Alfred Ely Beach (1826 - 1896)

Born 1 Sep 1826 in West Springfield, Hampden, Massachusetts, United States

Ancestors

Descendants

Died 1 Jan 1896 at age 69 in New York County, New York, United States

Biography

Alfred was born in 1826. He was the son of Moses Yale Beach and Nancy Day. He passed away in 1896.

Alfred Ely Beach was an American inventor, publisher, and patent lawyer, born in Springfield, Massachusetts. He is most known for his design of New York City's earliest subway predecessor, the Beach Pneumatic Transit. He also patented a typewriter for the blind. Beach was the son of a prominent publisher, Moses Beach. Alfred Beach worked for his father until he and a friend, Orson Desaix Munn, decided to buy Scientific American, a relatively new publication. They ran Scientific American until their deaths decades later, and it was carried on by their sons and grandsons for decades more. Munn and Beach also established a very successful patent agency. Beach patented some of his own inventions, notably an early typewriter designed for use by the blind and an engineering first for the Americas, designed and built one of the world's first tunneling shields in the same year as famed engineer James Henry Greathead.

After the Civil War he founded a school for freed slaves in Savannah, the Beach Institute, which is now the home of the King-Tisdell Cottage Foundation.

Sources

• ANCESTRY.COM
• Wikipedia: Alfred Ely Beach. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Ely_Beach