Joshua Lionel Cowen

Joshua Lionel Cowen (; August 25, 1877 – September 8, 1965) was an American electrical engineer and inventor. Cowen attended two different colleges but never obtained a degree. He had a mechanical inclination and was interested in the principals of electricity. He worked a lot with batteries, transformers, and electrical motors which led to inventions and innovations. His first patented invention for a photographer's flash igniter for flash photography developed into a detonator for exploding mines for the United States Navy. That resulted in a $12,000 () defense contract which gave him the money to go into the novelty business.

He was the co-founder of a manufacturer of model railroads and toy trains called Lionel trains. When he first made the Lionel toy train it was intended to be used as an advertising gimmick to attract people to store windows to sell other products. By accident people were more interested in the self-running electric toy train than the products in the display window. That led Cowen into developing a niche market for a Christmas gift for boys, model railroading. His marketing abilities parlayed store window displays into a multi-million dollar electric toy train business.

Early life and ancestry

Joshua Lionel Cowen had been born in the borough of Manhattan in New York City on Henry Street on August 25, 1877. He was the eighth child of nine children in the family. His parents were Rebecca (née Kantrowitz) and Hyman Nathan Cohen who had immigrated from Poland. Cowen's maternal grandparents were from the town of Suwałki, making them Lithuanian Jewish. An epidemic of cholera had broken out and his maternal grandfather and uncle had died at about the same time. Cowen's grandmother ran a bakery shop in Suwałki to have an income to support the family, his mother being one of the children.

Cowen's paternal grandparents had died when his father was a boy. His Jewish parents married in 1859 in Poland and then moved to England within a year. Cowen's father started making hats for a business. His parents lived in England for five years and there had two children. One was a son named Abraham who died as a young adult and the other a daughter named Rachael who was the grandmother of Roy Cohn. After some time, Cowen's father discovered that the London misty climate was contributing to illness so his parents immigrated to the United States and settled in New York City where they had additional children.

As a young boy, Cowen preferred playing softball, bicycling around his neighborhood, hiking in the woods, and examining mechanical toys to getting an education from the public schools he attended. He was especially interested in electrical devices that included transformers and batteries. He attended Peter Cooper Institute High School when he was a teenager and this is where he got an education in mechanics and science. In September 1893, at the age of 16, he first went to the City College of New York and then to Columbia University, not getting a degree from either of them. While at Peter Cooper Institute Cowen constructed a new type of electric doorbell (that he never developed because his instructor said there would never be a need for it). He also invented a battery operated artificial flower plant illuminator for restaurants which his partner Conrad Hubert bought from him and turned into flashlights and the Eveready Battery Company.

Cowen in 1896 got a job at Henner & Anderson, which manufactured dry cell batteries. He then took a position at the Acme Electric Lamp Company at the 1600 block of Broadway in midtown Manhattan. Here he was able to conduct his own experiments after work with the company's resources. Many of those experiments involved batteries that were made of containers of toxic sulfuric acid. One of his innovations was to convert those batteries to dry cell batteries that were much easier to handle. With these dry cells he developed a portable device that heated a wire fuse for igniting photographer's flash powder. He then applied for a patent on this on June 6, 1899. It was finalized in November and received patent number 636,492 for a Flash Lamp. The device was a slim pasteboard paper tube about a foot long containing dry cells which power was used to heat a wire fuse to ignite flash powder. The paper tube had at the end a socket similar to an Edison incandescent light bulb socket. A long metal pole with the flash unit screwed into this socket making electrical contact. The flash unit at the end of this pole was a small horizontal metal trough holding some photographer's flash powder. The powder then exploded with a ''poof!'' sound when a button was pushed on the tube of dry cell batteries that instantly heated the wire fuse red hot igniting the powder. The idea of using the electrical power from dry cells to ignite an explosive charge was a new concept. Cowen obtained electrical skills and knowledge at the Acme shop and with those technical abilities it enabled him to be able to made and market electrical novelties.

Mid life and business career

Cowen's first invention of the apparatus that ignited a photographer's flash powder by heating a wire fuse with batteries obtained for him a $12,000 () defense contract from the United States Navy to make 24,000 mine fuses based on this invention. He used the explosive mercuric fulminate and fulfilled on time his delivery to the Brooklyn Navy Yard. That contract money allowed Cowen to set up production facility with a mission being to manufacture electrical, mechanical, industrial and toy devices.

