Zerah Colburn (1832–1870) was a mechanical engineer, author, and prominent technical journalist who specialized in steam locomotive and railway design. He was known for his sharp intellect, influential writings, and volatile personality.
The Saratoga born Colburn “had a career of breakneck speed; he was a restless man, quick of brain and quick of temper; he fell into jobs and fell in with people, but then throughout his life, fell out with them too,” it’s been put diplomatically.
Colburn was the nephew of his namesake Zerah Colburn (1804–1839), a famous Vermont mathematical prodigy.
The teenage locomotive engineer distinguished himself as author of The Throttle Lever. He connected himself with the Railroad Journal, and in 1854 established Railroad Advocate in the city of New York.
His 1871 posthumously published Locomotive Engineering, and the Mechanism of Railways – “a treatise on the principles and construction of the locomotive engine, railway carriages, and railway plant, with examples” – was a widely respected locomotive engineering textbook.
The book remains an important resource for understanding the foundational principles of mechanical engineering and the evolution of transportation technology as it applied to early American railroads.
In 
his twenties, he was well-traveled by rail at a time when rail-roads were becoming rail systems. Alcohol and laudanum addictions, and a penchant for womanizing, helped impoverish the highly respected writer and publisher in his later years.
Coburn spent much of his short adult life working in England. He was exposed as a bigamist by his British wife Elizabeth Suzanna Browning. She accused him of infecting her with syphilis, physical abuse, and adultery with five different prostitutes.
Coburn lost his job as editor of the leading weekly technical journal in London, The Engineer, returned to the United States shamed, depressed and reckless, and died by his own hand at the age of 38.
What follows is a notice published in The Engineer announcing his death (as reprinted in Scientific American, June 18, 1870):
Zerah Colburn
It seldom falls to the lot of the journalist to discharge a sadder duty than that which we have to perform to-day in announcing the death of an engineer for several years connected with this paper [The Engineer] and whose name will be familiar to each one of our readers.
On the 25th of April, Zerah Colburn was found lying in an orchard at Belmont, near Boston, U.S., whither he had wandered a day or two before from New York, mortally wounded in the head by a pistol shot fired by his own hand. Not yet dead, though dying, he was borne to the county hospital, where he expired a few hours afterwards.
In this way has passed from among us an engineer whose abilities were sufficient, had they been but wisely directed, to raise him to any position that a member of the profession can reasonably hope to attain. Of the causes that led him to commit suicide it is not our place to speak.
To tell the tale of Mr. Colburn’s life would be to place on record the biography of a man blessed with enormous mental powers; but, alas! too little permitted to be governed by those influences which tend to make a man not only great, but good.
Such a narrative must proceed from other pens than ours. Of his connection with this journal it is, however, necessary that we should say something, and that something we may preface by stating that Mr. Colburn was born in Saratoga, State of New York, in 1832.
As a boy he early manifested wonderful powers of memory, a passion for mechanics which influenced his whole life, and extraordinary energy and fitfulness of character. All things by turns – office boy, clerk, actor, poet, agent, engineer – but nothing long he found his way to this country [England] in 1857.
For some time previously he had devoted his attention with considerable steadiness to journalism, and in 1858 he was already a practiced writer for the scientific press.
His abilities attracted the attention of the founder and editor of this journal, and, at his request, Zerah Colburn wrote several articles which were of so high a character that he was ultimately appointed to an influential position on the staff of The Engineer – eventually, for a time, occupying the post of editor in charge, while the responsible editor and proprietor was absent on the Continent through ill-health.
The leading articles written by Mr. Colburn during this period have never been excelled in vigor, accuracy, and elegance of style. Nothing like them had ever before appeared in a scientific journal. It is to be regretted that they subsequently manifested in a few cases a lack on the part of their author of that spirit of strict impartiality which should be a distinguishing feature in an influential journal.
Owing to this, and other causes, on the consideration of which it is not necessary to enter, Mr. Colburn ceased, in November, 1864, to have any c0nnection whatever with the editorial department of The Engineer, although for a few months he was an occasional contributor to its pages. But even this connection, slight as it was, ceased in the spring of 1865.
Of the attitude subsequently assumed by Mr. Colburn towards The Engineer we prefer to say little or nothing. To speak favorably of it would be affectation; to tell the truth would be ungenerous to the memory of the dead. The facts are already familiar enough to many, beyond whom it is needless that any knowledge of them should extend.
It is, however, not unreasonable to suppose that even at that time his mind, naturally ever restless and impulsive, had begun to lose its balance – that the insanity which has culminated in this last sad tragedy had already begun to develop itself.
Those who best know us will be most ready to believe that we find it impossible to speak of Mr. Colburn’s melancholy death without deep sorrow. That in this country he has left few friends and many foes, as the result of a peculiar temperament which would not brook a moment’s contradiction, is, we fear, but too certain.
We trust that the good angel Charity will efface with tender hand the record of poor Colburn’s faults, and leave for another generation the memory only of his virtues, his talents, and his good deeds.
Note: The Engineer, founded in 1856, continues to publish today.
Read More Railroad History in New York State
Illustrations, from above: Zerah Colburn albumen carte-de-visite portrait by John Watkins, 1860s (National Portrait Gallery); and Colburn’s portrait from The Engineer, ca. 1860; “Passenger Locomotive by Rogers Locomotive & Machine Works, Paterson NJ,” ca. 1870 (from Colburn’s Locomotive engineering, and the mechanism of railways, vol 2., 1870).
Recent Comments