page_title: Sylvester H. Roper
section_title: Early life
hierarchical_section_title: Sylvester H. Roper / Early life
caption_attribution_description: Sylvester Roper's steam carriage made sometime before 1870. Smithsonian negative 77-3533
context_page_description: Sylvester Howard Roper was an American inventor and a pioneering builder of early automobiles and motorcycles from Boston, Massachusetts. In 1863 he built a steam carriage, one of the earliest automobiles. The Roper steam velocipede of 1867–1869 may have been the first motorcycle, for which he was inducted into the Motorcycle Hall of Fame in 2002. He is also the inventor of the shotgun choke and a revolver repeating shotgun.
context_section_description: Sylvester H. Roper's father, Merrick, was a cabinetmaker, born 1792 in Sterling, Massachusetts. Merrick came to Francestown, New Hampshire in 1807 and married Sylvester's mother Susan Fairbanks in 1817. Sylvester had an older brother who was a housepainter, two younger sisters, and a younger brother who became a machinist at the Singer Sewing Machine Manufactory in Boston, then later a jeweler.
  Sylvester Roper was born on November 24, 1823. From an early age he displayed mechanical talent. At age 12 he made a stationary steam engine, even though he had never seen one before in person; this invention was kept on display in the laboratory of the Francestown Academy. At age 14, he built a locomotive engine, and only afterward saw such an engine for the first time in Nashua. Roper left Francestown at a young age and worked as a machinist, first in Nashua, then in Manchester, New York, and Worcester. He married Almira D. Hill on April 20, 1845 in Providence, Rhode Island. In 1854 he moved to Boston, Massachusetts living in the Roxbury neighborhood at 299 Eustis Street.
caption: Roper and his steam carriage, made sometime before 1870.
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