Thank you, Tim McKee, for introducing some of us to Frank G. “Carp” Carpenter.
Just a brief search for Carpenter’s writings revealed an amazing life adventure. Not only did he travel extensively, meeting dignitaries and people living in unique cultures of the world, but he also lived during some of the United States’, and the world’s most historic developments. A passing glance at his life reveals a journalist who met and interviewed the history makers of his day: Matthew Brady, Samuel Morse, Mrs. U.S. Grant, Nikola Tesla, the Empress Dowager of China, and Alexander G. Bell, who met with him one night in 1913 at midnight for an interview.
Among the people he spoke with during his three trips around the world was “a prince of extortioners,” as he called him–Korean Empire (at the time) Minister Min Yeong-hwan of Seoul.
It was 1895 and Carpenter wrote, “He rides in a chair, seated on a leopard skin, and he has a house containing scores of rooms. He is said to be a millionaire. A few years ago he was worth practically nothing.”
Carpenter was actively writing when electricity was sparking.
He interviewed Charles F. Brush of Cleveland in 1905. His column headline read, “A visit with the inventor of electric light and a talk with him about the possibilities of electricity.” Brush, when he was 28 years old, showed A. C. Baldwin of Tiffin “a glass globe that blazed with fire, upheld, as it were, between two black carbons the size of your little finger.”
Baldwin had made a fortune by virtue of his shrewd business sense. But according to Carpenter, business associates persuaded him to refrain from investing in Brush’s venture. Brush said to Baldwin, “But I tell you, you are making a mistake and you are losing a fortune.”
Carpenter’s story proceeded to say that not many years later, Baldwin realized the fortune he had lost by not investing in Brush.
And Brush wasn’t Carpenter’s only touch with electricity.
He also spoke with Nikola Tesla. And some readers may wonder where Thomas Edison is in all of this interviewing. Well, this glance at Carpenter’s writings is by no means comprehensive; there are books for that. And even in Milan (Ohio), they will tell you, at Edison’s birthplace, he didn’t “invent” electricity. But back to Tesla.
His work is impressive, though he did not invent electric light. However, he did invent how light can be harnessed and distributed. He developed and used florescent bulbs in his lab some 40 years before industry “invented” them, which means inventing requires finances and sometimes the “real” inventors went unrecognized while someone else, who had financial backing, made the headlines. Tesla also gets credit for the radio, not Guglielmo Marconi.
And what did Tesla talk about to Mansfield’s “Carp”?
He talked about inventing, of course.
“It has been the same in some of my experiments with electric lights and other things,” Telsa said of his invention for transmitting power through Niagara Falls, “The greatest rapture one can have is to discover a new force or series of forces which will reduce man’s working necessities to the minimum. I do not believe in laziness, and I should like to see the loafer wiped from the face of the earth; but I want that those who are willing to work should accomplish their results with the least labor and in the best way.”
“The Cosmos Club of Washington” has a passage stating that one of the firm convictions of Frank G. Carpenter was that “The happiest man is he who is moderately well paid for the work he likes best to do.”
Carpenter wrote approximately 20 travel books and was among the earliest syndicated journalists. It might be safe to conclude that he was happy and that he accomplished results “in the best way.”