Editor’s note: This is one in a series of stories on historical figures in Westbrook.
Howard Parker, an inventor once called “the Thomas Edison of the pulp and paper industry,” got his professional start here in Westbrook – courtesy of a badly aimed snowball.
Parker was born in Gorham on April 17, 1863, and at the age of 23 transferred to Westbrook for an apprenticeship with a Main Street machinery company. Before work one day, he gathered up a ball of wet snow and let fly at a teasing co-worker, but instead hit the window of an underwear manufacturing shop run by a man named Keeler.
According to a newspaper interview years later, a white-faced Parker confessed his wrongdoing to the irate shop owner. Although he earned only 60 cents per day – and spent most of that on boarding- he offered to work until he paid for the damage.
Parker was sure he had reached the end of his very brief career when he heard Keeler’s voice booming from the office of his employers, Thomas Foster and Nathaniel Brown. But he was in for a surprise.
Perhaps Keeler respected Parker’s honest confession, or maybe the businessman had some snowball fight memories of his own. Whatever the reason, he informed Foster and Brown that to repay the debt, Parker was to personally inspect and deliver every piece of machinery Keeler ordered.
Keeler added that he wanted Parker’s pay increased by 10 cents a day, with his manufacturing company to pay the difference.
On one of Parker’s first deliveries, Keeler introduced him to the head mechanic of his shop, Leonard Quinby, a talented machinist and one-time band instrument maker. The elderly Quinby found an eager pupil in Parker.
A close friendship developed, and it was in Quinby’s home workshop that Parker completed his first invention: a machine for manufacturing paper pails, containers similar to those now used for restaurant takeout. Parker got the patent – his first of many – in 1886.
While spending time at Quinby’s home, Parker also became acquainted with Nellie Day, Quinby’s granddaughter. A romance began, and the pair married in Westbrook in January of 1887. Sadly, Leonard Quinby died later that same year.
Shortly after his mentor’s death, Parker found employment at the Fairbanks Scale Co., in St. Johnsbury, Vt. According to the company’s Web site, by 1897 it held 113 patents for improvements and inventions in weighing, produced 80,000 scales annually, and sold its products in China, Cuba, and throughout Europe.
Parker worked with the company for 15 years, inventing and improving upon many machines for the manufacturing of paper and other pulp products. He stayed with the Fairbanks Company until the death of the founder, and then opened machine shops first in Bellows Falls, Vt., and then Nashua, N.H., where he continued to invent various paper and pulp processing devices.
In 1912, he joined hundreds of other scientists and technicians in Berlin, N.H., in the research and development department of the Brown Company. There he invented and patented fiber conduit and the machines to produce it.
Fiber conduit was a bituminized pulp product that was used for conducting electrical wires and cables underground. It was sold throughout the country as cities shifted away from running electrical wire overhead to space-saving subterranean installments.
The Brown Company and its products became internationally known in the 1920s. A 1925 company bulletin speaks of two record-breaking shipments to Spain for 500,000 and one million feet of conduit to upgrade the country’s electrical systems.
While with the Brown Company, Parker also developed a model for a pulp-based gun powder keg. At the start of World War I, he presented his design to the War Department in Washington, D.C. He left with a contract to produce 11 million of his fast-opening, sturdy kegs.
At the time of a 1936 interview for a Portland newspaper, eight years after his retirement from the Brown Company, Parker held more than 160 patents for his inventions. These detailed patents and machinery sketches today fill a Westbrook Historical Society binder as thick as many dictionaries.
Parker retired in 1929. He and his wife returned to Westbrook with their foster daughter, Gabrielle Thibeault. They took up residence in Quinby’s old house, where both Parker’s wife and his first invention were born. Parker lived there until his death on May 13, 1950.
Andrea Vasquez is a Westbrook resident with a master’s in fine arts from the Stonecoast writers program at the University of Southern Maine. Anyone with suggestions for profiles of historical figures from Westbrook can e-mail her at ampvaquez@hotmail.com.
After retiring in 1929, Howard Parker returned to Westbrook with his wife and foster daughter, Gabrielle Thibeault, who appears here in a photo with him.
At the time of his retirement, Howard Parker held more than 160 patents for his inventions.
Send questions/comments to the editors.
