Jacob Perkins

Jacob Perkins (1766 to 1849) was an Anglo-American inventor, mechanical engineer and physicist, born on 9 July 1766 in Newburyport, Massachusetts, and apprenticed there to a goldsmith. He made himself known with a variety of useful mechanical inventions and eventually held twenty-one American and nineteen English patents. In 1790 he created machines for cutting and heading nails, which he patented in 1795, and in 1809 he invented the stereotype check plate to prevent the counterfeiting of bank bills. In 1816 he moved to Philadelphia to work on steam power and refrigeration, and in 1819 he went to England with a plan for engraving banknotes on steel. In 1834 he took out the first patent for the vapour-compression refrigeration cycle, titled apparatus and means for producing ice and in cooling fluids.