling for the equivalent of about $60,000 in today’s money.

It might be said that his interest in machinery carried over into his romantic life. In 1868, Whitlock married Mary Olive Singer, a daughter of Isaac Merritt Singer of New York. Isaac Singer was a fellow machinist and inventor who had founded what has been called America’s first multinational corporation, the Singer Sewing Machine Company.

In 1888, as the demand for Whitlock’s Premier model press continued to increase, he reorganized into the Whitlock Machine Company and moved to larger quarters in Shelton (a building still standing and being considered for status as a state historic site).

Whitlock did not stop improving his press, and his business grew to the point where “the press is now used in most all of the printing offices in the country,” said an 1899 profile.

A year later, Whitlock’s wife died and he turned over management to a business associate and began to spend more time on community and political interests. A Shelton

resident, he served both as a state representative and state senator, was on the Board of Trade in Shelton, was active in Masonic organizations, served on the local board of burgesses, and was a strong supporter of the Episcopal Church.

Meanwhile his company took on a new name, the Premier and Potter Printing Press Company, and operations expanded in the 1920s to include actually performing high-quality printing. At one point, the firm was printing currency and stamped postcards for the U.S. government (which required the presence of federal agents who delivered the paper and oversaw the entire process).

In 1936, however, the company closed, apparently a victim of the Depression as well as competition from more modern press equipment. Sturges Whitlock had died in 1914 at the age of 70. So, apparently, had the ingenuity that had once brought his company to the top of the printing press manufacturers in this country.

“Mr. Whitlock possessed a rather unusual union of characteristics which, when taken together, almost invariably spell success,” said his family history profile. “The capable business man and the inventor are rarely found together in one person, the qualities which make for ability in each line somewhat negativing the others. In his case, however, this was not so and he was equally capable of inventing his splendid press and successfully putting it upon the market. 

“Nor was invention one effort merely, but he followed it up by much valuable work, making great improvements from year to year in his own device, and had eventually about twenty patents on these various supplementary inventions.”

Carlton Ross Stevens and his motorcycle in World War I.

Carlton Ross Stevens: 

War Hero and Inventor

Barely 20 years old, Ridgefield native Carleton Ross Stevens had one of the most important jobs in World War I: He delivered the first sectional terms of the Armistice to General Pershing. 

To do that, Sgt. Stevens rode a motorcycle more than 800 miles in 19 hours. He stopped only three times — once when he crashed — and ate only chocolate. 

Sgt. Stevens, who had entered the service in June 1918, was often under fire while on duty as a motorcycle dispatch rider. In one case, while on a motorcycle trip in France, enemy fire was so heavy he had to hide in a swamp for five days, with only raw bacon to eat. 

Never formally schooled beyond the eighth grade, Mr. Stevens went on to invent numerous machines and electronic devices, lecture at Yale, and build a highly successful manufacturing business in Waterbury. 

Born in 1898 of a longtime Ridgefield family, he joined American Brass in Waterbury after the war and began inventing automated machines and later, electronic devices. (In 1912, as a boy of only 14, he had set up the first wireless "ham" radio station in Ridgefield and he remained a ham operator all his life.) 

Stevens founded his own firm, the Stevens Company in Waterbury, and during World War II, created devices for the Manhattan Project, which produced the atomic bomb; he lectured at Yale on the Manhattan Project. During the war, he was also a major in the Army signal corps.

He died in 1970 in Thomaston at the age of 72.

Philip K. Saunders: 

'Dr. Panto Fogo'

Off and on for nearly a quarter of the 20th Century, the peripatetic P.K. Saunders lived in Ridgefield, probably where he wrote his critically acclaimed autobiography. But he was always heading off to other parts of the world, often to his native England and sometimes for extended periods, such as when he created one of Jamaica’s top golf clubs.

When he finally departed Ridgefield, the millionaire left behind a neighborhood served by a road bearing his name: Saunders Lane.

One of the more unusual characters in Ridgefield’s past, Philip Keith “P.K.” Saunders was  born in 1899 into an odd, but well-to-do British family. His father was a wealthy physician while his mother was an evangelical Christian who would move the family from town to town in order to find a local church suitable to her current needs. 

