Curtis Hussey Veeder

Curtis Hussey Veeder was an American mechanical engineer and inventor, born in Pennsylvania in 1862, who built a Hartford manufacturing company around the bicycle cyclometer, a counting device that let riders measure the distance they had travelled. A mechanical tinkerer from boyhood, he made a high-wheel bicycle while still in high school and took out his first patent on a flexible leather bicycle seat, which he sold to the Pope Manufacturing Company. After graduating from Lehigh University with a mechanical engineering degree in 1886, he worked briefly for Pope and then spent several years designing and patenting devices elsewhere, among them an electric hoist for mining, an automatic regulating apparatus for naval searchlights and the first electric locomotive put into regular use on standard track in the United States. He founded the Veeder Manufacturing Company on 15 August 1895 to make the cyclometer himself, later added an automatic casting machine for parts, and perfected a tachometer design for automobiles. His firm merged with the Root Company in 1928 to form Veeder-Root, which still makes gauges and measuring equipment.