Whiskey Men as Inventors

Foreword:  During the six years I have profiled more than 560 pre-Prohibition “whiskey men,” — distillers, distributors and saloonkeepers — it has been striking how many of them also took a turn at inventing things.  Perhaps my astonishment was misplaced, however, when one remembers that the late 1800s and early 1900s were the age of Edison, Bell and the Wright Brothers.  Many Americans were trying their hand at inventing new things and patenting their ideas.  Whiskey men were simply following the temper of the times.  Among a number of possibilities I have selected four men who best epitomized this innovative mentality while otherwise engaged in making and selling liquor.  

Perhaps the most prolific among them was David D. Cattanach of Pawtucket, Rhode Island — the Leonardo DiVinci of whiskey men.  Shown right, like Leonardo, Cattanach was an artist and an inventor in many fields.  As a youth in Scotland he invented a continuous process for manufacturing ingredients for gun powder.  Upon emigrated to the U.S. and Pawtucket, he innovated the use of hydrochloric acid for making stained glass windows, decorating churches throughout New England.  Later he invented a coal-efficient stove and a process for refining and treating oils.

In 1885 Cattanach took an initial step into the liquor trade when the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office awarded him two new patents.  One was for an “apparatus for the manufacture and distillation of alcohol, hydrocarbons, and acetic acid, and for aging and refining liquors.” The illustration he submitted with the application, shown here, is not as elegant as Leonardo’s drawings but presumably more practical. The second patent was for the process involved in using the distilling apparatus.   More than a decade would elapse, however, before Cattanach opened his own distillery.  Perhaps unable to sell his system to others successfully, he determined to employ it himself.

With a local partner, he created a corporation they called the Beverage Hill Road (B.H.R.) Distilling Company, capitalizing it at $100,000 — equivalent to $2.5 million today.  His flagship brand was “Heather Blossom” whiskey.  Clearly citing his inventions, Cattanach’s ads claimed that his liquor was made by an entirely original process and contained no fusel oil or other poison. Things did not go well, however, for the Beverage Hill Road enterprise.  Perhaps the Cattanach distilling process gave an off-taste to Heather Blossom and other B.H.R. products.  Whatever the reason,  the evidence is that only three years after it opened Cattanach’s company summarily shut down.

Equally dedicated to inventing as Cattanach was Joshua Low. a liquor dealer of Steubenville, Ohio, who was considerably less successful in selling his ideas.  It appears that Low’s first invention was a “thill coupling,” that he patented in 1873 when he was 28 years old.   For those, like me, not familiar with the term, a thilll is one of two long shafts, usually of wood, between which a horse is hitched. Although no evidence exists that his “thill coupling” ever saw practical fulfillment, he turned his attention to coupling railroad cars.  This  invention, he claimed, could firmly join two pieces of rolling stock simply by pushing them together.  Again, there was apparently no commercial interest.

Low next turned his inventing fever to an area of where his knowledge was more personal — coaxing liquid out of a larger container and into a jug or bottle.  As a liquor dealer he had experienced years of tediously siphoning whiskey and wine out of barrels and into wholesale or retail portions. The task apparently had triggered a desire on Low’s part to facilitate a means whereby the liquid could be drawn off at a point higher than the tank or cask.  His patent drawing is shown here.  

Having patented this invention in January 1885, Low continued to work on the problem of emptying barrels.  His improved dual siphons needed to be stabilized in place if they were to work right, he subsequently suggested.  This required a specialized kind of siphon cork made of rubber to hold each tube in place.  With this further development, patented the following September, he claimed he had perfected “a device…that will meet the general demands of the trade….”  While Low himself may have employed this invention, again there is no evidence of general manufacture.  

Freeman Graham II and his sons were part of an era in American history, embodied in Thomas Edison, during which a knowledge of how machines worked and the inventive genius to improve them could be a way of upward mobility.   With their technical and executive know-how the Grahams moved from agricultural implements to success in making whiskey in Rockford, Illinois.

A native of New England, Graham was lured to the Middle West by the larger salaries he could make as a designer/manager for farm implement companies.  He was responsible for innovations that improved the performance of reapers and other agricultural equipment.  With his earnings he established the first distillery in Rockville, which also was the first sour mash whiskey facility in Illinois.  He called called it the Graham Distilling Company.   Shown below is a illustration of the distillery.  Smoke pours from a chimney on the building, while the warehouse on right has been constructed to resemble a medieval castle. 

