Historical figures
Arranged by birth year

Joshua C. Stoddard was an American inventor. He was educated at the public schools, and became noted as an apiarist. He also turned his attention to inventing, and on October 9, 1855 patented (#13668) the calliope. ... It was originally known as a "steam piano", but Stoddard, finding this too leaden a title for his entirely new musical instrument, christened it after the chief of the nine muses, Calliope, "the beautiful voiced". His first instrument, consisting of a steam boiler, a set of valves, and fifteen graded steam whistles played from a pinned cylinder, reportedly could be heard for a range of five miles. The Worcester City Council banned him from playing it within the city limits because it was so loud. He had originally intended the calliope to replace bells at churches, but rather it became associated with riverboats and circuses.

He founded the American Steam Piano Company with financial backing from Worcester industrialists. According to an article on the Mechanical Music Digest website, Joshua was not a successful businessman and soon lost control of the company to one of his backers. He subsequently returned to his roots as a farmer and beekeeper.

He also invented the Stoddard horse-rake, patented in 1879. More than 100,000 of his rakes were produced. Other inventions included a fruit-paring machine and a fire escape system, patented 1884.

Richard Henry Stoddard, a critic and poet, was born on July 12, 1825, in Hingham, Massachusetts. He spent most of his boyhood in New York City, where he became a blacksmith and later an iron moulder, but in 1849 he gave up his trade and began to write for a living. He contributed to the Union Magazine, the Knickerbocker Magazine, Putnam's Monthly Magazine and the New York Evening Post. In 1853 Nathaniel Hawthorne helped him to secure the appointment of inspector of customs of the Port of New York.

His wife, Elizabeth Drew Stoddard was also a novelist.

William O. Stoddard was assistant secretary to Abraham Lincoln during his first term. He first served as a clerk in the Interior Department. On July 15, 1861, he was appointed "Secretary to the President to sign land patents". He personally made the first copy of the draft Emancipation Proclamation in September 1862.

After two bouts with typhoid, Stoddard left his White House post in July 1864.

Theodore Lothrop Stoddard ... was an American political scientist, historian, journalist, anthropologist, eugenicist, pacifist, and anti-immigration advocate who wrote a number of books which are often cited as prominent examples of early 20th-century scientific racism.

Stoddard was born in Brookline, Massachusetts in 1883. He attended Harvard College, graduating magna cum laude in 1905, and studied Law at Boston University until 1908. Stoddard received a Ph.D. in History from Harvard University in 1914, and was also an avid stamp collector. He published many unashamedly racialist books on what he saw as the peril of immigration, his most famous being The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy in 1920.