Walter Hunt

Infobox Person
name = Walter Hunt

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caption = Walter Hunt
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birth_date = 29 July 1796
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death_date = 8 June 1859
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nationality = United States
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known_for = fountain pen sewing machine safety pin flax streetcar bell hard-coal-burning stove street sweeping machinery, velocipede ice plough
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occupation = inventor
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Walter Hunt (1796 – 1859) was an American mechanic. He lived and worked in New York state. Through the course of his work he became renowned for being a prolific inventor, notably of the fountain pen, sewing machine (1833), safety pin (1849), a forerunner of the Winchester repeating rifle, a successful flax spinner, knife sharpener, streetcar bell, hard-coal-burning stove, artificial stone, street sweeping machinery, the velocipede, and the ice plough.

Hunt did not realize the significance of a good load of these when he invented them; today, many are widely-used products. He thought little of the safety pin, selling the patent for a paltry sum of $400 (roughly $10,000 in 2008 dollars) [http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2008/04/dayintech_0410#] to the company W R Grace and Co., to pay a man to whom he owed $15. He failed to patent his sewing machine at all, because he feared that it would create unemployment among seamstresses. (This led to a court case some years later when the machine was re-invented by Elias Howe.) Like Howe, Hunt is buried in Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, New York.

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