With his son Byron, Freeman in 1884 patented a machine for cutting matches, the drawing shown here.  Likely this invention failed to return even a fraction of the wealth the family took from making and selling whiskey.  Although he had begun his career in the reaper business, Byron Graham was involved with the distillery virtually from its beginning.  He headed its management after his father’s retirement and about 1901 changed the company name to Graham Bros. Distillery.  The market for Graham rye and sour mash whiskeys continued to grow.  By 1891 the company was grossing the current equivalent of $7.5 million annually and employing 45 workers.

“The Cushing Medical Supply Company” and its proprietor, Dr. Ira Barrows Cushing, in their very names carry a certain expectation of authenticity and trustworthiness.  That is, until one discovers that the “medicine” mainly supplied by Cushing was whiskey that the homeopathic physician mixed up in his Boston headquarters, presumably using the “Cushing Process for Purifying Alcoholic Liquors,” that he patented in 1892.

Shown below is the Rube Goldberg-like contraption that Cushing assembled for a “process of and apparatus for purifying and maturing liquors or distilled spirits.”  His  patent application explaining how it worked ran to more than three highly technical and abstruse pages.  An example of his description: “My present invention consists in commingling a suitable quantity of oxygen gas with the atmospheric air employed for treating the liquor, whereby the air which is disseminated through the liquor is energized or rendered more active for the purpose of rapidly oxidizing the fusel-oils into their avoring-acids and the process of maturing the liquor thus accelerated and rendered more perfect than heretofore.”   

Whatever the examiner understood of “atmospheric air,” “avoring acids,” and the rest, on November 1, 1892, the United States Patent Office issued Cushing Patent No. 485,984.  Cushing reputed used his patented system for his own whiskey, a variety of brands sold largely on the basis of their medicinal value.  The label of “Cushing’s Process Purified Whiskey” shows a simplified version of his apparatus.  

Four years after the doctor’s death in 1908, his firm was dissolved and his whiskey brands terminated.  No evidence exists that any distillery or liquor house subsequently adopted the Cushing Process for making whiskey, suggesting that the reputed benefits of the doctor's invention may have been largely “atmospheric air.”

Note:  For a more complete rendering of each of these four inventive whiskey men, see my earlier posts on each:  David Cattanach, November 14, 2013; Joshua Low, April 19, 2017; the Grahams, August 9, 2014, and Ira Cushing, October 9, 2017.

Boston’ s Dr. Cushing Supplied Spiritous Medicine

“The Cushing Medical Supply Company,” and its proprietor, Dr. Ira Barrows Cushing, shown right, in their very names carry a certain expectation of authenticity and trustworthiness.  That is, until one discovers that the “medicine” mainly supplied by Cushing was whiskey that he mixed up in his Boston headquarters, presumably using the “Cushing Process for Purifying Alcoholic Liquors,” that he invented and patented in 1892.

Shown below is the Rube Goldberg-like contraption that Cushing assembled for a “process of and apparatus for purifying and maturing liquors or distilled spirits.”  His  patent application explanation of how it worked ran to more than three highly technical and abstruse pages.  An example of his description: “My present invention consists in commingling a suitable quantity of oxygen gas with the atmospheric air employed for treating the liquor, whereby the air which is disseminated through the liquor is energized or rendered more active for the purpose of rapidly oxidizing the fusel-oils into their avoring-acids and the process of maturing the liquor thus accelerated and rendered more perfect than heretofore.”   Whatever the examiner understood of “atmospheric air,” “avoring acids,” and the rest, on November 1, 1892, the United States Patent Office issued Cushing Patent No. 485,984.

Ira Cushing’s road to this crowning achievement began on November 20, 1846, when he was born in Providence, Illinois.  His father, Caleb Cushing had been a retail grocer in Providence, Rhode Island, who with neighbors decided to buy land being offered by the Federal Government in Bureau County, Northwestern Illinois.  In May 1837, some 30 Rhode Island families, with household goods and provisions to last one year, made the trek, naming their town, Providence after the one they had left.  Caleb was accounted a pioneer “enduring…many hardships and privations” — almost dying in a snow storm.

Young Ira attended area schools until he was 16 and then was sent for two years to the English High School at Princeton, Illinois.  In 1864 he was recruited to Company F of the Illinois 146th Infantry, an outfit that saw no combat during the Civll War and solely was used to garrison locations around Illinois.  After ten months and the Confederate surrender, Cushing was mustered out of service in July 1865, likely going to work in his father’s store.

