Joshua Shaw

Shaw was able to find purchasers for his work and emerged from obscurity, traveling to London where his paintings attracted many wealthy clients.

In 1820 he collaborated with John Hill, an aquatint engraver, on a collection of large folio prints titled "Picturesque Views of American Scenery."

Although fellow artist William Dunlap called Shaw "an ignorant, conceited English blockhead,"[4] he participated actively in the cultural life of his adopted city.

[3] According to Shaw in an autobiographical pamphlet 'about the year 1814 or ’15, invented the instrument known, and now in general use throughout the civilised world, as the Patent Diamond, used by glaziers for cutting glass'.

Shaw was indeed a developer of percussion primers and a gun dated to be no earlier than 1817, was made by William Smith of Lisle Street in London to test his prototype steel cap according to his own account.

It was developed further as an alternative primer to ignite a gunpowder charge by E. Goode Wright in 1823 ('On the Substitution of Fulminating Mercury'...) and its success inspired Frederick Joyce, a London chemist, to swiftly produce mercury-fulminate non-corrosive percussion caps in quantity within a year.

'[9] this would have pre-dated Goode Wright by nine years but there is no contemporary historical evidence to back this up and Shaw was not a chemist or well educated, so seems very unlikely.

He also successfully filed suits against Joseph Vicars, William Beckwith, and Jackson Mortimer in 1811; Isaac Riviere in 1819, and Collinson Hall in 1819.

Ordnance Department converted one of John Hall's breech-loading rifles to test Shaw's percussion caps and based on this, despite the Supreme Court ruling, successfully petitioned Congress [12] for compensation for use of his patent.

By the time Shaw died in 1860 he was well-known and respected in America as a member of the Franklin Institute; in addition to being an artist and scientist he was a prolific writer.