les and purchases; and all his
evenings he spent at home, making up his accounts, answering his
correspondents, studying out new inventions, or talking and reading to
his wife and children.

By these simple, old-fashioned methods he built up a business and
accumulated a fortune too large to be thus administered. It would have
been impossible for one head to carry the details of work and
management, for one pair of eyes to superintend each part of the work,
or for one pair of feet, however tireless, to travel all the ways which
lead to and from a great modern industrial establishment. Still less
could financial direction and protection be compassed by the simple
scheme which Mr. Cooper, in his old age, recalled with pride. "I used,"
he said once, "to pay all my debts every Saturday night; and I knew
that what I had left was my own!" This could not have been strictly
true; but it doubtless expressed an old man's memory of the way he
began, and the principles he had followed, with that horror of debt
which dated from the time when debtors could be put in jail. Fortunately
for Mr. Cooper, his son Edward, and his son-in-law, Abram S. Hewitt,
were at hand to undertake the management of his business enterprises at
the time when his own simple methods would have proved inadequate, so
that his inventive genius, adventurous courage, and, above all, intense
philanthropy, were backed with ample means.

In this account of his business ventures (though of much later date than
those already mentioned) the part played by Peter Cooper in the
development of the American iron industry and in the construction of the
first transatlantic submarine telegraph may be recorded.

The manufacture of iron was one of the early industries of the American
colonies, and after the Revolution it was prosecuted with increased
activity in small and primitive establishments. With its development
into scientific forms on a large scale Mr. Cooper was both directly and
indirectly connected. His Ringwood estate in New Jersey had been the
scene of the operations of the Ringwood Company in 1740, and of its
successors,--Hasenclever (1764) and Erskine (1771); and the Durham
furnace, on the Delaware River in Pennsylvania (on the site of the
Durham Iron Works of Cooper & Hewitt), made its first blast in 1727. Mr.
Cooper himself was engaged in 1830 in the manufacture of charcoal iron
near Baltimore, and in 1836, together with his brother Thomas, he
operated a rolli