He soon made himself known with a variety of useful mechanical inventions[1] and eventually had twenty-one American and nineteen English patents.Sometimes known as the father of the refrigerator.

Mr. Davis died three years later and the fifteen-year-old Jacob continued the business of making gold beads and added the manufacture of shoe buckles.

When he was twenty-one he was employed by the master of the Massachusetts mint to make a die for striking copper pennies bearing an eagle and an Indian.

In 1819, with his printing business partner, Gideon Fairman, they employed Asa Spencer and went to England at Charles Heath's urging in an attempt to win the £20,000 reward for "unforgable notes".

They set up shop in England, and spent months on example banknotes, but unfortunately for them, Banks thought that the inventor should be English by birth.

Also concurrently, Jacob's brother ran the American printing business, and they made money on important fire safety patents.

In 1829–30, he went into partnership with his second son Angier March Perkins, manufacturing and installing central heating systems using his hermetic tube principle.

He also investigated refrigeration machinery after discovering from his research in heating that liquefied ammonia caused a cooling effect.

[citation needed] In 1816, Jacob Perkins had worked on steam power with Oliver Evans in Philadelphia.

In 1927, Loftus P. Perkins, a descendant, lectured on these boilers and displayed a 1⁄8 in (3.2 mm) copper pipe, apparently from a 40 bhp (30 kW) engine of a type that was in use up until 1918.

In 1832 Perkins established the National Gallery of Practical Science on Adelaide Street, West Strand, London.

[10] Perkins is credited with the first patent for the vapor-compression refrigeration cycle, assigned on August 14, 1834[11] and titled, "Apparatus and means for producing ice, and in cooling fluids".

His second son, Angier March Perkins (1799–1881), also born at Newburyport, went to England in 1827, and was in partnership with his father (later taking over the business on the latter's death).