Spencer Heath Archive

Item 2751

Typed page and several carbons of earlier drafts giving Heath’s qualifications for leading discussion groups at the Master Institute presumably, since these were clipped together with Item 2752 which names the Master Institute.

1930s

 

 

 

SPENCER HEATH

 

Spencer Heath is an engineer, lawyer, manufacturer (now re­tired) and lifelong student of the natural and social sciences. He was among the pioneers in the two great fields of automo­tive and aeronautical engineering, taking time out between the two for a civilian engineering career in the establishment of far-flung coal­ing stations for the United States Navy and for admission to the bar and practice of law, chiefly in the field of engineering and patent law. In his Naval work he was associated with Admirals Sigsbee, and Dewey and “Fighting Bob” Evans.

 

 Mr. Heath was an early member of the Aero Club of America and during the Great War was an active member of the Committee on En­gineering Standards of the Society of Automotive Engineers.  For some years as an attorney he had charge of the patent interests of the elder, Christopher, Lake, of the Lake Submarine Boat Company and also of the varied patent matters and engineering enterprises of Emile Berliner, inventor of the telephone transmitter and the flat disk phonograph record.

 

 Prior to the War, Mr. Heath patented various improvements in aeronautical propellers and organized the American Propeller and Man­ufacturing Company through which he supplied many foreign governments before and during the War, and became the almost exclusive source of supply for the United States.

 

 For some years after the War he was en­gaged in the development of power-controlled reversible pitch propellers until 1929 when he disposed of all his patent and other interests to a large aviation corporation for whom he became research engineer. Finally he retired to his country place near Baltimore, Maryland, where he took up studies and experimentation in botany and plant propagation and indulged his long-standing interest in the study of biology and other natural sciences as a key to the study of social phenomena and to an objective examination of the structure and functions of human societies.

 

 In 1933 he assisted in the establishment of a School of Social Science in New York City, and since that time has been engaged in teaching and research work in the Science of Society, chiefly in New York City. More recently he has made a special study of the aesthetic influence of religion and the fine arts as motivation towards creative social change.

 

 Mr. Heath, as a natural scholar and investigator, possesses a rich and varied background of science and philosophy as a basis for his penetrating analyses of the structure and normal processes of so­ciety. He regards such analyses as prerequisite to any proper understanding of any existing maladjustments. He is no idle theorist, but the owner of substantial properties and real estate, both improved and unimproved, and has spent the greater part of his life in active business and professional pursuits.