Although the original patent drawings and specification were lost in the 1836 Patent Office fire, they had been published in The American Journal of Improvements in the Useful Arts, and Mirror of the Patent Office of the United States, V1 No. 3 (July-September 1828). There is a link below the image, above. This mortising and tenoning machine is built like a scaled-down reciprocating sawmill with gate. The gate drives both a saw blade for cutting tenon cheeks and a chisel for mortising. The stroke length can be adjusted: shorter for mortising, longer for sawing. They also describe a new type of chisel that has a bent spring on its face to draw chips out from the mortise. According to the book “Records and Memorials of the Speed Family”, John James Speed, Jr., was born 1803-07-20 in Mecklenburg County, Va. In 1805 the Speed family relocated to New York. He began his working life in the “mercantile trade” in Ithaca, then bought a large parcel of land in Tompkins County, which he tried unsuccessfully to develop. In 1829 he became a colonel in a New York infantry regiment and for the rest of life he was known as Colonel Speed. In 1832 he was elected to the State Legislature. In 1836 he sold the land and moved back to Ithaca. He was an inventor, chemist, mechanic, and proponent of telegraphy; in partnership with Ezra Cornell to develop the telegraphy network in New York, he became very wealthy. The money was lost some years later in woolen-mill investments in Ithaca. When he died in Brooklyn in 1867 “the newspapers published extended accounts of his life.” None of the biographies we have seen mention this patent and it seems likely that it was never manufactured.

(To be filled in.)

• Patent specification and drawing
• Wikipedia biography of J. J. Speed, Jr.