SILVER, Thomas, inventor, born in Greenwich, Cumberland County, New Jersey, 17 June, 1813; died in New York city, 12 April, 1888. His parents were Quakers. As a boy he displayed unusual mechanical skill, and when he was only nine years old his toy boat, with hidden propeller-wheel and other ingenious devices, was the wonder of the village in which he lived. He was educated in Greenwich and Woodstown, New Jersey, and in Philadelphia, and became a civil engineer, but continued to devote much time to the perfection of numerous contrivances for lightening human toil and increasing the safety of travellers. Among the patents, upward of fifty in number, granted him, were those for a grain-dryer, a fuel-saving heat-chamber, a gas-consumer, a tension-regulator, a machine for paying out submarine cables, a machinery lubricator, a rotary ascending-railway, and clockwork for mechanical lamps. Models of some of these are at the patent-office, Washington, D. C., the South Kensington museum, London, and the Paris conservatoire des arts. The loss of the steamer "San Francisco," bound to California with troops in 1854, suggested his best-known invention. That vessel was wrecked through her engines becoming disabled in a severe storm, and, to meet such emergencies, Mr. Silver devised his " marine governor," which was adopted by the French navy in 1855. It is also applied to many stationary engines, notably to those in the press-rooms of the great dailies in large cities. It was adopted by the British admiralty in 1864, and the example has been followed by the navies of all the chief powers, except the United States. Mr. Silver perfected a plan of channel transit for the carrying of coal by car direct from Wales to France, in which Napoleon III was interested, but it was lost to that country by the surrender at Sedan. Mr. Silver was made a member of the Franklin institute of Philadelphia in 1855. He received the James Watt medal from the Royal polytechnic society of London, and one from Napoleon III. for his "regulateur marine." He published " A Trip to the North Pole, or the Theory of the Origin of Icebergs" (New York, 1887).