Through his mother, Malinda Peck (Burrows) Cushing, he was related to two well-known Eastern homeopathic physicians, Dr. Ira Barrows of Providence, R.I., and Dr. George Barrows of Taunton, Mass.  In 1869 at the age of 23, Ira was sent East to study medicine in the offices of his Uncle George.  From there he gravitated to the Hahnemann Medical College in Philadelphia, named for the founder of homeopathy, Samuel Hahnemann, who based his medicine on the claim that a substance that causes the symptoms of a disease in healthy people would cure similar symptoms in sick people.  Many consider this a quack theory.  Ira continued his studies at the New York Homeopathic College in 1871, graduating the following Spring and practicing as a doctor, first in Taunton and subsequently in Brookline, Massachusetts, a suburb of Boston.

On October 27,1874, at the age of 28, Cushing married a   Massachusetts woman eight years his junior.  She was Hanna Elizabeth Alden, born in Bridgwater, Plymouth County.  The couple would have three children, Ira May,  born in 1875; Maude, 1877; and Arthur, 1881.   Perhaps because of the financial pressures of a growing family  in 1882 Cushing founded the Cushing Medical Supply Co.  His letterhead showed a somewhat simplified version of the apparatus for the “Cushing Process.”   A major location was 580 Washington Street in Boston, shown right, with another outlet at 160-166 Canal Street.

Cushing’s enterprise offered a variety of proprietary whiskey brands, including "Boston Light,” "Cushing 100 Proof Whiskey,” "Cushing Highest Grade,” "Cushing Process Co. Bourbon Whiskey,” "Cushing Standard Rye,” "Cushing Straight,” "Essex Rye,” "Gold Standard,” "Home Brand,” "Old Buck,” "Old Colonial Rye,” "The Cushing Process Co. Pure Old Rye Whiskey,” and "Yachting Rye.”  The proprietor never bothered to trademark any of these brands.  He advertised them by issuing shot glasses to saloons and restaurants carrying his liquor. 

Cushing packaged his brands in clear or amber glass, from flasks and quarts to gallon size.  The bottles were embossed with paper labels, as indicated by examples shown throughout this post.  He continued to emphasize the importance of his “discovery” of the Cushing process.  According to a biographer: “It utilizes nature’s own means, and consists of forcing heated atmospheric air — which is first purified according to Professor Tyndall’s method of destroying germs of animalcule — through the liquors, thoroughly oxidizing the fusel oils and eliminating the poisons.”

Given the medical seriousness with which Cushing seemed to approach the merchandising of alcohol, it is somewhat startling come across a Christmas greeting that he supplied to customers containing several stanzas of verse, quoted here in part:

Each should receive for his daly strife

Something to smooth the rough edge of life.

Talk as you will, there is nothing quicker

To ease your care than a glass of liquor.

So Christmas day, we’ll drink from the glass

Which brings a cheer than naught can surpass.

Nor did Cushing shrink from offering other nostrums.   In a cookbook published by his wife circa 1900, the doctor advertised “PULMONINE for your cough” calling it Dr. Cushing’s great lung remedy and stomach corrector: “Unlike other medicines it will not disarrange the stomach and bowels.  Try it once and you never will be without it.”   He also featured a potentially addictive coca wine.  The company thrived, recording in 1905 the equivalent today of $15 million in assets.

Throughout his years selling alcoholic liquids from Boston, Cushing continued living in Brookline and working as a homeopathic doctor.  He is recorded as being the “examining surgeon” for several Boston area charitable organizations and a member of both the Boston Medical Society and the Gynecological Society.

At the age of 61, Cushing was diagnosed with an advanced stage of colon cancer.  An operation was quickly performed but with limited knowledge of infection at that time, sepsis subsequently occurred and on August 14, 1908, he died.  Taken from the Cushing home at 19 Harris Street, shown here, Cushing  was buried in Brookline’s Walnut Hills Cemetery.

The Cushing Medical Supply Company appears to have survived for three more years under different management but disappeared from Boston business directories about 1912.   An official notice from the State of Massachusetts included it among “certain delinquent corporations” that it required be dissolved by the first day of April.  After 29 years the brainchild of Dr. Ira B. Cushing was gone.  No evidence exists that any distillery or liquor house subsequently adopted the Cushing Process for making whiskey, suggesting that its reputed benefits were largely “atmospheric air.”

Labels:  Dr. Ira B. Cushing,  Cushing Medical Supply Co., Cushing Process, Essex Straight Rye, Cushing 100 Proof Straight Whiskey, homeopathic medicine