Missionary Cyrus Hamlin Made Engineering History with Steel Beams
“Upon the single plank of Christ’s righteousness, I am ready to launch upon the ocean of eternity.”
CYRUS HAMLIN was an extraordinary innovator. He is thought to have been the first builder in the world to make use of steel girders. He also constructed the first steam engine in Maine. Nonetheless, few people have heard of him.
Hamlin was born on this day 5 January 1811 in Waterford, Maine. As a boy, he worked hard on a farm. Later he was apprenticed to a silversmith in Portland, where he discovered his need of a Savior, submitted his life to Christ, and joined a church. Congregationalist leaders offered him the large sum of $1,000 to pursue his education. Although he felt convinced he should enter the ministry, he turned down their offer and made his way through school on his own, not wanting to be under obligation to anyone.
He was accepted as a missionary by the Congregationalists, and sent to Turkey in 1838, where he educated Christian Armenians for thirty-one years. By the onset of the Crimean War, he had become president of Roberts College in Constantinople, which is where he made use of steel girders because of the frequent earthquakes. During the Crimean War, he expanded the operations of the school to make bread. He also invented a washing machine and secured the privilege no one else wanted of cleaning filthy British uniforms. This provided employment to many women through the mission as well as funds for church building.
His efforts extended in many directions: teaching, writing, translating, tending cholera victims, fund-raising, and church building. He introduced the first electric light in Turkey and the first telegraph. Much of his accomplishment was despite the opposition for various reasons of Muslims, Russians, and Jesuits.
After seventeen years of intense devotion to Roberts College, during which he even went without his salary for four years because the mission had trouble raising funds during an economic downturn, he was sacked without a word of explanation. He returned to the States and spent several years as an educator at Bangor Seminary, Maine, and Middlebury College, Vermont. This last school was on the ropes when he stepped in and rescued it.
Hamlin lived into his nineties. A year before his death in 1900, his mind still clear and vigorous, he wrote to a friend, “Upon the single plank of Christ’s righteousness, I am ready to launch upon the ocean of eternity.”
Other Notable Events
1527
Felix Manz becomes the first Anabaptist martyr, drowned in the Limmat River (Switzerland) for rebaptizing Christians as adults.
1547
Death in Wroclaw, Poland, of Johann Hess, the Lutheran reformer of Silesia.
1743
George Whitefield and Welsh Calvinists Methodists form the first Methodist association at Wadford, Wales.
1793
Death of John Howie, author of The Scots Worthies (1775), biographies of the Covenanters. He had written it to counteract a growing tendency among his contemporaries to disparage their Christian ancestors, and he sought to inflame love of Christ by giving notable examples.
1874
Kate Youngman and Mary Park open Graham Seminary in Tokyo (named for Julia Graham, head of the Presbyterian’s foreign missionary office). They will form networks to evangelize among the Japanese and Youngman will move on to work with victims of leprosy.
1921
Wang Ming-Dao and his companions break the ice on a frozen river near Baoding, China, and are baptized as adult believers. Consequently Ming-Dao loses a steady income with the Presbyterian mission which teaches infant baptism.
1943
Death of George Washington Carver, after falling downstairs at his Tuskugee, Alabama, home. He had overcome the adversity of being born a slave to become a leading American educator and chemurgist. He had been noted for his deep faith, humility, and lively Bible lessons.
Source: Christian History Institute
