He played the violin and was an inventor, devising a compound regulator for timepieces, and a repeating pistol similar to the Girandoni air rifle.

The clock installed by Ralph Smith Mershon in the tower of Muskingum County Courthouse was still functioning in 1956.

Bateman would not answer Mershon's questioning, referring him instead to the Handbook of Civil Engineering by John Trautwine.

In 1891, Mershon joined the company in East Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where he designed transformers for electrical power distribution systems.

He helped place visiting Japanese engineers with American manufacturers and power companies so that the necessary expertise could be acquired.

In 1910, he was involved in the formation of an "Inventors' Guild" that included Thomas Edison, Peter Cooper Hewitt, Elmer Sperry, Mihajlo Pupin, Baekeland, and others.

He is quoted making the wry observation that such posts went to men whose "chief claim to fame arise from activities in fields other than that of electrical engineering as defined by the Institute's constitution".

Mershon became a master of the art of building capacitors, an important element not only of power systems but also in the electronics of radio.

His Mershon Condensers were featured in the popular Crosley brand radios, and suppressed the 60 cps hum heard without them.

However, the patent-holder continued to defend his interest with lawsuits: Merson v. Robinson (June 30, 1941) and Mershon v. Sprague (April 2, 1936).

The first volume recounts Mershon's life and engineering projects, the second is an edited and annotated collection of his writings.