Born in 1820, Samuel Mason started his apprenticeship at the age of eleven at Joseph Mappin and was a fully-fledged knife maker by 1838.  In the Census (1841), he may have the Samuel Mason, cutler, who was living in Infirmary Gardens with Mary (aged 55), who was possibly his mother.  Like many Sheffield cutlers of that era, he looked for a better life across the Atlantic.   On 30 March 1844, he set sail for New York – a journey that, according to his own account, took 105 days! He arrived ‘pennyless, and friendless’ (Sheffield Daily Telegraph, 29 June 1876).  He found a job with William Wild, a cutler, formerly of Sheffield.  By 1845, Mason was working at the Waterville Manufacturing Co in Connecticut.  He married and between 1846 and 1850 his wife, Martha, gave birth to four sons.  In about 1850, Mason moved to the Northfield Knife Co.  He became the company’s secretary and in the Census (1860) owned real estate valued at $550 and had a personal estate of $500.  By 1862, he was appointed the company’s president.  In that year, he registered a patent for malleable cast iron pocket-knife handles.  In 1865, however, Mason was ousted by a group of new investors and – ever the entrepreneur – in 1866 he formed a partnership with Edward Binns, who was a nephew of Curtis G. Hussey, a Pittsburgh entrepreneur involved with crucible steel manufacture.  Binns & Mason was located in Rochester, Pennsylvania, and manufactured pocket knives, table knives, and dental and surgical instruments.

Mason later claimed that Binns & Mason was the ‘first pocket knife cutlery in Pennsylvania’, and that the venture realised 50 per cent on its capital.  But the infusion of new investment was, in Mason’s words, ‘my misfortune’ (letter to H. Spearhouse, 20 September 1880).   In 1867, the Harmony Society, a religious group in Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania, became interested in establishing a cutlery venture in the town and so Mason’s band of cutlers moved to the Beaver Falls Cutlery Co.  This factory was notable in two respects:  Beaver Falls later recruited unskilled Chinese labourers from California to break a labour strike; and the firm was finally bought by Champlin of Little Valley, New York, which used it to launch a famous American company named Cattaraugus.   Mason played no part in these ventures: in what was becoming a familiar pattern, in about 1870 he was dismissed from Beaver Falls.  

In the early 1870s, Mason attempted to revive his fortunes by launching Mason & Son in New Brighton, Pennsylvania; and then in 1872 Mason & Son, in Canton, Ohio.  The latter apparently employed fifty hands.  Neither proved a success.   A local newspaper in August 1875 remarked that Mason and his cutlers had ‘folded their tents and silently stolen away to their native country, England.  We mourn their absence about $15 – the amount of subscriptions owed us’ (Zalesky, 2000¹).   While his sons appear to have remained in the USA, Mason indeed returned to Sheffield.  He arrived in 1875 and found the cutlery industry little changed, with the ‘poor pallid-faced, consumptive-looking cutler [still] at work in his box’ (Sheffield Daily Telegraph, 29 June 1876).   Once home, Mason wrote regularly to the Sheffield newspapers giving readers the benefit of his views on subjects as diverse as slavery and religion (he was a fervent Adventist).  In particular, he wrote about the cutlery industry and argued that Sheffield needed to adopt the best labour-saving machinery if it wished to compete with America.   One letter to The Sheffield Daily Telegraph, 11 November 1875, stated that:

As regards the manufacture of cutlery in the United States, the Americans are far in advance of anything I have seen or heard of in Sheffield.  The manufacturers in this town are fifty years back of Beaver Falls in the production of table cutlery.  I do not wish to be understood to say this of the finer branches of cutlery, but in respect of turning out knives and forks for general use … [I] was the pioneer, the first to manufacture cutlery in the state, and the builder of the Beaver Falls Cutlery Company, and for three years superintended the establishment.  It would do some of our Sheffield manufacturers good to see the machines bought in use for the manufacture of cutlery.  But I will not trespass further.  At some future day, by your permission, Mr Editor, I may give you a history of the manufacture of cutlery in America.

I am very respectfully yours, SAMUEL MASON.  120, Westbar, Sheffield, Nov.  9th 1875.

Mason’s views were not always welcomed and his attempt to launch another business venture was unsuccessful.  He opened an ‘American Shoe Store’ in Westbar and advertised in the press that ‘General Grant is Coming’ (a reference to the shoes that he was selling in the style of General Grant and his wife).   But by 1879 this shop had failed.  By 1880, Mason was living again in Litchfield (near Waterbury), Connecticut, with the family of his son, Joseph (1850-1927).   His death date is presently unknown.

^1. Zalesky, Mark, ‘Samuel Mason’s Story’, Knife World 26 (August 2000)