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“He was just a born tinkerer. I mean he’d love playing around with gizmos, and he invented what may be the world’s first washing machine when he was a child. It was a device to beat dirty laundry.”

John Steele Gordon
Business Journalist & Author of 'A Thread Across the Ocean'

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School was not free. Because his father was unable to send him to school, Peter Cooper’s basic education was as an apprentice. In his free times he tutored and taught himself to read and write.

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After his marriage to Sarah Bedell and the birth of their first child, Cooper invented a self-rocking cradle. The patent was signed by President James Madison.