![]() George Corliss, the immigrant, became the owner of a handsome farm at Haverhill and it was here that several generations of the family carried on the occupation of farming and finally died, George Corliss and his son and grandson by a very strange coincidence, meeting death while seated in the same chair. This was but temporary, however, and he shortly after removed to Haverhill in the same colony, this town becoming the permanent home of the family until the time of John Corliss, five generations later, the grandfather of the Hon. ![]() The young man came to the colonies when about twenty-two years of age and settled at Newbury, Mass., in 1639. The founder of the family in this country was George Corliss, a native of Devonshire, England, where he was born about 1617, a son of Thomas Corliss. Corliss was sprung from one of the best and most ancient of the old Colonial families which had spent the years previous to the Revolution in New England, but after that epoch-making struggle lived in New York State. I., whose death there on February 21, 1888, deprived that community of one of its most prominent and highly honored citizens, and the world at large of a benefactor and one of its foremost inventors. Such, for example, was the character of the late George H. Nothing could be further from the truth, as these men have well shown in their lives, wherein were displayed that essential spirit of democracy that is but another form of the Christian virtue of charity, and even those higher reaches of idealism expressed in religion and art. And if they thus prove this belief as to the one-sidedness of genius to be false, they no less dispose of another fallacy, the notion, namely, that such a union of abilities shows a man to have developed the material side of his nature at the expense of the spiritual. They, at least, were not deprived of their just deserts, and were quite equally capable of producing their masterpieces of mechanical skill and of marketing them to their own best advantage and to that of the world at large. ![]() However this may be, it is certain that the remarkable group of American inventors of the generations just passed, whose achievements have given rise to the wide-spread respect for ‘Yankee genius’, were not afflicted with any such one-sidedness of character. If this be so it is strange enough, for, to the layman at least, there seems to be no incompatibility between the mind that can grasp the highly practical problems of physical and mechanical science and the very similar problems of everyday business relations, but rather a parity such as to suggest that they are of one and the same kind. The assertion is sometimes made that in spite of certain notable exceptions, the type of mind possessed by inventive geniuses is rarely capable of dealing with the commercial or business aspect of life, and we have the popular and familiar picture of the unsuspecting ingenuous inventor fleeced of the well-earned profit from his devices by the sophisticated and scheming business man. From History of the State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, NY: The American Historical Society, Inc., 1920 George Henry Corliss (J– February 21, 1888)
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