Tomorrow Marblehead's newest art gallery, The Studio located at 18 Darling St., will open with an exhibit titled "A Tribute to Graphite Joe."
The show will honor Joe Dixon, who was born in 1799 and raised in the Darling Street building where the gallery is located.
A history of the Joseph Crucible Co., written by Brenda J. Elliott, makes it clear that as a youth Dixon was disinclined to be a run-of-the-mill student, choosing instead to immerse himself in the world of science and technology. One of his early experiments, a rocket, went awry and created quite a stir in Marblehead when it exploded.
Another malfunction would prove to be a long-term boon for the fledgling scientist. A crush on his next-door neighbor, Hannah Martin, bothered her parents who had little respect for Dixon and sent Hannah to live in New Hampshire. Dixon set out to find his beloved, selling pencils and other items door to door in areas where he thought she might be living.
Unsuccessful in his search, the Marblehead man returned home and went back to his experiments. When he almost blew himself up, Hannah was summoned home to say a last goodbye to her supposedly dying neighbor.
She nursed Joe back to health, however, and the couple were married in 1822. (A later Dixon experiment left Hannah bald, and she was forced to wear a wig for the rest of her life.)
Happily married, Joe could focus his attention on his career. He reached out to local scientists and industrialists Francis Peabody and Andrew Oliver of Salem and Edward Holyoke Jr. of Marblehead. For Oliver, Dixon invented a machine for grinding telescope lenses. The young man, who also had designed and built a file-sharpening machine, then set out to invent a steam engine that could power either a boat or a train.
But Dixon's real interest was in graphite and its myriad applications, especially crucibles. These heat-resistant vessels were used for melting or otherwise processing ores and metals and were in great demand as America continued to industrialize in the first half of the 19th century. Joe found that most crucibles of the time deteriorated after only a few uses, and he began experimenting with the manufacture of graphite crucibles.
By 1827 Joe had opened a factory in his home on North Street in Salem and set out to secure a steady supply of graphite from Ceylon, which he felt was the finest in the world. So, apparently, did the buying public; Dixon crucibles soon developed a reputation as some of the best on the market.
Dixon's business would keep him and his family on the move. After his marriage in 1822, Joe moved his business, and often his family, to Lynn, Salem, Boston, back to Salem, then New Bedford, Taunton, and Mystic, Conn. Finally, in 1847, Dixon settled permanently in Jersey City, N.J.
By 1867 the Joseph Dixon Crucible Co. was producing a quarter-of-a-million crucibles a year. The company was also making and selling graphite-based stove polish, carbon paper and pencils. The latter Dixon had experimented with, while still a young man, and abandoned until he could put the right ingredients and machinery into place.
Joe Dixon's contributions to the world of science and technology were not limited to items or processes made of graphite. He dabbled in printing and developed a new, faster color-transfer process for printing on cloth. He was an early pioneer in the fields of both photo-lithography and photography. He is known to have taken one of the very first photographs ever, a portrait of his wife in 1839, and through the artist and inventor Samuel F. B. Morse, had access to the latest technology developed by the Frenchman Louis Daguerre and other early European photographers.
Dixon solved one problem faced by early pioneers in photography — the fact that the final image was always reversed — with a new lens of his own invention. He also developed a number of chemical processes used in the taking and printing of photographs.
Joe Dixon's long-term contributions to the world of science and technology are forgotten by most, although Dixon Ticonderoga pencils are still a best-seller today. But the multimillionaire industrialist Andrew Carnegie, quoted in "Marblehead, The Spirit of '76 Lives Here," called the Marblehead native one of the 20 "world-makers" in the history of civilization.
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Jim McAllister of Salem writes a weekly column on the region's history. Contact him at jim@nii.net.
