From Here To Obscurity
by H. J. Fortunato

Paul Revere is famous for all the wrong reasons.

Blame it on Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. If it wasn't for his famous -- and famously inaccurate -- poem, Paul Revere might be remembered only as America's first successful defense contractor.

For all its present-day fame, Revere's "midnight ride" wasn't even mentioned in his 1818 obituary. And he couldn't land a commission with the Continental Army; he had to settle for being a lieutenant colonel with the Massachusetts militia. He spent most of the war commanding a battery guarding Boston Harbor, and his only serious military action was a botched attack against the British in Maine.

The truth is Revere wasn't really a military man. He was much more the classic American tinkerer-entrepreneur, more a Thomas Edison or Bill Gates than a George Washington. Before the Revolution he was a successful silversmith, and a sometimes dentist and engraver. After the war he used his knowledge of metallurgy to open a foundry. He cast numerous bells, some of which still ring from New England churches. And his success as a man of metal prompted Revere to take on his boldest venture: At the age of 65 he became a defense contractor.

America was building its first navy and badly needed copper sheathing for the bottoms of its wooden ships. Unfortunately rolling copper was a British trade secret -- until Revere figured out how to do it. It's been suggested that one of his sons appropriated this valuable information through one of the first acts of industrial espionage, but no matter how he learned it Revere seized the opportunity. In one of its first deals with a private business, the federal government loaned him $10,000 -- big money in those days -- to build a copper rolling mill. He provided the copper underbelly for several new American ships, including the U.S.S. Constitution ("Old Ironsides"). And he wasn't shy about lobbying Congress for favorable treatment. But Revere was more than a pioneer military industrialist; he also produced the copper boilers for at least one of Robert Fulton's early steamships as well as the copper sheathing for the dome of the Massachusetts Statehouse.

Before he died in 1818 Revere passed his business to his sons. Revere Copper and Brass, now based in New Bedford, still lives. Until last year Paul Revere's great-great-great-grandson, Paul Revere, Jr., was a manager of marketing there.