When he was only 15, he was sent to a Royal Navy training school and wound up serving in World War One as a British naval cadet and later engineer. During the war the teenage sailor nearly drowned when the dreadnaught he was serving aboard was sunk in the Dardanelles  and he had to swim for hours in the night before being rescued.

When he was 21, his family sent him to Brazil, where he worked as an engineer — one of his major projects was figuring out how to salvage hundreds of tons hides aboard a freighter that had run high and dry on a remote Brazilian beach. The wreck was far from civilization but close to native tribesmen, who would suddenly appear from the jungle to take their own share of the loot — Saunders and his crew put up no opposition, fearing the locals were headhunters.

The region was so remote that a “hotel” he stayed at in a nearby village while working on the freighter was little more than a thatched roof with four open sides. In his autobiography, “Dr. Panto Fogo,” Saunders describes an unusual feature of the hotel.

“The Hotel Mundo ... was infested with water rats from the nearby Carapata River, so instead of having a cat or a dog to keep the rats down, they had a tame anaconda, which was half grown and only 15 feet long,” he wrote. “Most of the time this pet lived in the rafters and you could wake up at night and hear a scuffle and a squeak as the rat went down. 

“At meals, Ninha, as she was called, would come round the tables and beg. She did this most

prettily, weaving her head and opening her mouth for titbits and she could catch better than an Australian cricketer, but the first time I met her it was quite a shock. 

“I had just arrived and was sitting at dinner, eating surprisingly delicious food. The only light was wax candles which flickered as the sea breeze blew through the room and a nice, gentle, big dog put his heavy flat head on my knee. So without looking down, I put my hand down to pat him on the head, only it was Ninha and the pretty little head was hard and stone cold.

“When I fell over backwards, old Captain Keelhauling, who was at the head of the table, lifted his long white beard to the sky and roared with merriment because it was his stock joke for newcomers and it had worked exactly to schedule on me.”

Around 1932 he moved to  South Africa, where he became an engineering draftsman for a company manufacturing explosives for the Johannesburg and Kimberley mines. As an engineer Saunders was assigned the task of cutting the costly power losses due to faulty, leaking valves used to supply air and water in the underground mines. While working in the mines at Witwatersrand, he invented a specialized valve for controlling air flow.

 The “diaphragm valve” traced its origins back to the ancient Greeks and Romans, who used a similar device to control the water and temperature of the hot baths.  Saunders had studied classical history and archaeology as a hobby, and knew of the ancient valve. His first modern diaphragm valve made him a millionaire.

Many patents were filed in his name for this valve, and he founded Saunders Valve Company in London to market his work. Saunders diaphragm valves are still used today, particularly in sophisticated medical equipment.

 By 1943 Saunders was in New York City, working for the U.S. Navy, installing anti-submarine devices on merchant vessels.

He continued to make the United States his home base, probably because he was irked by the climbing taxes in his native England. His autobiography is sprinkled with rants about the “socialists” who were taking his money. At one point he describes his savings account as  “devalued, inflated, exchange-controlled, and eventually tax-confiscated by a democracy in search of Utopia.”

Over the years he held many patents for inventions, usually related to valves and often designed to be labor-saving. He has been frequently quoted for his observation: “Laziness is the mother of nine inventions out of ten.”

By 1948 Saunders had discovered Ridgefield and moved to a house on lower Main Street.  At the time he was president of the Saunders Valve Company of America. 

In 1949 he bought the Starr estate, whose house is at the corner of Farmingville and Lounsbury Roads and whose land includes the site of today’s Farmingville School.  Almost immediately, he began plans for the 14-lot Saunders Lane subdivision, which he called Quaker Ridge. Houses began being built there in 1950. Oddly enough, one of the builders in the 1960s was William Saunders of Brookfield, no relation to P.K. 

