In perhaps the 1860s William X. Stevens, under the name W. X. Stevens, manufactured a treadle lathe in East Brookfield, One surviving example has a tablesaw attachment as well.

In 1874 Stevens patented a metal shear for cutting bar iron; in short order he patented that invention in Great Britain, Canada, France, Belgium, and possibly other countries as well; over his lifetime Stevens would patent numerous inventions, and this was the only one of his inventions to be so widely patented. Articles about the shear appeared in trade journals and it won at least one award, at the Cincinnati Exhibition. The original shear was hand-powered but an 1875 article in Scientific American shows a line-shaft-powered shear. The following year, in 1876, the Stevens Tool Co. was established with Stevens as co-owner and president, and it appears that the new firm's primary mission was to manufacture the Stevens patent shear.

A later lawsuit offers some rare, though still incomplete, insight into what happened next. To summarize, the company failed to win any large orders for the shear and so Stevens Tool Co., went under without the shear having reached production. The situation was not helped by Mr. Stevens getting into personal financial difficulty at the same time the company was struggling.

Stevens continued to work as an inventor and consulting engineer before becoming a patent attorney, moving to St. Louis, MO, and then Washington, DC. He was Chief Examiner in the US Patent Office before returning to private practice, retiring just a few years before his death in 1924 at age 88.

Information Sources

• Patent records provide some data on his working years.
• Findagrave.com entry for William X. Stevens (1835-1924) provides a wealth of biographical information on him. He was born in East Brookfield. He lived in that area until at least 1870; in 1880 he was living in Louisville, KY, and then in 1890 he had moved to Washington, D. C., where he was working as a patent attorney and would eventually become chief patent examiner for the Patent Office.
• 1876 Abstracts of the Certificate of Corporations, published January 1877, page 12, lists "W. X. Stevens Tool Co. / Brookfield / [Capital Stock] $12,000 / [No. of shares] 120 / [Par value of share] $100 / [Date of organization] Mar. 14, 1876 / [Date of charter] Mar. 20 1876 / [Capital] $12,000 / [Real estate] - / [Personal estate] $9,000 / [Mixed estate] - / [Cash] $3,000 / [When certified to] Mar. 24, 1876 / [When filed] Mar. 27, 1876".
• The 1880-81 lawsuit Southbridge Savings Bank v. Stevens Tool Co. provides some interesting insight into Stevens' shop and business dealings. Mr. Stevens was president of Stevens Tool Co., and also personally owned a substantial machine shop in Brookfield. The corporation purchased a drilling machine that weighed about a ton, but was not yet ready to use it. They stored it for a time and then, intending that they would be renting space in Stevens' shop, installed the drilling machine there, which involved securely bolting it to the floor. The anticipated need for the drill did not arrive, and in the meantime Stevens mortgaged his shop, and he failed to explicitly exclude the drilling machine from the mortgage. He defaulted on the mortgage and the bank took possession of the building and its contents. The Stevens Tool Co. tried to claim the machine, and the bank filed suit to establish that the drilling machine was part of the realty and hence passed to the bank by mortgage. The first court ruled in the Stevens Tool Co.'s favor, but the bank appealed the decision and won. A key factor in the decision was that the drill was securely bolted to the frame of the building and removing the drill would necessitate repairs to the building frame.