the way to abolition. Wright was a member of the Boston Vigilance Committee, an organization that assisted fugitive slaves. He was arrested and charged for aiding in the 1851 escape of Shadrach Minkins, the first black man to be seized in New England under the Fugitive Slave Act. He was not convicted. Wright was also indicted and tried for libel in consequence of his severe words for the liquor interests while publishing the Chronotype. Wright eventually became estranged from the abolitionist movement. Moreover, due partially to disappointment in his church's lack of support for the abolitionist cause, and to a slowly growing desire to find secular solutions to social problems, the formerly pious and devout Congregationalist distanced himself from the church. Eventually, Wright became an atheist. Inventions Between 1853 and 1858, besides editing the Railroad Times, he gave his attention to invention and mechanics, constructing a spike-making machine, a water faucet, and an improvement in pipe coupling. He patented the last two, and manufactured them for a short time. Life insurance According to Frank Preston Stearns, Wright became interested in life insurance as a mathematical study and read "the best works on life insurance ... with the same ardor with which young ladies devour an exciting novel." In the spring of 1852 an insurance broker placed an advertising booklet in his hand wherein Elizur Wright looked it over and perceived quickly enough that no company could undertake to do what this one pretended to and remain solvent. At age 40, Wright visited the Royal Exchange in London to investigate the life insurance industry. It was on this trip where he saw an advertisement in the Daily Telegraph for the Sale of 42 Old Life Insurance Policies in which old men were auctioning off their life insurance policies to investors after faithfully paying premiums all their lives. Elizur recognized that these life insurance policy owners were too old to work and could no longer afford their premium payments but were not yet dead to collect the benefit. As a result, the policy owners looked to speculators or investors. Wright recognized and wrote about the fact that life insurance policy owners were not able to obtain as much as half of the value that should be in these policies, but do obtain such from investors in his book Politics and Mysteries of Life Insurance. To Wright, this was unconscionable, and upon his