He died in 1819 without having seen his steam-carriage come to anything practicable. He made a fortune, however, from some patents upon flour-mill improvements. AMOS WHITTEMORE AND THOMAS BLANCHARD. In the domain of textile fabrics Amos Whittemore, the Massachusetts inventor of the card-machine, which did away with the old-fashioned method of making cards for cotton and woollen factories, must be mentioned. Before Whittemore's machine came into use, about 1812, such cards were made by hand, the laborer sticking one by one into sheets of leather the wire staples, which operation gave work to thousands of families in New England early in the century. Whittemore made a fortune by his invention, and devoted the last years of his life to astronomy. Another Massachusetts boy, Thomas Blanchard, invented the lathe for turning irregular objects, and well deserves mention. Born in 1788, he was noted as a boy for his efficiency in the New England accomplishment of whittling, making wonderful windmills and water-wheels with his knife. When thirteen years old he made an apple-paring machine, with which at the "paring bees" held in the neighborhood he could accomplish more than a dozen girls. Soon after this achievement he began helping his brother in the manufacture of tacks. The operation consisted in stamping them out from a thin plate of iron, after which they were taken up, one at a time, with the thumb and finger and caught in a tool worked by the foot, while a blow given simultaneously with a hammer held in the right hand made a flat head of the large end of the tack projecting above the face of the vise. This was the only method then known, and it was so slow and irksome that young Blanchard often grew disgusted. As a daily task he was given a certain quantity of tacks to make, which number was ascertained by counting. Finding this much trouble, he constructed a counting-machine, consisting of a ratchet-wheel which moved one tooth every time the jaws of the heading tool or vise moved in the process of making a tack. From this achievement he passed to a tack machine, and after six years of hard work turned out an apparatus that made five hundred tacks a minute. He sold his patent for the trifle of $5,000.