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Those Were the Days grew out of Edward Hewitt's stories to his grandchildren, and is as warmhearted as a letter home, full of untroubled admissions of failures and modest accounts of achievements, of unsensationalized disclosures of gigantic frauds, and an unself-conscious wistfulness. "I should be just as happy as I have ever been," says Edward Hewitt in conclusion, "if it were not for the fact that Mrs. Hewitt has become an invalid. ... If only I could get my wife well again, life would be even more enjoyable."
The book's distinction is that it takes readers so quickly and intimately into the Cooper and Hewitt families that it virtually adopts them. Its weakness is that, through its 316 pages, no connecting thread guides the narrative, and the discursive anecdotes include ancient and doubtful ones, as well as the stories which throw their mellow light on the strange people, mores and morals of the administrations of General Grant.
Across its span of years—through Peter Cooper's 92, Abram Hewitt's 80, Edward Hewitt's 77—the picture unfolds of a day of unchecked productivity, where wealth was the reward of ingenuity, and the common good was the result of wealth, when patents, like decorations for heroism, were signed by the President, and the capitalist who backed a new mechanical device to better the lot of mankind (and make a private fortune) was the equal of a general, a commissar, a duke, or a mechanic.
Spawning Inventions. All of the Coopers and Hewitts were inventors. They spawned ideas like salmon. Each had his pet idea, like a spoiled child, which he labored over more & more as it failed to work out, and which he grew more & more fond of as the other successful ideas raced on to practical accomplishment while the failure stayed in the laboratory. Old Peter Cooper's pet was a continuous chain drive for boats. He planned an endless chain, run by water power, along the Erie Canal. He got Governor Clinton's approval, and set up an experimental unit that pulled a boat eight miles an hour against the current of the East River. But farmers along the canal, who sold feed to the tow mules, refused to permit the chain to be installed.
Most of the people the Coopers and Hewitts knew were inventors or financiers of inventors. Readers of Those Were the Days get an impression of a nationwide intoxication with applied mechanics. Hiram Maxim's new improvements on electrical devices made equipment obsolete so fast that the electrical companies sent him abroad for ten years, with a contract not to invent anything electrical during that time. Restless, he invented the machine gun (for which Queen Victoria knighted him). When he demonstrated it before the Kaiser, Wilhelm asked to try it out, swung it in a circle, almost killed the whole General Staff of the German Army.