Thaddeus Fairbanks: the St. Johnsbury inventor whose scale built a town
Thaddeus Fairbanks patented the platform scale in 1831. The fortune it made his family paid for St. Johnsbury's Athenaeum, its academy and its museum.
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Vermonters and the work they do, drawn from public information.

Thaddeus Fairbanks patented the platform scale in 1831. The fortune it made his family paid for St. Johnsbury's Athenaeum, its academy and its museum.

Casey Neistat left school at 17, cooked in Connecticut, then sold a series to HBO, filmed for Nike and sold an app to CNN.…

Chester Alan Arthur was born in Fairfield in 1829, became a New York machine politician and, after Garfield's assassination, an unexpected reformer in the…

Anna Mary Robertson Moses began painting seriously in her 70s and became one of America's best-known artists. The Bennington Museum holds the largest public…

Lisa Su, born in Taiwan and raised in Queens, has led AMD since 2014. A look at her MIT training, IBM years, the Ryzen…

Before the Senate and two presidential runs, Bernie Sanders won the Burlington mayor's race by 10 votes in 1981 and served four terms. A…

Tim Cook will step down as Apple CEO on September 1 after nearly 15 years. A look at his path from Alabama and IBM…

Elisha Otis was born in Halifax, Vermont, in 1811. His safety brake, demonstrated in New York in 1854, made passenger elevators and skyscrapers possible.

Richard Snelling ran a Shelburne manufacturing company before serving four terms as governor and returning in 1991 to tackle a budget crisis. He died…

John Deere was born in Rutland in 1804 and learned blacksmithing in Middlebury before heading west to Illinois, where his steel plow made his…