Excerpt from Jersey City of to-Day: Its History, People, Trades, Commerce, Institutions and Industries Jersey City Stands at the gateway of the Western world. All the great traffic that makes navigation on New York Bay and Hudson River one of the greatest single movements of commerce in the world passes through Jersey City on its way to the East from the Western plains, and back again to the farms and towns of the interior from the factories and mercantile centers of the Atlantic States. There is no limit to the volume of this great ebb and ood of trade. It will grow as the country grows, and the great expanse of the harbor of New York City will always be there waiting placidly to bear the burden of it. It never will be possible to choke Jersey City. Temporary Shortsightedness and momentary local advantages may divert this or that share of the hour's traffic, but the waters must flow where the channel lies and in the end it must all pass through Jersey City. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works."

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Born in Carthage, North Carolina, Lucean Arthur Headen (1879–1957) grew up amid former slave artisans. Inspired by his grandfather, a wheelwright, and great-uncle, a toolmaker, he dreamed as a child of becoming an inventor. His ambitions suffered the menace of Jim Crow and the reality of a new inventive landscape in which investment was shifting from lone inventors to the new "industrial scientists." But determined and ambitious, Headen left the South, and after toiling for a decade as a Pullman porter, risked everything to pursue his dream. He eventually earned eleven patents, most for innovative engine designs and anti-icing methods for aircraft. An equally capable entrepreneur and sportsman, Headen learned to fly in 1911, manufactured his own "Pace Setter" and "Headen Special" cars in the early 1920s, and founded the first national black auto racing association in 1924, all establishing him as an important authority on transportation technologies among African Americans. Emigrating to England in 1931, Headen also proved a successful manufacturer, operating engineering firms in Surrey that distributed his motor and other products worldwide for twenty-five years. Though Headen left few personal records, Jill D. Snider recreates the life of this extraordinary man through historical detective work in newspapers, business and trade publications, genealogical databases, and scholarly works. Mapping the social networks his family built within the Presbyterian church and other organizations (networks on which Headen often relied), she also reveals the legacy of Carthage's, and the South's, black artisans. Their story shows us that, despite our worship of personal triumph, success is often a communal as well as an individual achievement.