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Dictionary of Miramichi Biography

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RUSSELL, WILLIAM HENDERSON (1844-1913)

RUSSELL, WILLIAM HENDERSON, inventor; b. Lower Newcastle, 8 Jan 1844, s/o John Russell and Margaret Miller; brother of Matthew Russell; m. 1872, Mary Jane McMaster, d/o William McMaster and Jane Ingram, of Newcastle; d. there, 3 Nov 1913.

William H. Russell was an inventor and promoter who acquired patents for a large number of mechanical and electrical devices. In 1888 the Vancouver News reported his invention of an elevator and tramway in that city for loading and discharging the cargoes of ships. Three years later, however, this invention was still not operational. An interest of Russell's in the years that followed was the electric street railways and streetcars, and he had an involvement with the systems introduced in Boston, Lexington, and Newton, Mass. He held patents for a number of items of streetcar equipment, including a trolley wheel that carried its own lubricant and an overhead wire connector that worked on curves. Some of these inventions were said to have been manufactured and used in the industry.

In 1902 Russell was in Glace Bay, N.S., in connection with the construction of the towers which Marconi used that year in establishing official transatlantic wireless communication with Europe. While he was there he interested a number of businessmen in his inventions, and in 1904 he promoted the formation of the Russell Electric & Hydraulic Co., with several Sydney, N.S., investors as directors, and George A. Watt of Chatham as president. The company owned seven Russell patents, including his "perpetual motor," which promised "to revolutionize the motor power of the world."

More often than not, Russell's inventions were bedeviled by problems which delayed or prevented their completion or production, but for a long time Miramichi businessmen and the local press boosted his efforts. The Union Advocate expressed a commonly-held view when it referred to him in 1904 as a "genius," and as "possibly the greatest inventor of this or any other age." A turning point came in 1906, however, at a meeting held in Chatham at which the Nova Scotia directors of the Russell Electric & Hydraulic Co. lashed out angrily at him, describing his "perpetual motor" as nothing more than "a dream of perpetual motion" and demanding to know the truth concerning the "sales quality" of his "double acting hydraulic jack" and other patents.

Soon afterwards Russell severed ties with his associates and moved to England. He did not come back to Newcastle until 1910, at which time he was planning to erect a factory. This did not materialize, and yet he persevered. In 1912, the year before he died, he talked a New Glasgow, N.S., company into undertaking the trial manufacture of an invention which he described as "a combination of thrust and roller bearing."

Russell's wife, Mary Jane McMaster, died in 1876, at age twenty-seven, and he spent most of the years that followed living on his own in hotels and boarding houses. When he died at his boarding house in Newcastle in 1913 his only named survivor was a son, John Montague Russell, of the Yukon Territory.

Sources

[b] church records [m] official records [d] Leader 7 Nov 1913 / Advance 29 May 1902; Advocate 21 Jun 1876, 4 Jan 1888, 12 Nov 1890, 8 Jun 1904, 2 Aug 1905, 30 May 1906, 13 Dec 1910, 12 Apr 1911, 24 Apr 1912; World 10 Feb 1906


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