By Maggie Boyd, Archivist at the Academy
In June 1881, the Massachusetts Charitable Mechanic Association invited the Academy to judge entries for its “Grand Medal”—an award recognizing the invention “most conducive to human welfare.” The Academy’s Archives holds many of the award entries, which often featured clippings of advertisements making sweeping claims. Submissions included improved ventilation systems, patented baby food, and girdles, among other inventions.
The Academy chose Albert Hamilton Emery, an engineer from Connecticut, for his “great testing machine,” designed to measure the strength of solid materials under push or pull forces. His invention was selected because it “lessens the risk of life and the cost of construction, by condemning every dangerous part and exposing each excess of material.”
The New York Times highlighted the significance of the award in a November 18, 1881, article: “The high standing of this body, including as it does many of the most noted scientists in this country and Europe, is too well known to require comment here, and it gives great force to that part of the judges’ report which refers to the machine as ‘the greatest invention in mechanism of the present century.’”
A finding aid with associated images about this collection of records is available on the Academy’s website.