 In 1960 Saunders wrote his light-hearted autobiography, whose full title is “Dr. Panto Fogo:  The Uninhibited Memoirs of A Twentieth Century Adventurer — His Inventions and His Escapades

on Four Continents and the High Seas.” The book is full of colorful tales of his experiences in South and North America, Africa and Europe, from his boyhood until just after World War II (he had planned a second volume to continue the post-war story). It was published by Prentice-Hall and he promoted it by observing, “The common belief is that all inventors are crazy, and I concur. Because if you are sane when you start off with an invention, the chances are you will be madder than a March hare by the time you are through — I was, as you will see.”

The book was praised by reviewers, including The New York Times and The Saturday Review, a literary magazine that said “Mr. Saunders is incapable of writing a dull paragraph,”

Dr. Panto Fogo is Anglo-Portuguese for “Dr. Pants-on-Fire,” a nickname friends gave Saunders after a rail trip through rural Brazil. He had ignored the friends’ warnings to keep his train compartment window closed and, as he napped,  his trousers caught fire from a spark thrown out by the ancient wood-fired steam engine.

While in Ridgefield, he continued to travel widely and, in 1950, to establish the Upton Country Club on the island of Jamaica. He maintained a home for himself and his daughter on Saunders Lane until 1974 by which time he was living in Manteo, N.C. He died there in 1997 at the age of 98.

 In an odd coincidence, the critic who reviewed Saunders’s book in 1960  for The Saturday Review was Quentin Reynolds, a journalist who had been a noted war correspondent in World War II. Reynolds later became even more famous for his libel suit against conservative syndicated columnist Westbrook Pegler — a Ridgefield resident — who had called him “yellow” and an “absentee war correspondent.”  Represented by the well-known attorney Louis Nizer, Reynolds wound up winning $175,001 (more than $1.6 million in 2018 dollars) in the case — at the time it was the largest libel judgment ever handed down. The lawsuit later inspired a Broadway play, “A Case of Libel,” and two TV movies.

Gerard Herrick: 

Rotary-Wing Pioneer

Long before the military developed vertical take-off and landing aircraft, like the Osprey, Gerardus Herrick of High Ridge had invented an aircraft that did that.

Gerardus Post Herrick, who generally went by the name of Gerard, was a rather eccentric but talented lawyer and a skilled research engineer.  Born in 1873, he was a member of the 13th generation of the Post family to live in New York City since the clan arrived in 1654. He graduated from Princeton and became an attorney. 

After serving as a captain in World War I in the Army Air Service—not as a pilot but as a gunnery officer—he came up with the idea of a convertible aircraft that could fly either fixed-wing like a conventional plane or vertically as an “autogyro.”  In the 1920s and 1930s, he partnered with a couple of aircraft manufacturers to build a working model of his autogyro. 

   “The first aircraft, the HV-1, was ready on Nov. 6, 1931,” the Smithsonian Institution says. “The test pilot, Merrill Lambert, made several successful test flights in both fixed- and rotating-wing mode, but when he attempted an in-flight transition between the two, the aircraft fell out of control and crashed. Lambert bailed out of the aircraft, but was killed when his parachute failed to open.” However, an analysis of the accident found the basic design was sound, and Herrick continued to develop what he called a “vertiplane.” 

   The plane was a fixed-wing monoplane with a large overhead propeller, shaped somewhat like a smaller wing. The aircraft could take off as a monoplane and once in the air, convert to a

hovering aircraft using the large overhead propeller. It could then land in a very small area. The aircraft could also take off vertically, but could not convert to horizontal flight in mid-air, and had to remain a “helicopter” until it landed.

 A new version, the HV-2a, began flying successfully in 1936, cruising at 100 mph as a fixed-wing plane and 65 mph in autogyro mode. The 2,300-pound aircraft needed only 60 feet of runway to take off. Unfortunately, the aircraft’s “remarkable performance did not justify production as the weight penalties imposed by carrying both rotary and fixed wing structures eliminated its commercial advantage over conventional airplanes,” the Smithsonian said.  

   Herrick continued to work on convertible airplane ideas and unsuccessfully tried to gain investor and government support until his death in 1955. He didn’t limit his interests to aircraft, however, and over the years the attorney/engineer wrote a manual for small-arms instructors, and did research work into blast furnaces, steam engines, lenses, and rifle sights.

