Charles James Eames | Kirkby Teaching Resources

The Third Brother

Although Charles James Eames, Richard’s twin brother, came to the United States with Henry and Richard, he soon blazed his own path. However, he kept in communication with his brothers and mimicked them by continually reinventing his persona and his past. Although Charles never lived in Minnesota, he helped his brothers acquire land there. Charles and his first wife, Isabella, purchased Minnesota land grants acquired by Delaware’s Agricultural College as part of the Morrill Act of 1862 that seized Ojibwe and Dakota land to benefit fifty-two land grant or ‘land grab’ colleges. By purchasing that scrip, Charles helped his brothers profit from that then-recent land seizure.

Charles and his twin were born in the parish of Fulham in Middlesex County, London on September 15, 1831, and were baptized the following December 23^rd. It was not recorded which twin was born first, but when he was fourteen Charles assumed the pseudonym of Mister Ditto in a playbill for a January 1846 amateur theater production of ‘The Quaker’, so on that flimsy pretext he may have been the younger twin. All three of the Eames brothers who came to America were amateur thespians, but Charles might have been the most proficient actor, as in an 1849 playbill he was the only one to earn a feature role as Mr. Dismal, in a production of John Baldwin Buckstone’s ‘Life: A Comedy, in Three Acts.’ In that evening’s second production, Thomas Haynes Bailey’s ‘Why Don’t She Marry: A Musical Burletta in Two Acts,’ Henry and Richard joined Charles to play the parts of three soldiers.

Isabella McClure

Charles was also the only brother aboard the Arago in June 1857 who was unmarried. Within a decade of their arrival, Charles met and married his first wife, Isabella. Their marriage appears to have been a match of equals, remarkable for its time. Although the names of Henry’s and Richard’s wives never appeared in legal documents, as was normal for the time, Isabella’s name appears alongside Charles on both patent applications and land grant documents.

Isabella McClure was the granddaughter of Adam Blackledge, a prominent and wealthy New York builder. She was thirteen years younger than Charles and the marriage brought Charles into the upper echelons of New York society. Their first child, Edith Isabella Megevan, was born on Nov. 10, 1866, followed by Charles James a year later. However, Charles birth was not without loss. On August 8, 1867, Bertha Eames, infant daughter of Charles and Isabella, died at the age of one month and two days. Like his father, the younger Charles was a twin, but his sister did not survive. At the time of their loss, the family was living in Ravenswood, one of Long Island’s most exclusive neighborhoods.

Despite her relative youth, Isabella played a far more prominent role in her husband’s professional life than most women of her time did. Charles’ first recorded patent, in May of 1867, was for an improvement in the manufacture of soap - a domestic concern with Isabella’s probable fingerprints. In a June 1869 patent case, Isabella’s name is even listed on the patent in place of her husband’s, and she was Charles assignor on a second soap patent in July of 1872. Since all of Charles’ subsequent work concerned industrial processes, Isabella may have played a pivotal early role in Charles’ choice of profession. Although he had been a gas-fitter in England, upon his arrival in the United States, Charles, like Henry and Richard, ‘reinvented’ himself as a British professor. Unlike Henry and Richard though, he claimed to be a chemist rather than a geologist or mining engineer and Isabella’s soap was his first known patent.

Throughout the 1860s, Charles and Isabella lived in New York City. On a blank piece of printed letterhead preserved in Richard Eames’ scrapbook, Charles gives his business address as 48, Bible House, New York and proudly listed himself as ‘Chas. J. Eames, sole assignee and manufacturer of Jones’ Patent Piston Spring’. His business address suggests Charles was already enjoying some measure of financial success as the six-story Bible House, at Astor Place and East Ninth Street between Third and Fourth Avenues, was not only the then headquarters of the American Bible Society, but New York City’s first cast iron building. Built in 1853, the building and the nearby Astor library were iconic features of what was then a very-well-to-do 1860s neighborhood.

In 1867, the same year their twin children were born, Charles and Isabella also made their first Minnesota land purchases to aid Henry’s and Richard’s dreams of land wealth. That land grant was for the south half of the southwest quarter of section 22, Township 30 north, Range 22 west in Ramsey County, a parcel of land that lies west of White Bear Lake. It was the only land the Eames brothers would purchase in the Twin Cities area. Following the collapse of the Lake Vermilion gold rush and their departure from Saint Paul, the remainder of the Eames brothers’ land dealings took place in northeastern Minnesota.

