Program

NYS Historic

Subject

Industry & Commerce, People, Site

Location

8 Clove Pl, Central Valley, NY 10917, USA

Lat/Long

41.329087829652, -74.126071455559

Grant Recipient

Woodbury Historical Society

Ethan I. Dodds was born on December 4^th, 1872, and raised in New Galilee, Pennsylvania. He was an unconventional student who struggled with reading, but his inventive genius overshadowed this deficiency. After being sent home from school one day, seven-year-old Ethan created his first invention. He noticed that his mother was exhausted from stirring thick apple butter in a kettle. Ethan rigged her rocking chair with various belts and pulleys so that she could produce the smoothest apple butter without rising from the chair.

At seventeen, Ethan left home and went to work as a blacksmith at Westinghouse Works in Pittsburgh. He quickly rose to the top and became George Westinghouse’s right-hand man. When Guglielmo Marconi, the famous electrical engineer, came to Westinghouse with his idea for wireless energy transmission, Dodds was recruited to collaborate with him. With Dodds’ assistance, Marconi invented a machine that could transmit wireless signals over forty feet. Around this time, Dodds married Anna Bucking, whom he went on to have three children with. Dodds broke into the railroad industry when we started working for the Pullman Company. He developed patents for everyday conveniences such as steel sleeping cars, locomotive fireboxes, and light switches for train berths. Dodds went on to enter a partnership with E. H. Harriman, the railroad tycoon and financier, to electrify the Erie Railroad system. Their working relationship became so close-knit that Harriman had a laboratory built for Dodds alongside his home in Central Valley, New York. This arrangement ensured that Dodds would be at the beck and call of Harriman. Unfortunately, their project went unfinished after the sudden death of Harriman in 1909.

Dodds and his wife also moved to Central Valley in 1908, where they lived for nearly 25 years. Dodds is ultimately known as a prolific mechanical and industrial engineer who went on to submit over 2,000 patents—more than Thomas Edison developed. He passed away at the age of 70 in 1943.