Nathan Ames Educated at Phillips Academy

Phillips Academy

Phillips Academy is a selective, co-educational independent boarding high school for boarding and day students in grades 9–12, along with a post-graduate year...

, Andover, and Harvard, Ames was a patent

Patent

A patent is a form of intellectual property. It consists of a set of exclusive rights granted by a sovereign state to an inventor or their assignee for a limited period of time in exchange for the public disclosure of an invention....

 solicitor

Solicitor

Solicitors are lawyers who traditionally deal with any legal matter including conducting proceedings in courts. In the United Kingdom, a few Australian states and the Republic of Ireland, the legal profession is split between solicitors and barristers , and a lawyer will usually only hold one title...

 who held the first patent in the United States for an escalator

Escalator

An escalator is a moving staircase – a conveyor transport device for carrying people between floors of a building. The device consists of a motor-driven chain of individual, linked steps that move up or down on tracks, allowing the step treads to remain horizontal.Escalators are used around the...

-like machine. The patent (#25,076) was granted on August 9, 1859 for an invention he called "Revolving Stairs". The escalator had steps mounted on a continuous belt or chain. He also patented machines for improvement in polishing leather

Leather

Leather is a durable and flexible material created via the tanning of putrescible animal rawhide and skin, primarily cattlehide. It can be produced through different manufacturing processes, ranging from cottage industry to heavy industry.-Forms:...

 during the time when Lynn's

Lynn, Massachusetts

Lynn is a city in Essex County, Massachusetts, United States. The population was 89,050 at the 2000 census. An old industrial center, Lynn is home to Lynn Beach and Lynn Heritage State Park and is about north of downtown Boston.-17th century:...

 shoemaking

Shoemaking

Shoemaking is the process of making footwear. Originally, shoes were made one at a time by hand. Traditional handicraft shoemaking has now been largely superseded in volume of shoes produced by industrial mass production of footwear, but not necessarily in quality, attention to detail, or...

 industry was one of the largest in the world. Another one of his patents was for a polygraph

Polygraph (duplicating device)

A Polygraph is a device that produces a copy of a piece of writing simultaneously with the creation of the original, using pens and ink.Patented by John Isaac Hawkins in 1803, it was most famously used by the third U.S. president, Thomas Jefferson, who acquired his first polygraph in 1804, later...

, an early copying machine that operated by using pens connected by wires. Another patent he held was for an improved grater.

A writer and a poet, Ames has a disquisition and a Class Ode published during his time at Harvard. His book of poetry Pirate’s Glen and Dungeon Rock was published in 1853. These poems were based the local pirate legend of Dungeon Rock.

His brother Joseph

Joseph Alexander Ames

Joseph Alexander Ames was an American artist, primarily known for portrait and genre painting. Originally named Joseph Emes, he was born in Roxbury, New Hampshire. Ames began painting at a young age. At the age of twelve Henry Theodore Tuckerman wrote about one of his paintings. After moderate...

 was an American portrait

Portrait

thumb|250px|right|Portrait of [[Thomas Jefferson]] by [[Rembrandt Peale]], 1805. [[New-York Historical Society]].A portrait is a painting, photograph, sculpture, or other artistic representation of a person, in which the face and its expression is predominant. The intent is to display the likeness,...

 artist

Artist

An artist is a person engaged in one or more of any of a broad spectrum of activities related to creating art, practicing the arts and/or demonstrating an art. The common usage in both everyday speech and academic discourse is a practitioner in the visual arts only...

.