(at right is Charles and Isabella's indenture agreement for land west of White Bear Lake in Ramsey County from Minnesota Historical Society collection)

In January of 1869, Charles and Isabella joined Charles’ brothers in the purchase of lots on Lake Avenue and Lake Shore in upper Duluth. Henry, Charles, and Isabella subsequently transferred their two-thirds share of those lots to Richard the following year for the token amount of ten dollars. Isabella’s name appears on the land deeds besides her husband’s which was unusual for the time. Her name was also on two land transfers in 1870 of land originally granted to the Agricultural College of Delaware. Those grants were part of the 1862 Morrill Land Grant College Act, more accurately renamed the ‘Morrill Land Grab’ by the Indigenous communities who saw most of their land taken by its passage. Delaware’s Agricultural College was one of fifty-two land grant universities to benefit from this land seizure and among that college’s acquired lands were grants along the North Shore of Lake Superior west of Grand Marais and between Two Harbors and Beaver Bay. Charles and Isabella acted as agents to purchase those lands and then transfer them to Henry and Richard in hopes that the land contained economic mineral deposits. At the time, Charles had an office and laboratory at 26 Pine Street in New York City.

at left is Charles and Isabella's Delaware College Scrip - MHS collection

By October of 1872, Charles was gaining a reputation as a chemist. In that year, he not only renewed a patent on soap manufacture with Isabella, but also filed patents with Henry for the manufacture of illuminating gas from hydrocarbons and one on treating the ‘ammonical liquor’ of gas works. These are the earliest records of what would become Charles’ long-term interest in gas fuels. At the time, gas for lighting was primarily derived from coal as the widespread use of natural gas required pipelines which were decades away. Instead, gas for fuel or lighting was derived from the alteration of coal and other hydrocarbons using different methods, some of which Charles helped pioneer. Later, in April of 1884, Charles would testify before a Massachusetts legislature joint standing committee on manufacturers as an expert on the new development of manufacturing water gas. In his testimony, Charles claimed to have been a chemist and metallurgist for twenty-five years and was a member of the New York Academy of Sciences. Charles had begun as a gas-fitter installing gas pipes in wealthy homes, but a quarter-century later, he was an acknowledged authority on the manufacture of gaseous fuels, having studied them for fourteen years. Charles was also amassing an impressive range of patents to back up his reputation as a chemist. Many of those patents reflected his continued contact with his brothers and their interests in mineral resources as the patents were in the fields of ore extraction and processing.

In August of 1885, Charles filed eight Canadian patents for processes to make a variety of iron types directly from ore as well as a patent for the graphite lining of metallic furnaces. These were filed at a time when Henry had moved to Philadelphia and was filing similar patents there on ore extraction and purification. In 1889 and 1891, Charles also filed patents on a reducing stack, and two reducing ore processes. However, a significant name was missing from all of Charles’ later patents.

Julia Beebee Ross

On October 5, 1874, Isabella died at the age of 29 and Charles was left with two young children aged 7 and 9. To care for them, Charles turned to a recent widow, Julia Ross, whose husband, Leander Ross, had died nearly a decade earlier. Julia was the daughter of William Beebe, the owner of an iron foundry. Shortly after William’s death in 1859, his foundry took over finishing the dome of the U.S. Capital building in Washington D.C. and would later provide the railings for the Brooklyn Bridge. Like Isabella, Julia helped secure Charles’ place in upper class society. Besides her father and husband, Julia had also lost a child so she could well emphasize with Charles’ loss. Coincidentally, Julia’s infant had been named Edith and if she had lived would have been a bit older than Charles’ Edith.

In the 1880 U. S. Census of New Marlborough, Berkshire, Massachusetts, Charles is living with Julia and two children, Edith (age 15) and Charles (age 13). Julia’s age was listed at 28, nearly twenty-one years younger than Charles. In reality, she was really only seven years his junior. After Isabella’s death, Charles had moved his family to Massachusetts but continued to base his office and laboratory in New York City. With 130 miles between his residence and office, it is unlikely Charles spent much time at home, especially with the limited transport between the two locations in the 1880s. Despite the gulf, this domestic arrangement continued for several years. As late as 1886, the New York City directory lists Charles’ chemistry office on Pine Street but gave his home as being in Massachusetts.

On February 2, 1888, Charles’ daughter, Edith married Charles Henry Stouffer of Philadelphia, but the marriage was not a lengthy one. Edith died on December 11, 1894, just past her twenty-eighth birthday.

By the 1900 census, Julia and Charles were living in Manhattan where they rented a house and had eight boarders, four married couples whose husbands listed their professions as electrical engineer, lawyer, buyer of dry goods, and treasurer of a manufacturing company. Despite hosting boarders, the neighborhood was still well-to-do. The 1900 census also shows Charles continued the Eames’ tradition of altering their past. He posthumously made his mother French to set a more elegant tone on his ancestry.

