From testing guns near the White House to filing his own patent, Lincoln was an innovator

Rail-splitter. The Great Emancipator. Martyr. That’s how Abraham Lincoln often is remembered.

But he also was an innovator who supported important new technologies throughout his political career. The 16th president, whose birthday is Tuesday, came of age as a young, growing nation embraced invention to settle the continent. 

The son of a farmer, Lincoln was fascinated with agricultural innovation — he spoke at length about the prospects for a “steam plow” during a lengthy address at the Wisconsin State Fair in 1859. He tested weapons outside the White House during the Civil War, was an early supporter of railroads and made the telegraph into an essential tool for presidential communications.

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And he is the only president to hold a patent. Filed in 1849, it was for a device to lift stranded riverboats off shoals.

To learn more about Lincoln the innovator, I spoke with Christian McWhirter, Lincoln historian, at the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum in Springfield, Ill. Our discussion has been edited for length.

I didn’t know Lincoln had a patent. Was the device ever produced?

No. As far as we know, it was never actually put into use. It seems to have been a kind of phase that Lincoln went through. He might have occasionally fancied himself as an intellectual, engineer or scientist. He gave a series of lectures in the late 1850s – what we call the discoveries and inventions speeches — with him theorizing on how inventions work. He goes all the way back to Genesis and talks about Adam’s fig leaf as the first invention.

In his Wisconsin State Fair speech, he goes on and on about the “steam plow.”

It’s a theme that runs through a lot of his speeches. Lincoln was very aware that he was living in a time when technology was taking big leaps forward. The whole foundation of the early Republicans’ political belief was that free labor would allow anyone to rise as high as they wanted in society — Lincoln himself being an example of that. You needed an industrial society for that theory to work.

What other inventions was he interested in?

Lincoln personally tries out guns during the war. There is a rifle that he fires at a target — and that target survives (it’s in the Illinois State Military Museum). Balloon technology was a big thing during the Civil War. There is a story where he tested a balloon in front of the Smithsonian.  

What about the telegraph?

Lincoln is very interested in the telegraph and immediately understands its usefulness. … He’s always going over to the telegraph office and sits there as updates from the war are coming through. It’s a way for Lincoln to, almost in real time, keep track of what’s going on at the front.

Did he also use the telegraph to move the chess pieces around?

Oh yeah, he certainly did, and not just that. We have telegrams where he — and I forget the specific language — telegraphs the White House and says something like, “Mary (the First Lady) needs a carriage, could somebody go pick her up.”

What about his interest in photography?

There are more photographs of Lincoln than all the previous presidents combined. While Lincoln was not a huge fan of his own appearance, he clearly had an awareness of how important it was for his image to get out there and for people to feel like they knew him and feel like they had a connection with him. … Lincoln gives the speech in the Cooper Union (in New York City) — it’s one of his most famous speeches — and they take a photograph of him the morning of that speech. He refers to that photograph as the photograph that made him president.

He was a big supporter of “internal improvements” as well, right?

Absolutely. All the Republicans were. That was a big part of the Republican platform, the Transcontinental Railroad — it’s Republicans that run with that. It doesn’t get completed until long after the Civil War (1869), but the foundations for it are laid during the Civil War. Lincoln had been a Whig before he was a Republican, and the Whigs were very invested in internal improvements. When Lincoln is a state representative here in Illinois, the Whigs get control of the legislature and pass a huge internal improvements package, which ends up blowing up on them and costs the state a bunch of money and ends up becoming a kind of economic albatross.

Throughout his political career, his politics were deeply wrapped up in internal improvements — railroads, canals, the state university system (Morrill Act, 1862) — that comes about from the Republican-led Congress, which Lincoln signs off on.

In some ways, the Lincoln Museum itself reflects Lincoln’s innovative legacy, doesn’t it?

It’s a high-tech museum. It’s very immersive. And we have the Papers of Abraham Lincoln project (papersofabrahamlincoln.org), where we’re collecting everything written to or by Lincoln and we’re digitizing it, transcribing and annotating it and putting it up for free on the Internet. We’ve already published up to his congressional career. We do all this technological stuff, in part, in the spirit of Lincoln a president who endorsed and embraced innovation and technology.

David D. Haynes reports on innovations in business, government and higher education. He is editor of the Ideas Lab, where we field-test ideas for solving problems in Wisconsin. Email: david.haynes@jrn.com. Twitter: @DavidDHaynes. Join our Facebook group.