Whiskey Men of Science

                                              

Foreword:   Making good whiskey is both an art and a science.  Subtle changes in the chemistry of the distilling process can mean the difference between a good bourbon and rotgut.  Few of the men and women involved in making whiskey before 1920 had any scientific training but through experience and onsite experimentation often achieved good results.  A handful of whiskey men approached the process from a more scientific perspective.  Three of them are briefly profiled here, none of whom in the final analysis, succeeded.

David D. Cattanach of Pawtucket, Rhode Island, was a true “polymath,” that is, someone whose expertise spans a significant number of different fields, allowing the individual to solve problems that others can’t.  Born in Scotland in 1835, he emigrated to the United States about 1855, already having invented and sold an improved method for making gunpowder.  He first made his name on these shores as a stained glass artist and decorator of churches.  

Cattanach never stopped inventing.  Among his innovations was an improved furnace that reputedly would give the same amount of heat with one-third of the coal required by ordinary furnaces.  It also consumed its own smoke, something environmentalists today would applaud.  He also invented processes for refining and treating oils and in May, 1776, with other investors spearheaded a new company in Rhode Island called the “Chattan Oil and Paint Works” for the manufacture of paints and varnishes.

Then Cattanach turned his attention to making a whiskey that, he claimed, would be unlike other spirits that were “injurious…because of acids and alkalines.”  The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office in 1885 awarded him two 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 is shown here.  A second patent was for the process involved in employing the distilling apparatus. 

Perhaps unable to sell his system to established distillers, Cattanach determined to employ it himself.  In 1895, with other investors, he formed the Beverly Hill Road Distilling Co., capitalizing it at $100,000 and naming its principal product “Heather Blossom.”  The inventor advertised the product heavily to physicians:  One such ad read: “The B.H.R. Distilling Co. calls attention to their Heather Blossom pure malt Whiskeys, Brandies, Wines, etc., which through its new system of distillation by phyisco-chemical means, are rendered chemically pure, and are of reliable and uniform quality and adapted to the requirements of the Medical Faculty in its demand for a pure and nutritive stimulant.” 

Despite Cattanach’s efforts things did not go well for the Beverage Hill Road enterprise.  Perhaps the distilling process gave an off-taste to his whiskey.   Whatever the reason, only three years after it opened the company summarily shut down. Heather Blossom Whiskey disappeared forever. 

“The Cushing Medical Supply Company,” and its proprietor, Dr. Ira Barrows Cushing,  in their very names carry a certain expectation of authenticity and worthiness.  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 here 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 “energized…atmospheric air,” “avoring acids,” and the rest, on November 1, 1892, the United States Patent Office issued Cushing Patent No. 485,984. 

A homeopathic doctor, Cushing had practiced in several Massachusetts towns before opening his “medical supply house” in Boston.  Along with other patent medicine nostrums he offered a variety of whiskey brands, many of them with “Cushing” in the title, e.g. “The Cushing Process Old Rye Whiskey.”  He continued to emphasize the importance of his “discovery” of the Cushing Process, telling 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.”

Throughout his years selling alcoholic liquids from Boston, Cushing continued 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 Dr. Cushing was diagnosed with an advanced case of colon cancer.  An operation ensued but sepsis occurred and in August, 1908 he died. The Cushing Medical Supply Company appears to have survived for three more years under different management but went bankrupt and along with the doctor’s whiskeys  disappeared about 1912.  

It may seem like a stretch to call a Japanese pioneer of biotechnology, credited with the first isolation of adrenalin, a “whiskey man.”  Nonetheless, for several pivotal years in his life, Jokichi Takamine, a true scientist,  was financed for his research into a less expensive method of whiskey production by the Peoria, Illinois-based “Whiskey Trust.”

Born in Japan in 1854, Takamine came to the U.S. in 1884, married an American woman, and in rapid success had two sons.   He sought employment in America and decided to pursue his interest in distilling.  The key was adapting the methods of brewing Japanese sake (rice wine) to making whiskey.  In Peoria, Takamine sparked interest in one of the most important liquor executives in the Nation. He was Joseph Greenhut, the head of the Distilling and Cattle Feeding Company, a monopoly controlling dozens of distilleries in the Midwest and known popularly as “The Whiskey Trust.” 