However, Charles time with Julia’s was ending. Julia died suddenly on July 6, 1901. At the time Charles and Julia were living in Bensonhurst on Long Island, a new suburban residential area. After Julia’s death, Charles moved to Brooklyn and in the 1905 New York census, was one of three boarders living with a middle-aged couple and their nineteen-year-old daughter.

Bertha Eames

In 1908, Charles married for a third time. In the 1910 U. S. census, Charles was living at 311 West 95^th Street, a prestigious apartment building five blocks northwest of Central Park. He lists himself as a naturalized citizen, whose father was English while his mother was still French. Despite being nearly seventy-nine, Charles, now a Professor of Chemistry, worked on his own account and reported that he had not been out of work at any time in the previous year. His wife, Bertha, was thirty-nine years his junior. In the 1910 Journal of the Society of Chemical Industry, Charles’ office was located at 99 Water Street, over eight miles from his residence on the southern tip of Manhattan.

Born in Barbados, Bertha immigrated to the United States in 1902 with her sister Effie May de Glanville who was married to the son of a West Indies missionary. In Bertha, Charles had found another spouse who was willing to challenge the sexist norms of her time. Years after Charles’ death, Bertha published letters in the Brooklyn Eagle that championed the liberal republican Alf Landon in his doomed campaign against Franklin Delano Roosevelt and defended the labor union leader John L. Lewis.

In 1913, Charles suffered another family loss when his son, Charles Jr., died. In another reflection of the Eames brothers’ close family ties, Charles Jr. had followed the paths of his uncles, becoming a mine owner with extensive properties in Arizona. Charles Jr. achieved considerable financial success of his own and had married Helen Noe Young. The two married relatively late in life, both being in their mid-thirties. Charles seems to have found someone who matched his own mother’s forward-thinking views as Helen would later serve as editor of the women’s page of the Bronx Home News for many years and broadcast a radio program of her own poetry and essays that ran on several stations.

Unfortunately, the couple would not be together for long. On the evening of July 21, 1913, Charles was on this way to meet Helen in San Francisco, when he stopped to visit a friend in Tucson, Arizona. On that evening, Charles Jr. mistakenly swallowed several tablets of bichloride of mercury, thinking they were sleeping pills. At the time, bichloride of mercury was a common, but highly toxic, syphilis treatment and Charles Jr. died hours later.

Charles Eames - death and legacy

Less than two years later, on March 4, 1915, Charles Eames died at New York’s Home for Incurables in the Bronx (now St Barnabas Hospital) at the age of eighty-three. At the time of his death, he and Bertha resided at 348 West End Avenue, a five-story townhouse in a fashionable neighborhood three blocks northeast of Central Park.

Charles’ burial and final resting place was a testimony to his abilities and remarkable confidence. Charles was cremated at Fresh Pond Crematorium, by Mount Olivet Cemetery in Queens, New York. The crematory, built in 1884, was the third crematorium in the United States, constructed only eight years after the first crematorium was built in Washington, Pennsylvania. Since 1895, Fresh Pond has been the United States’ oldest crematorium and remains active. But the original building, from its ‘refrigidarium’ to keep bodies indefinitely, a ‘caliderium’ (high temperature room for cases of possible suspended animation), its ‘oedicularium’ or urn room, ‘atelier’ or autopsy room, and its beautiful chapel, was all designed and constructed under the supervision of Charles Eames.

With no background or training, Charles put himself forward for the project and brought it to a successful conclusion, which was a remarkable achievement. Of course, as might be expected, there were a few stumbles due to Eames’ inexperience. During construction, a January gale blew down two crematorium walls and controversy arose over who was responsible. And a November 16, 1885, Buffalo Courier Express article noted that Eames’ chimney was too short to create a sufficient draft. During a test, fortunately using ox and ram bones instead of one of the fifty stored human bodies, gases escaped and caught fire, chasing the crematorium’s president and directors from the building. The chimney had to be built 20 feet higher, and a blower installed before the process went as planned.

However, it was a later, failed project that brought Charles to the attention of West Coast newspapers. In 1891, Charles, supposedly fronting a group of Pittsburgh foundry owners, convinced the citizens of San Diego to subscribe $200,000 (the equivalent of nearly seven million dollars now) towards the construction of an iron works in the Roseville area. However, the collapse of a local bank shortly after construction began and the reluctance of Eames’ supposed Pittsburgh cartel to step forward, caused the project to fail. The February, 1892, bank collapse reversed San Diego’s earlier unbridled optimism for the iron works and embrace of Charles. Through late summer and fall of 1891, Charles was championed in the newspapers, but by mid-June of 1892 local newspapers advocated giving the subscription to a new syndicate, vowing the city did ‘not want any iron plants ala Eames and Roseville’. Although Charles attempted to struggle on, in January of 1893 another iron works purchased the remnants of his California enterprise.

at left, Pittsburg Dispatch - June 21, 1891 article on Eames' plan for building an Iron Works in San Diego, California.