   “Gerard Post Herrick was one of the earliest to advocate combining fixed-wing flight with rotary-wing flight,” wrote Dr. Bruch H. Charnov in a study of the inventor. “He has been given little notice by vertical flight historians, quite unjustifiably becoming one of the forgotten rotary-wing pioneers, the champion of a concept that even today in various forms seeks legitimacy.”

   He and his wife, Lois, had their High Ridge home here starting in the 1920s. A large garage in back once housed the HV-2a, historian Dick Venus recalled. After Lois Herrick died in 1983, Mr. Venus was at an estate sale on the property when he came across “the largest propeller that I had ever seen, lying on the floor of the garage. No doubt this enormous thing could lift a house right off the ground if you had a machine with the energy to turn it.”  He concluded it was a spare for the HV-2a, which had already been donated to the Smithsonian Institution.

   Incidentally, Herrick was a cousin of Myron T. Herrick, the U.S. ambassador to France who greeted Charles Lindbergh on his arrival in Paris in 1927. Myron must have been popular: He’s the only American ambassador to France with a street in Paris named after him — Avenue Myron Herrick.—from “Hidden History of Ridgefield”

Preston Bassett: 

Inventor and Historian 

Although he was a nationally recognized inventor and aviation pioneer who became a captain of industry, Preston Bassett was better known locally as a historian, an antiques expert, and a benefactor of the Keeler Tavern. 

As an aeronautical engineer and inventor,  Bassett held patents in such varied realms as anti-aircraft searchlights, automatic pilots, and airliner soundproofing,  and counted the Wright brothers, Charles Lindbergh, Eddie Rickenbacker, Wiley Post, and Amelia Earhart among his friends.

Preston Rogers Bassett was born in Buffalo, N.Y., in 1892. His father was an urban planner and his sister, Isabel Bassett Wasson, became one of the first female petroleum geologists in the United States (she was also the first female ranger at Yellowstone National Park, and also one of the first interpretive rangers hired by the National Park Service).

Bassett graduated from Amherst College in 1913 and continued his studies at Brooklyn Polytech.

He joined Sperry Gyroscope in 1914 as a research engineer and remained with the company for 42 years, rising through the ranks to become its president from 1945 until 1956. Sperry, later Sperry Rand, had its headquarters at Lake Success, Long Island, in a huge building that, from 1946 to 1952, also served as temporary headquarters of the United Nations.

Bassett held 35 patents for his aeronautical inventions, including a high-intensity anti-aircraft searchlight— one Bassett searchlight produced 800-million candlepower and could be seen 200 miles away. In 1924 at Mount Wilson Observatory, Bassett assisted Albert A. Michelson in employing an arc light and gyroscope technology to measure the speed of light. 

He directed the development of the first blind-flying instruments and the first automatic pilot for aircraft. In 1929, aviation pioneer Jimmy Doolittle tested the Sperry equipment in the first “blind landing”  — now known as an “instrument landing” — of an airplane.

During World War II he focused his efforts on military applications for his inventions, and was a technology adviser to President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

After the war he turned his attention to improving passenger aircraft and engineered the first successful soundproofing system for airplanes. In 1954, President Dwight D. Eisenhower named him to the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics which, in 1958, became NASA, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

While living on Long Island, Bassett had been very active in historical efforts, serving as

village historian for the town of Rockville Centre, and vice president of the New York State Historical Society in Cooperstown.

He brought that interest in local history with him when he moved  in 1952  to a house on High Ridge, the boyhood home of 19th Century author Samuel Goodrich, whose pen name was Peter Parley.  An inveterate collector, Bassett amassed more than 100 different Goodrich books, many of

them exceedingly rare, which he eventually gave to the Ridgefield Library.

He was president of the Keeler Tavern Preservation Society from 1968 to 1972, and one of its most important benefactors, donating many artifacts, including pieces of colonial-era furniture. He also provided his expertise to the tavern and to many people in town. Well into his 80s, he would explore dirt cellars and ancient attics to help owners of old houses identify the age of their home’s construction.

