The Founding Fathers of American Invention

The Founding Fathers of American Invention

Christian Schussele’s ‘Men of Progress’ portrays revolutionaries personifying the inventiveness at the heart of the American character

By David M. Shribman in the Wall Street Journal

One invented the telegraph, another created the first revolver, still a third was the father of the American sewing machine. One invented the mechanical reaper, another a machine for the mass production of horseshoes. One discovered vulcanization and transformed rubber into a consumer product. Two of them changed how we use stoves, both industrial and domestic. One of them invented the rotary press, which made the early editions of this newspaper possible. All were revolutionaries, changing the character of the world they inhabited and personifying the inventiveness at the heart of the American character itself.

Let us, amid all our 21st-century technological prowess, pause to give praise to American inventors—and to the 19 whom the artist Christian Schussele (1824-1879) assembled in a remarkable painting called “Men of Progress’’ that hangs, most remarkably of all, in the very structure in which it was set, the National Portrait Gallery building in Washington that once was the headquarters of the U.S. Patent Office.

In that building, today often dismissed as a snoozy repository of stodgy presidential portraits, the patents for Samuel Colt’s repeating revolver, Cyrus McCormick’s reaper, Samuel F.B. Morse’s electric telegraph, Elias. Howe’s sewing machine and many others were registered, providing a bureaucratic record of the essence of a nation whose founding myth was an agrarian ideal but whose growth was fueled by manufacturing.

Unlike the characters in perhaps the most famous American group portrait, John Trumbull’s “Declaration of Independence,’’ which appears in the Rotunda of the Capitol, two subway stops away on Washington Metro’s Red Line, these 19 men of progress didn’t appear together—not in 1862, when the painting was finished, not ever. Most never met one another. But they helped define American innovation and a poignant American moment, one of (civil) war and (industrial) revolution.

The Schussele painting is in a great tradition of Western group portraiture, from Johann Zoffany’s 1772-77 “Tribuna of the Uffizi’’ (populated with diplomats and Florentine glitterati in a gallery with paintings from Raphael, Correggio, Rubens and Caravaggio) and Gustave Courbet’s 1855 “Painter’s Studio’’ (with the artist himself, along with such luminaries as George Sand, Charles Baudelaire and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon) all the way to Vanity Fair’s annual Hollywood magazine cover.

“The Schussele is not a schlocky painting, far from it,’’ George T.M. Shackelford, deputy director of the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas, told me. “It holds its place perfectly well in a history of American or European portraits of worthies.’’

A popular engraving of the painting of these fathers of invention—sadly, no mothers of invention, such as Martha Coston, who invented marine flare signals vital in Civil War combat—was marketed in 1863 for $10 each by the mezzotint pioneer John Sartain. It was accompanied by this explanation: “It is to such men...that modern civilization owes its chief triumphs, and they should be all the more esteemed and honored that their path has been a rough and thorny one.’’

Schussele is forgotten today outside scholarly and curatorial circles, but he was an Ecole de Beaux-Arts-trained lithographer and painter who favored imaginary assemblages of great men, including another in the portrait gallery collection—“Washington Irving and his Literary Friends at Sunnyside”—completed two years later and depicting Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, William Cullen Bryant, Ralph Waldo Emerson, James Fenimore Cooper and others at Irving’s romantic Tarrytown, N.Y., homestead on the Hudson River.

But the painting of these men of the book does not have the forward momentum of the men of action in the industrialists’ painting, created while the Civil War raged and the destiny of the nation was uncertain. There is a tension in “Men of Progress’’ that reflects the era, and not only because Joseph Henry, who was the first secretary of the Smithsonian Institution and is an important figure in the painting, was locked at the time in a dispute with Morse over credit for the invention of the telegraph.

The work that resides in the Washington gallery (along with a similar one at Cooper Union, founded by Peter Cooper, the inventor of the first American steam locomotive and a principal in the painting) was commissioned by Jordan L. Mott, who produced the first anthracite cooking stove and who selected the inventors who were portrayed. Schussele visited each of the characters in the painting, which is how he produced the full-length view of Charles Goodyear (vulcanized rubber), the waist-high view of Erastus Brigham Bigelow (power looms for manufacturing carpets) and the bust-length view of Eliphalet Nott (the Union College president who held 30 patents for various stoves and boilers).

And interspersed in the painting are the products of this feast of invention: a Colt pistol and the telegraph, for example, presided over by a seated portrait of Benjamin Franklin, a founding father of the America Revolution and arguably the founding father of American invention.

“This painting gathers some of the most important innovators of the mid-19th century in one fictive gathering but in a real space,’’ Brandon Brame Fortune, chief curator of the National Portrait Gallery, told me. “There is almost no painting anywhere that is as eloquent a tribute to the 19th-century belief in American progress.”

So evocative of the American spirit is this work—painted by a Frenchman, just as the Statue of Liberty, commissioned a dozen years later, was designed by France’s Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi—that it was moved to the White House in 1947, where it resided until 1965. Harry Truman had been looking for a companion to the George P.A. Healy “Peacemakers”—a portrait of Abraham Lincoln, Ulysses S. Grant, William Tecumseh Sherman and David Dixon Porter aboard the steamer River Queen—and “Men of Progress’’ was a natural choice. It was installed opposite the Healy in the West Lobby of the executive mansion.

The painting had been given to the nation in 1942 by Andrew W. Mellon and, like so much in the artistic and political worlds, was improved by an afterthought. It originally included only 18 figures, but as Schussele neared completion of the work he learned of the victory of the ironclad Monitor over the Confederate States’ Merrimack. So he quickly added John Ericsson, who designed the Union vessel, crowding him into the picture just above Frederick E. Sickels, who invented the valve that made the steam engine efficient. The late addition of Ericsson thus stands as a symbol itself, reminding us of another element of the American creed: that invention and progress are never finished.

—Mr. Shribman is the executive editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and the Pittsburgh Press.

Posters comments:

1)       The difference between invention and “jury rigging” is pretty close to me.

2)      The old expression about necessity being the mother of invention comes to mind, too.

3)      Americans tend to invent “pretty” things that can be manufactured in vast numbers at a good price, too.