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Manslaughter and Mrs. Fish. Society people were also interested in inventions. Mrs. Hamilton Fish bought the first electric automobile in Gramercy Park. During her trial run, a big Negro stepped in front of the car. Mrs. Fish tried to slow down. But she pushed the lever forward and the car speeded up, knocked the Negro down, ran over him. Mrs. Fish tried to stop. But she pushed the lever too far the other way, and the car backed up, ran over the Negro again. This rattled Mrs. Fish. Again she pushed the lever forward too far, again ran over him. The Negro jumped up, yelled: "'Fore God, ma'am, you sure is goin' to run over me," dashed for his life around the corner.
Alexander Graham Bell came to the Cooper house to show old Peter Cooper his telephone. The Hewitt boys studied it, cut out a wooden earpiece, made coils and a magnet, got a piece of black enameled iron from a tintype photographer for a diaphragm, and ran wires to the bed of their brother Erskine, who had scarlet fever, found they could talk to him without breaking quarantine. The doctor was astonished. Thomas Edison demonstrated his talking machine to Peter Cooper, and the boys copied that too. They used their telephone diaphragm and the cook's rolling pin, which they stole while she was in the laundry. They got the machine to say "Hello," were irritated when P. T. Barnum withdrew his offer to pay $10,000 for a machine that would really talk.
$600,000 Forgery. Cooper Hewitt's favorite discovery was the transformation of polyphase alternating current to direct current through the mercury vapor transformer. He decided suddenly, circa 1910, that "if a path of electric current were established across a tube which had a single negative electrode and multiple positive electrodes, and the positive electrodes were each connected with a different phase of the alternating current, the positive impulses would be conducted successively to the negative electrode which was already in operation with its surface resistance broken down, but the negative impulse could not be transferred to the positive electrode because here the resistance was not broken down. The positive impulses would, therefore, flow successively from each of the positive electrodes to the negative and a continuous direct current would pass from the negative electrode." Cooper had not tried it. He simply decided it must be so. It was. Because it interfered with General Electric's profitable business in mechanical transformers, the corporation sued Cooper. Their lawyer discovered a forgery in their evidence, got so mad he made the corporation buy Cooper's patent for $600,000.