Martha Coston and The Box of Light
by
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The box seemed unexceptional. Lying next to my husband’s folded silk handkerchiefs and his scientific medals, gold and silver, with their red and green and yellow ribbons, it seemed old and ordinary. After all, this was a sacred hiding place, closed off to even the oldest of our children, a sanctuary untouched since the last time he’d entered it. And I leaned in for a cherished breath of the air he’d last tasted only days earlier.
I was but twenty-one years old, destitute and mother of four. And as I lifted the box from where he’d placed it, set it on the dresser top and prepared to open it, my fingers trembled at the enormity of the risk I faced. If there were nothing inside for me to make a life out of for myself and my family, we were ruined.
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About the Book
Widowed at the age of twenty-one, left penniless with four children to raise, Martha Coston overcame nineteenth century bias to carry on her deceased husband’s work, patenting and manufacturing history’s first night time signal device. Traveling the world, she then successfully marketed the Coston Night Signal to the navies, coast guardians and railroads of every industrialized nation, founding a company that flourished for more than a century.
In her lifetime, Martha Coston became close friends with Admiral David Farragut, was introduced to British society in Queen Victoria’s own drawing room, banqueted with Napoleon III at the Palaise de Tuilleries, danced with the King of Sweden at his summer retreat at Rosendal, was feted by the Admiral of the Russian fleet at Kronstadt Island in St. Petersburg, struggled across winter ice floes in Scandinavia and fought fang and claw with the United States Congress for her invention to be recognized.
About the Author
Tom Lonergan is a writer and historian. He has previously published a biography of Henry Knox, George Washington’s General of Artillery. He works as a guide at the Nantucket Shipwreck and Lifesaving Museum in Nantucket, Massachusetts where he resides with his wife.