Cowen and one of his Acme co-workers Harry C. Grant founded Lionel Manufacturing Company at 24-26 Murray Street in New York City in September 1900. At first they had nothing to make and sell. One day that was exceptionally hot Cowen got the idea to manufacture cooling fans using small electric motors. His first product soon lost public interest when cool weather set in. Cowen then on a day off from work walked around lower Manhattan trying to think of another product to sell and saw lifeless static toys in store display windows. He saw them as boring and not very interesting.

One toy in a particular store window that got Copwen's attention was a toy train pulled by a rope. That gave him the idea that perhaps it could be designed to go in a circle on a track by itself without someone pulling it by hand. That inspiration he immediately passed onto the store merchant. The merchant said if he could come back with such a toy train he would buy it. Cowen went back to his shop and made an electric toy train using his previous product's small electric fan motor. When done, he took it back to the merchant who bought it for $4 () and then displayed it in his window to draw attention for the store's products. This became the first such electrified animated advertising device in New York City.

The train was designed as an open gondola and looked a like a wooden cigar box with wheels. It was labeled the ''Electric Express.'' The electrified toy train ran on a set tracks that was two metal strips that were 2 inches apart. The tracks were electrified by dry cell batteries that furnished the electricity for the fan motor that propelled the toy train locomotive. Cowen's first merchant ordered a half dozen more of these electric toy trains in 1901 because the merchant's customers were more interested in this train than the other toys. Other stores ordered Cowen's electric model toy trains and he ended up selling 12 ''Electric Express'' train sets. He had made a niche on the market of toys and developed a business that ultimately became Lionel train company.

Cowen published his first catalog of electric model toy train sets in 1902. In the catalog was a City Hall Park style trolley and a model suspension bridge. Future catalogs also had transformers he made to reduce household current to a low voltage that operated the model toy train. They had batteries and battery components for houses that didn't have electricity. Cowen's 1903 catalog had an electric model of a B & O train and an operable model derrick that could be manipulated up and down with a handle. The original 1901 wooden gondola was changed to a metal one in 1903. They also had a three-rail track system with the third rail as a power rail and the other rails as a ground for the electricity. It was a simpler system that could give different configurations of layout and run several trains at the same time.

Cowen's marketing skills were more profitable to him than his abilities at invention. The idea of having toy trains for a Christmas gift began in Germany in the 19th century. It was expanded by Cowen who convinced merchants of department stores to incorporate elaborate electric model toy train setups, which he provided, around their large Christmas tree displays, increasing demand among boys for model toy train sets as Christmas gifts. These train displays sometimes involved toy villages and other objects to enhance the electric toy train. Cowen figured that there were more miles of Lionel track in American homes than the 13,096 miles of track operated by the Santa Fe railroad, the nation's largest railroad company based on a track mileage measurement.

Cowen's Lionel Manufacturing Company had $8,000 () in sales in 1905. His company had $300,000 () in sales by 1913. Giving Lionel toy train sets as a Christmas gift became an American traditional event. Building a track layout to showcase the toy train became a family bonding experience because the activity involved the parents and children. Lionel electric toy trains were portrayed in the 1950s as the height of the American Dream, that abundance could be enjoyed in peace by all in the postwar economic boom after World War II.

Personal life

Cowen met Cecelia Liberman in 1902 and they got married in 1904. They had a son in 1907, Lawrence, who was used as a boy figure in advertising as playing with Lionel toy trains. Lawrence ultimately became president of the Lionel train company. Cowen anglicized his last name from Cohen in 1910.He fed our dreams… Happy 125th Birthday, Joshua Lionel Cowen
He had sold $30 million () worth of his model toy train sets by 1953. Cowen retired in 1959, selling his 55,000 shares of Lionel stock to his great-nephew Roy Cohn. He died when he was eighty-eight years old on September 8, 1965, in Palm Beach, Florida. He is buried in Union Field Cemetery in Brooklyn, New York.

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{{DEFAULTSORT:Cowen, Joshua
1877 births
1965 deaths
20th-century American inventors
City College of New York alumni
Columbia University alumni
Cooper Union alumni
Toy inventors
Lionel, LLC
American people of Lithuanian-Jewish descent
Jewish American inventors
People from the Lower East Side