Bassett gave away most of his many collections when he was in his 80s, a process he called “uncollecting.” The Smithsonian Institution got his vast collection of more than 800 antique lamps, lanterns and lighting devices, as well as some of his antique bicycles – including the oldest known American bike. Among the other institutions that received his gifts were the Henry Ford Museum, Mead Art Museum, Old Bethpage Village, and the Farmers’ Museum.

Bassett was also a writer, producing many articles on scientific and historical subjects. In 1969, he published a 244-page history of Rockville Centre, Long Island, and in 1981, at the age of 89, “Raindrop Stories,” his book of weather tales for children, was published. 

His autobiography, “The Life and Times of Preston R. Bassett,” appeared in 1976, and offered many stories of his life as an inventor and historian. In one tale, he described a flight he took

in 1936 across the Atlantic in a German airship, debating with the caption about whether the future of transoceanic flying belonged to the dirigible or the airplane. Less than a year later, that same airship, the Hindenburg, was a burned wreck in New Jersey.

He also did a bit of publishing, hand-printing a volume of poetry written by his wife, Jeanne M. Bassett.

He died at his home in April 1992, just a few weeks after his 100th birthday.

Preston Bassett spent his life inventing many improvements in aircraft. He also knew how to have a bit of aeronautical fun. In 1953, he posed as a British aircraft mechanic in order to get aboard a test flight of the prototype of the first jet-powered passenger airliner, a de Havilland DH 106 Comet that was made in England. He thus became the first American ever to fly in a passenger jet. 

In 1971, the last commercial, propeller-driven, trans-Atlantic flight took place; jet airliners had completely replaced prop-planes. “It seems unbelievable to me,” Bassett wrote that year, “that this entire revolution from my test flight to the 100% conversion has all taken place since we moved up here to Ridgefield in 1952.”

Dr. John Ireland Howe: 

Pin Money

The common pin is about the smallest device we commonly use, a tiny piece of metal with a sharp tip and a small head that holds one thing to another. Pins seem simple and insignificant, but to John Ireland Howe, they were the source of his considerable fortune. 

The Ridgefield native invented the first machine to mass produce them.

John Ireland Howe was born in Ridgefield in 1793. His grandfather was Epenetus Howe, a prominent local miller whose saltbox house on the corner of North Salem and Saw Mill Hill Roads is still standing today. (His mother was born Mary Polly Ireland, whence his middle name, which he always used.)

Howe studied medicine and became a physician at the New York Alms House in Manhattan. There he saw pins being made by the old-fashioned, hand-made way of cutting up wire and sharpening a tip, and adding a head — a process said to require 18 steps for each pin.

He set about designing a machine that would manufacture pins, received patents in 1832 and 1833, and with the backing of New York financiers, he opened the Howe Manufacturing Company in Derby in 1836. The company moved to the Birmingham section of Derby, Connecticut, two years later and its pin factory became one of the largest in the country.

Howe and his staff also invented a machine for “carding” pins — mounting them on heavy paper for sale.

The physician’s first foray into the world of industrial inventions was far from pins, however. His familiarity with chemistry from studying medicine led him to experiment on India rubber latex, and put it to practical uses through chemical additives that would make the sticky latex lasting as well as resilient and durable. 

“So far as I know,” Howe once said, “I was the first person who attempted to utilize rubber by combining other substances with it, but I did not happen to stumble upon the right substance.” The man who did was Charles Goodyear, a native of New Haven whose process for treating rubber latex, called vulcanization, was patented in 1844.

Howe made a fortune on pins, and his mansion in Derby has been acquired by the local historical society which plans to restore it and open it to the public. 

The miniature model that Howe used to apply for his 1841 patent on an improved pin-making

machine is now in the collection of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington.  “His design was mechanically very complex,” the Smithsonian says. “The patent document comprised 20 pages of detailed text and five of diagrams.” Though only about a foot wide and a foot high, the model is extremely detailed.

Howe died in 1876 and is buried in Derby.

A grandson, John Ireland Howe Downes (1909-1987), was an impressionist painter of some repute, whose work is in the National Gallery of Art.  Another descendant, art scholar John Ireland Howe Baur, who once headed the Whitney Museum, was named for the artist, not the pin-maker.