Although his name is nearly forgotten today except for a three-block avenue on the East Side off Grand Boulevard, James Waring See was in his day one of the city’s leading citizens as well as a nationally-recognized author and patent attorney.
During the great industrial boom of the last half of the 19th century, Hamilton seemed to be a magnet for industrialists and entrepreneurs like See, his employer Alexander Gordon, and others who set up shops along the Great Miami River and the Hydraulic that channeled the river’s power through downtown. Part of the attraction was a city leadership that could see into the future, recognizing the potential for Hamilton to become the industrial powerhouse that it was.
In the early 1870s, city leaders approached the Irish-born Gordon, a machinist in his early 30s who had come to Cincinnati to build Union gunboats during the Civil War, about relocating his business to Hamilton. Gordon, with two other men, had purchased the failing Niles & Company in Philadelphia and brought the operation to Cincinnati. They were flourishing but struggling to keep up in a building that was ill-suited for their production demands.
The city donated two acres of land on North Third Street along with 900,000 bricks and enough stone for the construction—all for free, a common practice at the time that allowed Hamilton to compete with Dayton and other growing cities to bring jobs and growth—and with free use of the Hydraulic for a limited time. Gordon and his partners were ready for the move and in 1872 established the Niles Tool Works on the site, a model shop for the time, taking up nearly a full block, and by the end of the century became one of the world’s largest machine tool manufacturers.
The company sold one of its early lathes to James W. See, a young machinist who had just set up his first shop in Omaha. See was not satisfied with the machine and wrote a letter to Gordon, telling him that if he couldn’t design a better lathe himself, he would eat it.
Gordon wrote back to See and told him that if he could design a better lathe, he wished he would come to Hamilton and do so. See, apparently, took the testy suggestion to heart.
In 1874, long after Gordon had forgotten the incident, there appeared in his office a tall, lanky young man who said with a drawl, “My name is See and I came up here to design that lathe for you.”
“He was put off with one excuse after another,” according to a posthumous recollection in American Machinist, “until in disgust he appropriated an empty drawing board and did design a lathe that made Mr. Gordon sit up and take notice.”
Gordon, it is said, gave him a job on the spot as a foreman, then promoted him to chief draftsman, then chief engineer, in rapid succession.
Two years later, See left Niles Tool Works and opened his own mechanical engineering consulting firm with a clientele that would include the largest machine shops in the United States and Europe. He seems to have traveled wide almost constantly, judging by the social notices in the newspapers of the day, but he maintained a home in German Village where his wife—the former Hester Rose of Forestville, Ohio, who came to Hamilton to teach school—kept a busy social calendar with their five children.
James Waring See was born an only son in New York, May 19, 1850, to descendants of French Huguenots. His father was a modeler for architects and family moved a bit during his childhood, and he was schooled in Rutland, New York, and Arcadia, St. Louis, and Springfield, Missouri. In the latter city, his father was called before “the committee” because his son had been teaching black people to read, which was against state law. During the Civil War, in his teens, he served as a telegraph messenger for the Union Army and as an operating room assistant in a Union military hospital in Springfield, Missouri.
Having a natural aptitude and genius for mechanical pursuits, he began an apprenticeship as a machinist after the war in the Springfield Iron Works. “It was here that he laid the broad foundation for his future vocations and career, and upon the completion of his term of service he was employed as a journeyman in various large shops between St. Louis and Yankton, South Dakota,” according to American Machinist, where he was also employed by the federal government working on an Indian reservation.
In 1870, he opened his first shop in Omaha, the last stop before the purchase of an unsatisfactory lathe led to his settling in Hamilton.
Between 1878 and 1883, he enhanced his national reputation as a regular contributor to American Machinist magazine, writing letters under the pseudonym “Chordal,” which made him something of a Mark Twain of the mechanical set. “Chordal had a way of making all he wrote stick with you,” wrote one admirer after his death.
His letters were so popular, having a unique mix of practical shop advice and stories from the trenches of the profession, with colorful characters and witty descriptions drawn from his constant travels, that they were gathered into a book after his busy career took the bulk of his time. “Extracts from Chordal’s Letters” received nine printings.
In the preface he wrote: “It has often come to the author’s knowledge, that they were read by people who, as a rule, never read anything.” The book is available for a free download at archive.org, and much of the quaint, lively writing holds up well, even for those not much interested in machine shops.
His letters, 117 of them in all, developed an almost cultish niche following and continue to be read and quoted in blogs and journals today. The famed British engineer and locomotive designer Sir Henry Fowler called himself “a Chordal missionary,” and said that when he first came to the United States as a young man in 1902 made a “what was really a pilgrimage” to Hamilton to visit his idol.
Thirty-four years later See resumed the columns, writing another dozen letters over a three-year period. The last appeared two days before his death in 1920.
With the invention of the telephone See became greatly interested in its practical workings invented several devices to make switching more efficient and built the first telephone line in Hamilton. As a consequence of that work, he became editor of the Telephone Exchange Reporter, a journal devoted to that burgeoning field.
With Alexander Gordon and James K. Cullen, he built the first electric light plant at the Niles Tool Works, the first in Hamilton.
As he worked as a consultant, he studied to become a patent attorney and developed another national reputation as an expert witness in patent litigation for more than three hundred cases, some of them of great importance, including the validity of the original McCormick reaping machine and litigated for the Wright Brothers of Dayton in their famous patent wars against Glenn Curtiss.
He also held many diverse patents himself, mostly for telephone equipment, machine tools, and engines, but also one for a toy pistol and another for a tunneling system to aid in installing underground pipes across roads without disrupting traffic.
By appointment of Ohio Governor James E. Campbell, a Middletown native, See served as one of the commissioners for Ohio to the World’s Fair held at Chicago in 1893.
He had such an orderly mind that in 1895 he organized the books of the Lane Public Library into the Dewey Decimal system as a volunteer.
Although he enjoyed good health through most of his life, in late January 1920 at age 69, he came down with what seemed to be influenza that developed into double pneumonia. He seemed to be on the verge of recovery when a heart attack put the final period on a life that was described in his obituaries as “perfect,” February 2, 1920. He rests in Greenwood Cemetery.
“He was a bigger man than most of our people knew,” editorialized the Hamilton Evening Journal. “As an expert witness in patent litigation he was a marvel of clear expression and in this his fame was national.
“Mr. See’s life was replete with many deeds of service toward the uplift of his community despite the pressing need his attentions to his busy professional life. He had always taken a prominent and foremost interest in public affairs and municipal reforms for the best growth, development and advancement of the city, although never ostensibly nor for any material personal gain outside of this satisfaction in seeing the city go forward.”
A glowing tribute also came from James K. Cullen, Gordon’s successor at Niles Tool Works: “Honest and honorable, he was trusted implicitly in all business transactions, and socially, while of a retiring disposition, he endeared himself to a large circle of admiring friends who will sadly miss him in the years to come.”