![]() ![]() His wife and children sued the city for negligence, winning $2,000 in March 1854. However, he was never able to work in it.Įarlier that year, Temple was walking home at night and tripped over a plank left out by a New Bedford construction crew, sending him into a sewer ditch and injured beyond hope of recovery. His lack of commercial success, despite his stroke of genius, may have been the motivation for the local firm Delano and Pierce to offer Temple a new shop in 1854. It is also possible he knew a young Frederick Douglas in the 1830s, when the famous author was pursuing odd jobs at the wharfs. He moved shops several times, renting homes nearby for his family.He was elected Vice President of the New Bedford Union Society in 1834, the city’s first anti-slavery group. The Temple family continued to grow, and Lewis began to train his son, Lewis Temple Jr., in blacksmithing. With nothing to prevent them, other blacksmiths freely copied his idea and made their own improvements. Only three to ten percent of patent holders were African American, many choosing to file under the name of a white lawyer to ensure their product had a fair shot.Since Temple was unable to write his own name, it was unlikely he could have hired one without help. Although a gifted blacksmith, he never received a formal education.The idea of obtaining a patent probably would not even have crossed his mind. Lewis Temple never patented his invention. This was far more effective than the traditional harpoon, quickly becoming the weapon of choice for all savvy harpooners. A small piece of wood held the head straight while it was thrown into the whale, breaking on impact and allowing the barb to pivot ninety degrees into the blubber. ![]() It was similar to its Arctic predecessors, with a sharp point and swinging barb that was held in place by a pin. Lewis Temple created the first iron toggle harpoon in his Walnut Street shop in 1848. New Bedford whalers were aware of this technology from hunting in Alaskan waters, but were unable to replicate it. Toggling harpoons, which have a frontward cutting edge and a backwards sweeping barb that pivots (or toggles), had been used in the Arctic for centuries. These would frequently tear holes in the whale’s blubber instead of lodging in it, leading to angry whales and no profit. In the first half of the nineteenth century, harpoon tips resembled arrowheads. Since almost all crews were paid through a cut of the profits, losing a whale was a significant hit to their paycheck. If the harpoon came out during the chase, the whale would get away. The crew would grab onto a rope tied to the harpoon and be pulled through the ocean as the whale tried to escape, a risky experience referred to as a “Nantucket sleigh ride.” When the whale was too exhausted to continue, they would then row close enough to stab the leviathan to death. When thrown at a whale, the barbs would catch in the blubber and prevent the harpoon from dislodging. The most important tool of a whaler was his harpoon: a barbed iron point mounted to a long wooden handle. Temple arrived in New Bedford in 1829 and married Mary Clark, presumably also African America, and had two daughters shortly after.A blacksmith by trade, he opened a shop on Walnut Street in 1836 and began producing the various metal objects required on whaling ships. He was born either a slave or freedman in Richmond, Virginia around the year 1800. One person that came to the city to make their fortune was a free African American named Lewis Temple. ![]() By the 1840s, however, they were being eclipsed by an upstart mainland town: New Bedford. In 1851, Herman Melville wrote in his masterpiece Moby Dick, “New Bedford has of late been gradually monopolizing the business of whaling,”and that “nowhere in all America will you find more patrician-like houses parks and gardens more opulent, than in New Bedford.”The city had a superior harbor that fit even the biggest of whaleships, and a rich industry sprang up around the waterfront. Nantucket, an island off the coast of Massachusetts, was an obvious capital of the whaling industry. A consumer might pay as much as $2.50 for a gallon-$80 today. This meant whales were essentially swimming petroleum deposits, and massive fortunes could be made by those brave enough to hunt them down. Whaleships became floating factories for processing the massive creatures, complete with tryworks for boiling the whale blubber into precious oil. The Industrial Revolution demanded whale oil to light the factories, as well as the plastic-like baleen for lady’s corsets and spermaceti for mass-produced candles and perfumes. Hunting whales has been an integral part of Native American communities for millennia, but whaling had never been practiced on such a massive scale as it was in the 1800s. ![]()
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