ROBERT MCALPIN, inventor and manufacturer, was born in Cokensie, Edinburgh, Scotland, March 4, 1837. His father and other ancestors had lived in the vicinity of Edinburgh for many generations, having come there from the Highlands, descendants of the ancient royal Alpin line.

He came to America in 1853, and began his career as a paper manufacturer at Lee, in the Berkshire Hills, Massachusetts. Mr. McAlpin took hold with determination to learn the business, working in every department of the paper mill and living on what he could earn and educating himself until he became absolute master of every detail of the paper business. There was not a shaft, bolt, pulley, pump or any piece of machinery with which he was not familiar. He could take a steam engine apart, repair it and then put it together again. He could fire a boiler better than any of his firemen, and could run a machine better than the best machine tender. So proficient had he become that he could make a better sheet of paper at less cost than any other mill man in the country. He produced the first sheet of paper from ground wood pulp in the United States, and later was able to produce a sheet of news-print paper which could be sold in New York market at half the price for which it had been sold formerly. He is entitled to an enduring place in the history of paper manufacturing.

Mr. McAlpin continued in the manufacture of paper during his whole life, being the inventor and patentee of many of the improvements in paper-making machinery, and was the first paper manufacturer to install machines which made paper at the rate of over three hundred feet a minute.

From youth Mr. McAlpin spent his leisure in the study and enjoyment of music and in the reading of ancient Scottish history. He was a lover of the literature of Walter Scott and of Robert Burns. He was especially interested in every bit of evidence which threw new light upon the interesting and romantic period of the regions of the Alpin line.