Brothers Walter (left) and Jonas Aiken helped usher in a new industrial age with the invention, manufacture and marketing of the automatic knitting machine (Photos courtesy of Richard Candee).

FRANKLIN – By the 1850s, Edison was still years from inventing the light bulb, but one creative design clearly flickered in brothers Walter and Jonas Aiken’s heads as they came home each night from work knitting stockings at the old Franklin Mills Co., with a grand idea and endless determination.

In a small, dusty workshop along the banks of the Pemigewasset, amidst the clatter of tools and clanking of metal, the pair was carrying on a family tradition: tinkering with an already good idea and making it even better. The result would change the way the world worked and help to usher in a new industrial age.

In a rapidly evolving mechanical age where new gadgets and whirligigs for every conceivable need came to life each day, the Aikens were emerging as one of the nation’s most prolific – and successful – families of inventors. Led by patriarch Herrick, a Peterborough native who himself had invented a spiral brush and a machine for splitting leather, generations of Aikens would spend nearly a century practically paving a road to the U.S. Patent Office.

From makeshift showerheads made from perforated tin bowls (you supplied the water and then pulled a string to release it) to a personalized train ticket punch and a specialized set of tools made to sharpen handsaws, the Aikens would produce hundreds of inventions big and small, often fueled more by imagination and old-fashioned Yankee resourcefulness than technology as we know it. Today they are credited in part with inventing the model for the world’s first mountain-climbing train, the Mount Washington Cog Railway in Bretton Woods.

“It was the ideal of its day,” says Richard Candee, Boston University Professor Emeritus of American and New England Studies, who has written and spoken extensively on the Aiken family. “Almost every young guy had a love of mechanics and was sort of hoping to invent that something that would be the next mousetrap, the next light bulb, the next phonograph; that next great idea that would solve a societal need and take off. All it took was one idea.”

Even Abraham Lincoln had gotten into the act, receiving a patent for a device that would lift boats over shoals, an invention that was never manufactured.

The Aiken automatic knitting machine could weave a pair of stockings in just 10 minutes—a feat that previously took your average knitter two days to perform by hand (Photo courtesy of NH Historical Society).

In the case of the Aikens, their idea was taking shape in the small family workshop along the banks of the Pemigewasset. At a time when the growing nation’s needs were more and more dictated by speed and efficiency, the Aikens were figuring out a way to deliver both in the field of textiles. By marrying the knitting machine on which they’d toiled each day at the mill – invented by Englishman John Pepper – with another invention of the day, James Hibbert’s distinctive latch needle, the brothers had created something never before seen: an automatic knitter that could weave a pair of seamless stockings in just 10 minutes. It was a feat that would take your average knitter two entire days to perform by hand.

With its unusual pie shape and inward facing rib of needles, the Aiken automatic knitting machine looked weird. But it more than did its job, knitting up to 400 dozen pairs of stockings each day at facilities like Belknap Mill in Laconia, and evolving to weave everything from socks and stockings to woolens for Civil War and WWI soldiers, headbands, bonnets, meat bags, girdles and even medical implements like internal tubes to hold stents for heart patients.

“The Aikens single-handedly revolutionized the textile industry,” says Belknap Mill Executive Director John Moriarty. “They came up with an idea for mechanizing knitting that had never been tried or executed with the same kind of success… The lace, linens and textiles produced here were shipped all over the world. If you were looking for a comparison, it was very much like what China has become today.”

Workers at Belknap Mill were capable of turning out 400 pairs of stockings per day among other things, thanks to the Aiken machine, helping to make Laconia’s mills alone the textile equivalent of China in the late 19th century (Photo courtesy of the Belknap Mill Society).

The Aikens, to be sure, were among thousands of inventors in their day, succeeding with some ideas and failing with others. Where they stood apart was in their ability not only to invent, but to manufacture (Walter’s specialty) and market (Jonas’s field). Where poorer inventors with lesser resources were often forced to sell their patents to larger manufacturers, the Aikens were also shrewd businessmen, pursuing patents almost by the gross, hiring salespeople across the Northeast and Midwest, winning gold and silver medals for new products at county and industrial fairs, and scaring off would-be copycats through threat of lawsuits.

In all, Candee estimates the Aikens sold up to 3,000 of their industrial knitting machines throughout the 1850s and 60s, and nearly 2,000 others manufactured for domestic use, many finding their way to overseas markets. In doing so, they would join a distinguished list of Granite State inventors and pioneers whose ideas would shape both national and world history.

Chalk it up to the state’s flinty, do-it-yourself independence, its belief in the ability of the individual and communities to solve problems or the tendency of rural culture to inspire imagination, New Hampshire residents have for centuries never shied from forging new paths. New Hampshire, after all, was the first state to draft a Constitution (1776); a state that gave birth to the nation’s first Thanksgiving, thanks to “Mary Had a Little Lamb” writer and Newport resident Sarah Josepha Hale whose letters to President Lincoln in 1863 inspired him to establish the holiday. It was the first state to adopt integrated baseball with the assignment of Roy Campanella and Don Newcombe to the Nashua Dodgers in 1946, and the first to send an American into space (Alan Shepherd of Derry).

The Aikens assisted in the conceptualizing and construction of the Mount Washington Cog Railway, the world’s first mountain-climbing train, with Campton’s Sylvester Marsh. (Photos courtesy of Richard Candee and NH Historial Society.)

New Hampshire inventors, meanwhile, have included Berlin native Earl Silas Tupper, whose Tupperware containers continue to lend new life to leftovers, and Nashua’s Ralph Baer, whose interactive video game console, the Odyssey, would be the precursor to today’s PlayStation and Nintendo Wii. Londonderry’s James Wilson would be America’s first commercial globe maker and Samuel Morey of Orford one of the first inventors in the early 1800s of steam power and the internal combustion engine.

As New Hampshire has grown, so have its technical capacity and the number of patents issued annually. Manchester’s Dean Kamen has established himself as one of America’s foremost inventers and marketers, having produced the first insulin pump for diabetics, the Segway personal transporter, and an annual robotics competition for high-schoolers. Patents sought by Granite State inventors, meanwhile, number in the hundreds each year, and have recently included everything from a stationary baby walker to a roller ski, a soup dispenser pump tip and a fish fighting apparatus for helping to reel in large catches at sea. That’s before you consider all the inventions in the fields of genetics, software and biology.

(Photo courtesy of Richard Candee and NH Historial Society.)

“So much of today’s inventions are things you can’t see,” Candee says. “But the ethic is still the same. We’ve just moved from a wooden culture to a metal culture to, in many cases, a microscopic culture.”

Something Granite State residents can continue to see is the original Aiken machine still on display at Belknap Mill in Laconia, alongside the legacy of a family whose future generations would go on to invent aircraft and soap- and candle-making machinery.

“I think there is something true to the notion of the successful idea being 2 percent inspiration and 98 percent perspiration,” says Bob Drake, a filmmaker and Dartmouth visiting scholar whose great-great grandfather was Jonas Aiken. “I think you just marvel at the meticulousness and detail that went into what they did… I mean, pieces like the knitting machine are inspiring as objects alone, but when you think that they did this at a time when they didn’t have all the tools or 200 years of culture that we have today, it’s amazing. These were incredibly patient people and real craftsmen with great energy and passion for what they did.”

It is a passion woven many times over in New Hampshire and national history – one that lives on in the dreams of folks with the will to bring that next great idea to life.

Special thanks to the NH Historical Society, Belknap Mill Society, Richard Candee, Bob Drake and Citizen Publishing for their assistance and generosity with this story.