Meantime, Aaron Benedict established, in 1812, a factory at Waterbury for making bone and ivory buttons, and, in 1823, he too began making brass buttons. About 1820 James Croft, a brass worker from Birmingham, England, came to the Scovills. A year later Benedict secured him, and when Benedict and Israel Coe formed the firm of Benedict & Coe, in 1829, Croft became one of the partners. Croft’s coming marks a vital point in the history of the industry. On his advice, both Scovill and Benedict began to do their own rolling. It was his influence which induced them to import from Birmingham workmen, processes and machinery. He went to England seven times for Benedict, and Israel Holmes went three times for Scovill to bring back English machinery, rollers and finishers. Israel Coe also went to England when the Wolcottville Brass Company was started.[198] From that time, the business may be said to have passed the experimental stage, and its growth from 1830 was rapid. William Lathrop, who has made a study of it, has traced, perhaps better than any other, the coincident growth of the market and the industry. The raw material was at first mainly scrap copper, old ship sheathing, kettles, boilers and stills, collected by the Connecticut peddlers. More and more copper was imported until after 1850 when the mining of western copper began developing. All of the zinc was imported until about 1870. [198] Lathrop, p. 89. [Illustration: FIGURE 48. HIRAM W. HAYDEN] [Illustration: FIGURE 49. ISRAEL HOLMES] At first they rolled brass only for their own use, but new demands for it were arising. By 1840 Chauncey Jerome had developed the cheap brass clock. The discovery and refining of petroleum created a lamp industry. The pin machinery, invented by Dr. J. I. Howe, Fowler, and Slocum & Jillson, opened up another great outlet. Daguerreotype plates gave another, and metallic cartridges another, while the invention of the telegraph enormously extended the use of copper wire. The Waterbury men were best able to meet these new demands, as they were the only ones in the country with the facilities and experience needed, and they “got in first.” While the rolling and the drawing processes were imported bodily from England, and have continued almost unchanged, Yankee ingenuity was constantly at work devising new articles made of brass and improving the machinery for making the old ones.