After meeting Jokichi in person Greenhut was sufficiently impressed to give the Japanese scientist a contract to allow him to set up a research laboratory.  This facility, given heavy security by the Trust, was located inside the malt house of the Woolner Grove Distillery, along the river on the south side of Peoria.  Takamine called his lab “The White House.”  In 1891 word got out what Takamine was up to:  His use of rice rather than malt in the distilling  process would be simpler and faster, resulting in a lower cost for whiskey — Trust whiskey.

Hampered by arson at his original distillery, thought to have been set by malt workers, Takamine finally was able to put his distilling methods to the test.  He manufactured a lower cost whiskey which Jokichi called “Bonzai,” a greeting given to the Emperor of Japan meaning, “May you live ten thousand years!”  Under pressure from dissident distillers and experiencing financial problems, in 1894 the Whiskey Trust ousted Greenhut and broke off its relationship with Takamine.  It took Bonzai whiskey off the market and reverted entirely to creating its whiskey from malt.

Disappointed and broke, the Japanese scientist turned to the pharmaceutical business, inventing a remedy for indigestion that made him a multi-millionaire. He continued to be active as a scientist, including credited as the first person to isolate adrenalin.  He also started new biotechnical enterprises in Japan and the United States.  Takamine is remembered in the Nation’s Capitol for donating 3,020 Japanese cherry trees in 1912 to decorate the Tidal Basin.  Their blooming annually brings thousands to Washington.

Note:  More complete biographies of each of these men may be found elsewhere on this post:  David Cattanach, November 14, 2013;  Dr. Ira Barrows Cushing, October 9, 2017, and Jokichi Takamine,  August 5, 2018.

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.

The Polymath Who Set His Mind on Whiskey

According to the dictionary, a “polymath” is an individual whose expertise spans a significant number of different subject areas, allowing the individual to solve specific problems.  Leonardo Di Vinci frequently is given as an example.  Donald D. Cattanach of  Pawtucket, Rhode Island, shown here, had a lot in common with Leonardo.  In addition, he was a whiskey man.

Like Leonardo, Cattanach was a skilled artist and an inventor in many fields.  He was born in 1835 in the Highlands of Scotland into an old and distinguished family.  According to a 1897 biography, through his father, Duncan, he was a lineal descendant of “The Cattanach,” a Scottish chieftain also known as the “Cat of the Mountain.”  His mother, Mary, was a descendant of Macdonald, a chief of Clan Glengarry who fought the British at Culloden and was executed for his trouble.

Because his Scottish family had some wealth they were able to send Donald to London for his education.  He attended a military school there where he excelled as a swordsman.  He also became skilled in several branches of chemistry.  Before leaving England he invented a continuous process for the manufacture of the ingredients for gunpowder.  After arriving in the United States in 1855, he sold the invention to a Georgia manufacturer.  Moving to Pawtucket  he then began the manufacture of hydrofluoric acid for the embossing and decorating of glass.  He linked that endeavor to his artistic interests. 

His 1897 biography states:    "For a number of years Mr. Cattanach carried on the largest decorative business in New England. He decorated several of the churches in Pawtucket and Providence and in other towns of the state. Many private dwellings also bear testimony to his artistic ability. The designs and colors were his own, and the latter possess a durability not achieved by any one else."  Shown here are two photos of a stained glass window Cattanach designed and executed for the mansion of Rhode Island Governor Lippitt about 1865.  In the 1870 U.S. Census, the Scotsman gave his occupation as “decorative painter.”

The same census found him married. In 1859, after four years in the United States, Cattanach wed Agnes Lick, a twin daughter of Hugh and Mary (Drown) Lick.  Agnes’ father was a prominent cotton manufacturer and later a Pawtucket businessman.  The family was Scottish and she was accounted a relative of Gilbert Stuart, the portraitist of George Washington.  The 1870 census found the Cattanachs with six children in their home, three boys and three girls, ages ranging from nine to one year.

Cattanach never stopped inventing.  Among his innovations was an improved furnace that reputedly would give the same amount of heat with one third of the coal required by ordinary furnaces.  It also consumed its own smoke, something environmentalists today would applaud.  He also was working on processes for refining and treating oils and in May, 1876, with other investors he spearheaded a new company in Rhode Island called the “Chattan Oil and Paint Works” for the manufacture of paints and varnishes. The 1800 Census listed his occupation as “oil merchant.”  As his sons matured, he took them into his operations.  By 1897 three of them, John L., Hugh L., and Donald C., were engaged with their father in the management of the Cattanach laboratories and works located at the Ingrahamville area of Pawtucket

Ever the restless inventor, 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.

