Spencer Heath Archive

Item 2907

Six typed pages — a news release prepared by Spencer MacCallum for an event honoring Heath’s 80^th birthday (held, however, not on January 3^rd but on the 29^th), as part of the on-going effort to bring attention to his ideas

January 20, 1956

 

 

Spencer Heath, L.L.M., research engineer, patent attorney, pioneer in aviation, manufacturer, social re­searcher will be honored on his eightieth birthday on January twenty-ninth at a reception to be given by the Franklin J. Matchette Foundation, 20 East 66th Street, New York.

 

 An informal sketch of Mr. Heath’s career follows.

 

 Spencer Heath was born in 1876 at Vienna, Virginia. Educated at the Corcoran Scientific School, his first job was working in the tool-making department of the Elgin Watch Co., Elgin, Illinois, making the finely adjusted machinery used in watch manufacture. From there, he went into the Experimental Department of the Western Electric Co., Chicago, and did experimental work on telephone apparatus, especially succeeding in inventing a success­ful “lock-out” box to prevent cutting in on party lines. Reports from Iowa, however, where it was put into use, were most discouraging, and the device was discontinued. The country people wanted to know what was going on; they didn’t want any locking out. Mr. Heath next designed hy­draulic machinery for the Crane Company, radically re­designing their entire line of cast iron valves, princi­pally globe, angle and gate valves. In 1902, he returned from Chicago and took a daytime job with the Navy Department in Washington in order to study law in the evenings.

 

 Spencer Heath graduated from National University Law School, Washington, D.C. in 1906. While a student there, he was president of the debating society one year, won a gold medal for highest scholarship and published a simplified table of Parliamentary Procedure which was used by the Judiciary Committee of the House of Representatives and com­mended in a letter by the then Chairman of the Committee, John J. Jenkins.

 

 Mr. Heath entered into private law practice, and be­tween 1908 and 1912 was chief patent counsel and technical aid to Christopher and Simon Lake in connection with sub­marines and early aircraft, and to Emilie Berliner, inventor of the telephone transmitter and the flat disk method of making records for talking machines, and a pioneer in the aeronautical field. Emilie Berliner was interested at this early date in the helicopter principle, and with several sets of rotor blades designed and built for him by Mr. Heath, he was able to demonstrate, by tests in which the machine was chained to the ground, that enough lift could be attained to make the helicopter practicable.

 

 Spencer Heath was an early and active member of the Aero Club of America. Later (1916), he became a member of the Society of Automotive Engineers and was ap­pointed to the Engineering Standards Committee.

 

 In 1910, Spencer Heath formed his own propeller company in Washington. It grew until in 1913, he quit his law practice and moved the company to Baltimore, where it was incorporated as “The American Propeller & Manufacturing Company, Inc.”

 

 Those were the days when “anybody with any ‘proper sense’ didn’t fool with airplanes.” Illustrative of this prevalent attitude were the businessmen of Baltimore, lum­ber and hardware companies, who were glad at first to give credit for the new “propeller company” but who, when they found the propellers were not for sea-going ships but for “air ships” instead, cut the credit off immediately.

 

 Spencer Heath went on, between 1913 and 1917, to design and build the first facilities for machine mass pro­duction of propellers, replacing the earlier method whereby a woodworker stood at a bench and carved them out by hand. These machines in series turned out propellers at the rate of 60 per day.

 

 When the War came, his production methods enabled him to meet the emergency, and through­out the critical stages of the war the government depended exclusively upon the then celebrated “Paragon” propellers produced in the plant of the American Propeller & Manufacturing Company.

 

 On May 16, 1919, “Paragon” propellers made possible the first airplane flight across the Atlantic Ocean, a flight conducted by the Navy in Navy sea (“N-C”) planes from Tre-Passy, Newfoundland, to the Azores.

 

 Between 1919 and 1929, Mr. Heath concentrated research upon and demonstrated one of his best-known developments for aviation, the engine powered and controlled, variable and reversible pitch propeller.

 

 In 1925, responding to an interest in horticulture, he started an evergreen nursery at his country place and farm, “Roadsend Gardens”, in Elkridge, Maryland.

 

 In 1929, he dissolved the propeller company and sold all patents and technical facilities to Bendix Aviation Co., becoming a research engineer with them for two years in the US and in England.

 

 Aviation was no longer in its infancy; it was well established by now, and Spencer Heath’s pioneering interests led him gradually to new frontiers. In 1932, he retired to his farm and nursery, “Roadsend Gardens”, for researches into the natural sciences and the development of society.

 

 In 1935, Spencer Heath discontinued his nursery busi­ness altogether and, for the next twenty years, devoted his energies entirely to research into the phenomenon of society, with specific reference to finding the common basis of the physical sciences and founding thereon an objective science for the study of society.

 

 Mr. Heath set out the results of his researches last year in a manuscript titled, Citadel, Market and Altar, which he refers to as his “engineer’s report.” Citadel, Market and Altar is being manufactured by Yale University Press and is scheduled to be published by Mr. Heath’s newly founded organization, the Science of Society Foundation, in the fall of the year.

 

 He is looking forward to beginning work this spring on a second book which will treat of society, its long development and the bright future he sees in store for it, from the religious approach.

 

 Spencer Heath’s favorite sport is sailing. In his younger life, he designed and built two of his own sailing boats, both sixteen feet, one when he was a boy in high school and another in Law School. In light airs, they would outsail the other boats on the Potomac. Mr. Heath likes to remember that when all the big ones were standing around waiting for wind, the “Gem” would sail among them. When asked why he considers sailing the queen of all the sports, he says, “I would have to go into poetry for that.”

 

 He would be qualified for that too, because poetry is a deep love of Spencer Heath’s, and he occasionally writes it — sonnets or doggerel. His favorite form of humor is the pun, and next, the anecdote.

 

 At eighty years old, Mr. Heath Is still a remarkably active person. Among other indications besides his wit is the fact that he still averages more than a thousand miles of travel a month in his automobile, which he drives himself, visiting Montreal and Virginia and spending his late-winters in Florida.

 

 Spencer Heath has three daughters, six grandchildren, and six great grandchildren living in Virginia, Michigan and New York. For the past year, he has been assisted in his work by one of his grandsons, Spencer Heath MacCallum, a recent graduate of Princeton. A second, Crawford MacCallum, is taking his doctorate in physics at Cornell, while a third Irvan O’Connell, is enrolled in the Harvard School of Law.

 

 Spencer Heath lives on his farm, “Roadsend Gardens”, 1502 Montgomery Road, Elkridge, Maryland. His New York City office is at 11 Waverly Place.

 

 Ref: Who’s Who in the East, A.N. Marquis Co.

S. M.

1/16/56

 

 

 

 

 

[Posthumous biographical note: Spencer Heath died October 7, 1963 — Spencer MacCallum]