Andrew Jackson Beard

American engineer

• Born: March 29, 1850
• Birthplace: Woodland, Jefferson County, Alabama
• Died: May 10, 1921
• Place of death: Birmingham, Alabama

Beard’s major invention was the automatic railroad car coupler, which dramatically improved the speed and safety for joining railroad cars. He also patented a rotary steam engine and an improved plow.

Primary fields: Agriculture; railway engineering

Primary inventions: Jenny coupler; rotary steam engine

Early Life

Andrew Jackson Beard was born in 1849 as a slave on a plantation in Woodland, Alabama. His parents, a slave couple, chose the Beard surname from the owner of the plantation. Andrew had no formal education during childhood or at any other time during his life. Consequently, he could neither read nor write. Learning took place through interaction with others. By the time the fifteen-year-old Andrew became a free man, he had already developed skills in agriculture, carpentry, and blacksmithing. He chose to remain on the Beard farm until 1868, eking out a living as a sharecropper. He was able to accumulate enough assets to purchase an eighty-acre farm near Center Point, Alabama. There Andrew and his wife, Edie, raised three sons. He also raised the three sons and daughter of Hattie Horton, one of his sharecropper tenants, and gave them his surname.

Although Beard was proud of owning his own farm, farming became less and less appealing to him. His epiphany came in 1872, after an arduous three-week trip by oxcart to Montgomery. After that trip, Beard built a flour mill and a church (which also served as a school) on his land for his tenant farmers. Although Beard was illiterate, he had a great respect for education.

Beard’s flour mill, located in Hardwicks, Alabama, ran smoothly and generated capital, but his mind began to drift to other projects. He began experimenting with designs for an improved plow, and he registered a patent for it in 1881. Another improved plow was patented in 1887. Selling his rights to the patents for nearly $10,000, Beard invested the money into a real estate business. Within a few years, his capital accumulation was $30,000. Once again, Beard’s creative energies were channeled in other directions.

Life’s Work

During the early 1890’s, Beard became an employee of the Alabama and Chattanooga Railroad (which grew to become the Georgia Pacific and Southern Railway system). He became obsessed with designing a rotary steam engine that would be safer, more efficient, and more economical than the conventional steam engines of his time. Exploding steam engines were a common cause of injury or death, but Beard’s rotary engine was not subject to explosion because of its more even distribution of internal pressure. His venture was closely supported by Melville Drennen, who served two terms as mayor of Birmingham. In July, 1892, Beard was granted a patent for the rotary engine by the U.S. Patent Office. Few would have predicted that a former slave, lacking basic literary skills and any sort of structured education, and operating in a deeply racist society, could have achieved so much. He was not only a financial success in several different careers but also a creative genius as an inventor. Although by the age of forty-three Beard had achieved much, his greatest invention was yet to come.

While working on his rotary steam engine, Beard also became intrigued with the problem of joining railroad cars together. Often, railroad yard workers were mutilated or killed while attempting the dangerous operation of dropping a pin at exactly the right moment into a receiver hole of a railroad car in motion. If the worker did not move away from the cars fast enough, he could be crushed. It was Beard’s dream to remove the human element from the process and design a system based on the automatic coupling of cars. Beard worked at home tinkering on a safe and efficient means of coupling cars. He was not trained in either engineering or metalworking, so the venture must have seemed overly ambitious to observers. What he designed by 1897 was a system in which horizontal jaws placed at each end of a railroad car engage each other merely by bumping. On November 23, 1897, he received a patent for an automatic coupler. His application was signed with the characteristic X, witnessed by two observers.

To attract investors, Beard built a wooden model of the “Jenny coupler,” which was displayed at a convention of the Master Car Builders’ Association in Atlantic City, New Jersey. Based on the potential of his invention, Beard was made an honorary member of that association. This was a great honor for an uneducated former slave. The distinction also made it possible to attract several Birmingham investors and market his invention. He founded the Beard Automatic Coupler Company and registered four additional patents for improvements to the coupler between 1899 and 1904. Ultimately, he sold the rights to the coupler to a New York company for $50,000. Further royalties made Beard the first African American millionaire in Jefferson County.

Beard’s new fortune was heavily invested in real estate. For the African American residents of Birmingham, Beard’s accomplishments were a source of pride. Often the mustached, bespectacled, well-dressed inventor could be seen with his fine horse and shiny buggy riding down the streets of Birmingham. However, while Beard’s investments were at first successful, the issue of his illiteracy and business mismanagement caused many business failures and near bankruptcy. He continued with his inventions as much as declining health allowed but registered no new patents. In his later years, suffering from arteriosclerosis and virtually paralyzed, he lived with his foster daughter, Mamie, in Woodlawn. He was admitted to the Jefferson County Alms House soon before he died. His funeral was held at Jackson Street Baptist Church, and his remains lie in an unmarked grave in Woodlawn Cemetery.

Impact

Beard’s well-designed rotary steam engine produced little impact in U.S. locomotive design. Ultimately, only a few rotary engines were constructed by European concerns and were used for limited purposes. His Jenny coupler, however, transformed railroad efficiency and safety for rail yard workers. In 1892 alone, there were 11,000 recorded accidents in the United States involving the coupling of railroad cars. In an age before workers’ compensation and other types of worker insurance, crippling or deadly accidents such as those produced by being crushed between two railroad cars were tragedies both for the individual involved and for the family who relied on the worker’s income.

In 2006, Beard was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame for his contributions to rail transport coupler design. He is credited with inventing the first automatic railroad car coupler, which dramatically reduced serious injuries to railroad workers. Beard’s invention, patented in 1897 and improved in 1899, was identified as a forerunner of automatic couplers used today. Automatic couplers also made possible the use of power air brakes, which had not been successfully used with link-and-pin couplers because of excessive slack in the coupling.

The fact that it has taken over a century for Andrew Jackson Beard to gain national recognition as a major American inventor is a situation that has an impact all its own, indicating that African Americans have made a larger contribution to the development of technology in the United States than has been officially recognized.

Bibliography

Daniels, Rudolph. Trains Across the Continent: North American Railroad History. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000. An excellent study on the development of railroads in the United States. The chapter “Glory Years Technology” is particularly relevant to problems related to the development of coupling instruments. Contains index, notes, bibliography.

McKinley, Burt. African-American Inventors. Portland, Oreg.: National Book Company, 2000. Short studies on black inventors, including Andrew Beard. Includes bibliographic references.

Sullivan, Richard Otha. African American Inventors. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1998. Written for a juvenile audience, this work contains a short biography of Beard.