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Eli Whitney Sr.’s sister Elizabeth Fay Whitney married Elihu Blake around 1790, and they went on to have ten children. Eli Whitney Sr. supported his nephews’ and nieces’ education. Several of his nephews joined him in New Haven to pursue their education or work at the Armory.
Philos Blake (1791-1871), Elihu Blake (1793-1875), Eli Whitney Blake (1795-1886), and John Blake (1808-1877) all made their homes in New Haven as young men. It is unclear exactly when they arrived, but Eli Whitney Blake studied at Yale, graduating in 1816 and travelling back to Massachusetts to study law. Around 1816, he drew two perspectival views of the new Whitney barn.
In the 1820s, Whitney Sr. selected Philos and Eli Whitney Blake to take over the Armory upon his death. They ran the factory from 1825 until 1835. They, along with John, remained in New Haven, while Elihu followed their father into the medical profession and worked in New York City for much of his career.
The Blake brothers shared the family talent for engineering and technological innovation. Their inventions made major impacts on American industry, homes, healthcare, and infrastructure.
In 1833, Philos, Eli Whitney, and John Blake filed a patent for a “Latch and bolt escutcheon lock,” a piece of door hardware. This was a major innovation: it was the first American design for a mortise lock, with the hardware installed within the door. Before their invention, door hardware was installed as a lock box attached to the door’s surface.
The Blakes’ new door hardware was a success. Less than two years later, they left the Whitney Armory to establish their own hardware manufacturing firm, Blake Brothers Hardware Company. Their factory was in Westville, north of the intersection of Fitch and Blake (then Pearl) Streets. From this beginning, New Haven went on to be a major center for hardware manufacturing throughout the nineteenth century.
As seen in this 1877 advertisement for the firm, Blake Brothers manufactured a wide range of door hardware, extending to hinges and handles as well as latches. They also made pulleys, building hardware, “cork extractors” (corkscrews) and nut crackers.
The Blakes’ corkscrew and nut cracker were both inventions of Philos Blake. Philos’s corkscrew is particularly well known - patented in 1860, it was one of the first corkscrews patented in America, and an important evolution in modern corkscrew design. Philos and John also filed the first American patent for a furniture caster, in 1838. Elihu Blake, meanwhile, invented a range of dental equipment and devices, advancing the practice of dentistry in America.
In 1858, Eli Whitney Blake patented a very different invention: the Blake Stone Crusher. In 1851, the town of New Haven had appointed Blake to a committee to improve the road between New Haven and Westville - now Whalley Avenue. The committee wanted to use the new method of macadam road construction, invented in Scotland around 1820 and then still very rare in America. Macadam required large amounts of crushed stone to be laid and then compacted into a solid road surface. At the time, the work of breaking the stone down from larger rocks was done by hand by workers with hammers. The work was physically very hard, inefficient, and expensive for the road-builders. A machine could clearly improve the process. Over the next seven years, Blake occupied himself with finding the ideal solution. His invention was a machine with a powerful crushing jaw that could be adjusted to make stones of the required sizes.
The Blake Stone Crusher vastly improved the road construction process as well as other work like railroad building and mining. It was very successful, and Blake established the Blake Crusher Company to manufacture and sell the machine.