Recognizing that he would need sales expertise in his operation, Cattanach engaged as a partner a man named Edward R. Dawley. In 1895 together they created a corporation they called the Beverage Hill Road (B.H.R.) Distilling Company, capitalizing it at $100,000. Cattanach was president;  Dawley was secretary and treasurer. Dawley also was a principal in the Hunt's Remedy Company of nearby Providence, Rhode Island. The office address of the whiskey enterprise was the same as the Hunt's firm, one that hawked a patent medicine called “Hunt’s Remedy.”  That nostrum was merchandised as “The best kidney and liver medicine....Never known to fail.”  It was advertised as curing virtually every disease known to man, from dropsy and diabetes to dyspepsia and hemorrhoids.

This kind of hyperbole was transferred to B.H.R’s whiskey which they named “Heather Blossom,” obviously a reference to Cattanach’s Scottish roots.  Under the same name B.H.R. also sold brandy and wine. The partners advertised widely, with only slightly veiled medical claims.  An ad, headed “Queen Victoria,” posited that other spirits were “...injurious, especially to ladies, elderly people, dyspeptics and invalids” because of acids and alkalines.  Only Heather Blossom was pure.  Clearly citing Cattanach’s inventions, the ad claimed that their liquor was made by an entirely original process and contained no fusel oil or other poison.  In an 1895 Boston Evening Transcript ad the ingredient “amyl” was singled out “to cause evil effects and create an appetite for strong drink.”  No amyl, it was claimed, would be found in Heather Blossom products..

Another ad was more explicit about Cattanach’s innovations.  It read: “The B.H.R. Distilling Co. calls attention to their Heather Blossom pure malt Whiskeys, Brandies, Wines, etc., which through its new system of distillation by phyisco-chemical means, are rendered chemically pure, and are of reliable and uniform quality and adapted to the requirements of the Medical Faculty in its demand for a pure and nutritive stimulant.”  The ad contain a testimonial letter purportedly from a professor of chemistry at Boston University attesting to the purity of the product.   The Atlantic Medical Weekly, reporting on the 1896 meeting of the Rhode Island Medical Assn., commented on the large display for Heather Blossom Whiskey.  It noted that representatives of B. H. R. Distilling had called on more than 5,000 physicians promoting the whiskey.

Cattanach and Dawley also went all-out to design a distinctive bottle for Heather Blossom and early patented the design.  Each size had a slightly different look.  The quart bottle carried the name and the B.H.R. logo.  The back was a guarantee of a full quart and a admonition against refilling, a common gambit of crooked bartenders.  The front  and back of the pint bottle was similar.  The company also gave out free samples from time to time. The lettering on those smaller containers was modified.  The back contained the warning that it was not to be sold.  Heather Blossom bottles ranged in colors ranging from yellow to reddish amber and in both light and dark shades.

Things did not go well 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 the company summarily shut down.  Dawley quit the distillery but remained with Hunt’s Remedy Co.  Cattanach may have had some hope of to keeping on.  Rhode Island tax records shown that, as lessee in 1890 he paid taxes of on the Beverage Hill Road property of $147.51.  Heather Blossom Whiskey, however, disappeared forever.

The 1900 census found Donald Cattanach, age 62, living in Pawtucket with his wife, Agnes.  Living with them were two sons John, 36, and Donald, 29, and a daughter, Mary, 38, as well as Agnes’ sister.  Where Cattanach’s occupation was written on the census form, it subsequently was scratched out, possibly indicating that he had retired.  Shown here is a photo of the Cattanachs, Donald and Agnes, taken in 1909 on their 50th wedding anniversary.  This aging polymath -- Rhode Island’s Leonardo Di Vinci -- could look back on a life of artistry and inventiveness yet contemplate just why his foray into the whiskey trade, an effort that once looked so promising, ended so quickly and completely. 

The Cattanach at 50 Years Wed

Note:  The bottle illustrations and some of the information for this article came from the website of the Little Rhody Bottle Club.   Their members are some of the more avid collectors of Heather Blossom bottles.  The color photograph of Cattanach’s window and of the 50th anniversary couple are from the website of Maude Dexter, a descendant.