"One of the unique parts of the making glue for Peter Cooper was the utilization of raw materials which, to a certain extent, had been just disposed of or thrown away prior. A tannery typically wants to tan a large piece of hide. They don't want to spend money tanning the small pieces around the legs and neck, because it doesn't provide a piece of leather large enough to use. So a tanner will trim off those pieces and throw it away. And along comes a glue factory and they take those pieces of hide and from those pieces they can extract glue by several stages of a process. They wash it, they treat it with a lime solution for three months or more. Then they wash the lime, treat it with the acid, and then they cook it. Much the way you make soup today, but at very controlled temperatures. And that’s something Peter Cooper developed in his early stages as well. Temperature is important. You don't just heat it, you don't just cook it. It’s a careful control and he learned how to do that in his factory.
Drawing from Cooper's patent on a glue manufacturing process.
"Some of the earliest raw materials that Peter Cooper utilized to both make glues and gelatin came from slaughter houses, meat processing plants, meat markets in the city. Scraps of meats, bones, hide trimmings, the innards. All the material that the slaughter house or the butcher shop would throw away, Peter Cooper would collect this in wagons. It wasn't a very pleasant appearance with a wagon load of material going down the street on a warm afternoon. It became a challenge in the factory itself and the area around the factory because sometimes the odors were very strong. But it was a method used to convert waste material into usable products.
Cooper's Glue was also distributed in bags.
"He had the one factory in New York City and he was the most prominent name in the business because of his quality standards. He wasn't the biggest in the country, but the most prominent. There were many other companies, fifty, a hundred other glue companies in the United States because everybody that had a tannery built a glue factory next to them. Those that didn't would sell their raw materials to Peter Cooper.
"Here is his actual price list of 1916. He has the same grades listed on the right hand side of the card as existed on his sign for distribution of hide glue. At the time that Peter Cooper developed these standards, he had listed the numbers of grades available because in his process with both glue and gelatin, he was able to differentiate between different grades and qualities."
