BURDEN HORSESHOES FACT FILE
by Sloane D. Bullough
For more information: http://www.troyvisitorcenter.org/
and http://www.angelfire.com/journal/millbuilder/album3.html

(Reference: Laura Lee, "Horseshoe Factory Tour Set," Albany _Times_Union_,
August 11, 1998.)

*    Henry Burden invented the world's first horseshoe manufacturing
     machine in Troy in 1834, and received a patent for it in 1835.
*    Burden was an immigrant from Scotland who became manager of the
     Troy Iron & Nail Factory in 1822.
*    Burden's machine could produce 1 horsehoe per second - or more
     than 50 million horseshoes per year.
*    Burden built a water wheel - the most powerful vertical water wheel
     in hisotry - to power his factory in 1851.
*    The Burden water wheel may have inspired Rensselaer Polytechnic 
     Institute graduate George Ferris' own 1893 invention - the Ferris
     Wheel.
*    During the U.S. Civil War, the Union Army bought most of its
     horseshoes from Burden's factory.
*    The water wheel no longer stands, but Burden's office building
     survives and now houses the Hudson Mohawk Industrial Gateway.