[2] Following his father's death in 1799, executors of the Baldwin estate proved unequal to the task, however, and his widow and children were left in difficult financial circumstances owing to their poor management.

[3] Although he received a very satisfactory common school education, Baldwin's inclination and aptitude related to mechanical tinkering from an early age.

[3] Toys would be deconstructed and reassembled to learn their inner workings and spare bits and pieces of machinery would be put to new use in a makeshift workshop inside his mother's home.

[3] In 1825, Baldwin went into partnership with a machinist named David Mason to form a company which made industrial equipment for printers and bookbinders: tools, dies, and machines that had previously been exclusively imported from Europe.

Demand for steam engines proved to be great and Baldwin and Mason quickly supplanted their printing machinery business with an engine-making division.

Based on designs first shown at the Rainhill Trials in England, Baldwin's prototype was a small demonstration engine that was displayed at Peale's Philadelphia City Museum.

[5] This engine, nicknamed Old Ironsides, traveled at the rate of only 1 mile per hour (1.6 km/h) in initial trials made on November 23, 1832, but the machine was later refined and improved so that a peak speed of 28 mph (45 km/h) was attained.

Although contracted for $4,000, owing to performance shortcomings a compromise price of $3,500 (equal to $110,503 today) between the railroad and the budding Baldwin Locomotive Works was ultimately agreed upon and received.

[3] Baldwin was an outspoken supporter for the abolition of slavery in the United States, a position that was used against him and his firm by competitors eager to sell locomotives to railroads based in the slaveholding South.

[3] Baldwin was a member of the 1837 Pennsylvania Constitutional Convention and emerged as a defender of voting rights for the state's black male citizens.