Elisha K. Root

Who was Elisha K. Root?

Elisha King Root was a Connecticut machinist and inventor.

Root was born on a Massachusetts farm and worked as a bobbin boy in a cotton mill before switching, at the age of 15, to working in a machine shop in Ware, Massachusetts. At age 24 he was hired by Connecticut industrialist Samuel W. Collins to work in his axe factory in Collinsville, a village of Canton, Connecticut.

According to historian Diana Muir writing in Reflections in Bullough's Pond, Root "reconceptualized" the making of axes. Until his invention, axes were made by "flattening wrought iron, folding it around a steel pin, and forging the two sides together under a trip hammer." Root arranged "a series of dies and rollers that could 'die forge' -or apply pressure to a mold, forming apiece of hot wrought iron into the shape of an ax, with an eye already punched to receive the handle." According to Muir, Root next automated the tempering of axes by inventing a machine that moved ax heads through a temperature-regulated oven on a rotating wheel. And a machine that "shaved" the axes to give them a sharp edge, so that they needed only a small amount of finishing on a grindstone.