Charles E. Billings

Charles Ethan Billings (December 5, 1834 – June 5, 1920) was an American mechanical engineer, inventor, superintendent, and businessman. He was elected president of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers in 1895.

Charles Ethan Billings
Born(1834-12-05)December 5, 1834
Weathersfield, Vermont
DiedJune 5, 1920(1920-06-05) (aged 85)
Hartford, Connecticut
Resting placeCedar Hill Cemetery

Biography

He was born in Weathersfield, Vermont, the son of Ethan F. and Clarissa M. (née Marsh) Billings.[1] He served his apprenticeship at Robbins & Lawrence in Windsor, Vermont.[2] Robbins & Lawrence was a factory and armory that was an important early node in the social network of the 19th century machine tool industry.[3]

In 1856, at the age of 21, he worked at the Colt armory in Hartford, Connecticut as a die sinker and tool maker and became their expert on the drop forging process.[2] In 1862, he went to E. Remington & Sons, where he built up their forging plant, increasing its efficiency and saving $50,000 by one improvement in frame forging alone.[2] At the end of the American Civil War, he returned to Hartford as the superintendent of the Weed Sewing Machine Company, which had taken over the old Sharps Rifle Works, built by Robbins & Lawrence.[2]

In 1868, while at the Roper Repeating Arms Company in Amherst, Massachusetts, he worked with Christopher M. Spencer.[2] The Roper company failed and in 1869, the two founded a partnership in Hartford, Connecticut called Billings & Spencer,[2] which would manufacture sewing machines, drop-forged hand tools, and machine tools. Billings perfected a drop hammer for metal forging in the 1870s and designed the copper commutator which was central to the operation of electrical generators and motors.

In 1895, Billings was president of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers.[2]

He died on June 5, 1920 in Hartford, Connecticut and was interred at Cedar Hill Cemetery.[4]

gollark: This makes sense as a display thing, but how do you run it *backward*?
gollark: I tried playing a 10Hz sine wave just now and I can't hear it.
gollark: The position of the pen clearly can't be being directly mapped to voltage on a speaker or something, because the frequency would be waaaaay too low to hear.
gollark: What property of the waveforms it's generating varies as you change X/Y?
gollark: I'm aware it's converting it into waveforms somehow. That's just very vague.

References
  1. Billings, Dwight Morris Archived 2006-10-10 at the Wayback Machine at www.accessgenealogy.com
  2. Roe 1916, pp. 174–177.
  3. Roe 1916, p. 187.
  4. "Charles Ethan Billings". www.findagrave.com. Retrieved 2 February 2020.

Bibliography
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