On August 13, 1891, during the height of Charles’ prospects in San Diego, The San Diego Sun published a biography of Eames to introduce him to their city.

“Dr. Charles J. Eames was born in Falham, Middlesex county, England, in 1830. At the age of 14 he was sent to the continent of Europe, where he pursued a course of study in Leipsic, Berlin and Brussels; after which he returned to England, where he pursued a course of study in mechanics, then in Edinburg the special course in chemical and metallurgical studies. He finally graduated in the University of Leyden, Holland.

After graduating in chemistry and metallurgy he pursued a course in practical mechanics, at the works of Maurdsleys, England. Arriving in this country in 1856, …”

Charles’ given birth and emigration years were only a year off the actual dates, but everything book-ended between those ‘facts,’ was utter fantasy. At the age of 14, Charles was not attending school on the continent but was playing the role of Mr. Ditto on an amateur London stage. Charles never attended college, much less a litany of Europe’s most prestigious institutions.

The newspaper biography continued for many paragraphs, describing Charles’ remarkable contributions to different industries. While some of those accomplishments, if slightly inflated, had some legitimacy, the article also credited Charles with discovering bacteria and the antiseptic properties of carbolic acid, effectively claiming credit for Dr. Joseph Lister’s advances in antisepsis and the idea of sterilization during surgery using carbolic acid as an antiseptic.

“About this time Dr. Eames was engaged in the separation and distillation of coal tar products, making a complete separation of the products obtained from the temperature of 60° F. to 500° and 600° F. Some of the products being carbolic acid, and its derivatives, such as cresylic and rosolic acids. Subsequently these acids were compounded in soap, and are sold to this day under the name of Buchan’s carbolic soap, the large royalties accruing to the Doctor during the legal period. About 1864 he was busy conducting experiments, for uses of carbolic and cresylic acids, and while so engaged discovered their antiseptic properties, which eventually led to a series of experiments for the prevention of contagious diseases; this also led to the discovery of bacteria and monads – species or germs producing such diseases by infursorial life. While conducting these experiments the Doctor took the small-pox and by use of the acids prevented any of his family, consisting of wife and small children, from contracting the disease. Being the only manufacturer of carbolic acid he supplied large quantities to the Boards of Health of New York, Philadelphia, St. Louis, Chicago and all the large cities. Mixed with water it is used by sprinkling in horse car stables for the preventing of excessive odors and extermination of flies.”

That carbolic acid claim would be repeated in Charles’ obituary a quarter century later.

New-York Tribune, March 5, 1915

DR C. J. EAMES DEAD

Dr. Charles J. Eames, who made several notable discoveries in the field of chemistry, died yesterday in the Home for Incurables at the age of eighty-four years. He drew the plans for the first successful crematory in this country, at Fresh Pond. His body will be cremated.

Dr. Eames was the discoverer of carbolic acid, and was the first to apply it in surgery to prevent infection. He found a process of making celluloid without which the commercialization of the product would not have been possible. He invented a method of forging steel directly from the ore, which was used by the Carbon Steel Company for many years.

The crematory he planned has served as a model for similar buildings throughout the world. Royalties on his discovery of carbolic acid gave him a large income, and itn the early 60’s he was the owner of several fast horses, bred on his stock farm in the Berkshires. During the Civil War he served as advisory chemist for the army department at Willetts Point.

During the last fifteen years Dr. Eames lived in retirement. He is survived by a wife and a twin brother. He was a member of the Chemical Society and the Union League Club. Services will be held in The Funeral Church, 241 West Twenty-third Street to-morrow night. His ashes will be placed in one of the vaults there.

Carbolic acid was discovered by Karl Ludwig Freiherr von Reichenbach, a German chemist and geologist, about the time of Charles’ birth and Joseph Lister was the first to use it as a surgical antiseptic. However, Charles may have provided carbolic acid to many U.S. cities.

Epilogue

Regardless of carbolic acid, by the end of his life, Charles had a reputation as a chemist and inventor of note and his death was reported in newspapers across the country. His imaginative ‘reinvention’ aboard the Arago fifty-eight years earlier, from gas-fitter and amateur thespian to chemical engineer, had been based on little more than his theatrical skills and audacious confidence. However, over the intervening decades, Charles, like his brothers Henry and Richard, became what he had once claimed to be. Unlike his brothers though, Charles’ transformation appears to have left relatively little damage in its wake.

Any concerns or suggestions?

email: Kent Kirkby ([email protected])