Spencer Heath Archive

Item 2212

Biographical sketch by Spencer MacCallum

 

Original is missing.

 

 

Spencer Heath (1876-1963): An Informal Sketch

Spencer Heath MacCallum

 

Spencer Heath was born January 3, 1876 of Quaker /?/ parents, Spencer Anson and Selinda Amelia (Payne) Heath, at Vienna, Virginia. On May 2, 1899, in Chicago, he married Johanna Marie Holm, suffragist and life-long friend of Susan B. Anthony. They had three children — Marguerite (McConkey), Lucile (MacCallum), and Beatrice (O’Connell).

 

 Educated at the Corcoran Scientific School in Washington, his first job was in the tool-making department of the Elgin Watch Company in Elgin, Illinois, making the finely adjusted machinery used in watch manufacture. From there he went into the Experimental Department of the Western Electric Company, Chicago, to do experimental work on telephone apparatus. While there he invented a “lock-out” box to prevent cutting in on party lines. Reports from Iowa, however, where it was tested, were discouraging and the device was never used. It worked too well! The country people wanted to know what was going on; they didn’t want any locking out! He next designed hydraulic machinery for the Crane Company, radically redesigning their entire line of cast-iron valves, principally globe, angle and gate valves. Returning from Chicago in 1902, he accepted a daytime position with the Navy Department in Washington, designing coaling stations around the world, while studying law at National University at night.

 

He received his degrees, LL.B. and LL.M., graduating from National University in 1906. While at Law School, he was president of the debating society for a year, won a medal for highest scholarship, and compiled Heath’s Parliamentary Table, which he successfully published and sold. The latter was used by the Judiciary Committee of the House of Representatives and was commended in a letter by the then Chairman of the Committee, John J. Jenkins.

 

Heath entered private law practice, and from 1908 to 1910 became chief patent counsel and technical aid to Christopher and Simon Lake in connection with submarines and early aircraft. He was similarly associated with Emilie Berliner from 1910 to 1912. Berliner, inventor of the loose-contact telephone transmitter and the flat-disk phonograph record which replaced the wax cylinder. Berliner was also a pioneer in the aeronautical field and was interested at this early date in the helicopter principle. With several sets of rotor blades that Heath designed and made, he demonstrated (he and Heath fastening the machine to the ground by a length of chain to keep it from flying out of control) that enough lift could be attained to make the helicopter practicable. They did not see how to guide it, however; that was left for Sikorski some twenty years later. From this experiment, Heath became interested in the aerodynamics of airplane propellers.

 

In 1910, he formed the American Propeller Company in Washington. It was successful enough that it he quit his law practice in 1913 and moved the company to Baltimore, where it was incorporated as “the American Propeller & Manufacturing Company, Inc.” This was an era when “anybody who had any ‘proper sense’ didn’t fool with airplanes.” Typical of the prevailing attitude were the businessmen of Baltimore, lumber and hardware companies, who, glad at first to give credit for a new “propeller company,” could not cut it off quickly enough when they found the propellers were not marine propellers but were intended for “air ships.” Fortunately, his sales revenues were enough that he never needed that kind of financing.

 

Heath went on between 1913 and 1917 to design and build the first facilities for machine mass production of propellers, replacing the worker who stood at a bench and carved out them out by hand. Four of his machines turned out propellers at the rate of 250 per day.

 

Throughout the critical stages of the war, the Government relied upon the then celebrated “Paragon” propellers produced in the plant of the American Propeller and Manufacturing Company. Heath supplied some three-quarters of the propellers used by the allied governments in that conflict.

 

On May 16, 1919, “Paragon” propellers powered the first airplane flight across the Atlantic Ocean, a flight of three Navy sea (“N-C”) planes from Trepassy, Newfoundland to the Azores.

 

Between 1919 and 1929, Heath concentrated research upon and demonstrated one of the important contributions to aviation, the engine powered and controlled variable and reversible pitch propeller, which did for aircraft what shifting gears did for the automobile.

 

Heath was an early and active member of the Aero Club of America and, after 1916, the Society of Automotive Engineers, serving on their Engineering Standards Committee.

 

Shortly after the war, Heath built a farm in Elkridge, Maryland, and in 1925, in response to a longtime interest in horticulture and ornamental landscaping, founded Roadsend Gardens Nurseries, specializing in landscaping principally with evergreens.

 

In 1929, he sold his propeller company, including all of his patents and technical facilities to Bendix Aviation Corporation, remaining with them as a research engineer here and in England. But aviation was no longer in its infancy; it was established big business now, and Heath’s pioneering interests gradually drew him on to new frontiers. In 1932, he retired to his farm and evergreen gardens for research into the natural sciences and the development of society. He had long been attracted by the free-trade aspect of Henry George’s philosophy, and in 1933 helped found the Henry George School of Social Science in New York City, keeping a part-time office/apartment in the city and lecturing there until 1937.

 

Heath discontinued most of his nursery activities in 1935, liquidating it entirely at the onset of World War II, and devoted himself almost exclusively to research into the phenomenon of society with the specific aim of discovering the common basis of the natural sciences that could guide the founding of an objective science of society. As he saw it, society was not a ‘problem,’ — “but a system of harmony to be discovered and described.” His investigations became the basis of a book, Citadel, Market and Altar: Emerging Society, privately published in 1957, which he often referred to as his “engineer’s report.” The preceding year he had founded the Science of Society Foundation, an educational organization to “Promote and publicize knowledge concerning the world of nature, and particularly the world of mankind and its organization, with special reference to the free and voluntary institutions of society.”

 

For his remaining years, Mr. Heath’s interests drew him to concentrate his attention in new directions, on the one hand towards inquiry into the fundamentals of physical science, extending the basis and implications of Quantum Theory, and on the other towards a development of the aesthetic and religious aspects of mankind in its societal organization. In the latter connection he spent an academic year in Sewanee, Tennessee at the University of the South as guest of its chancellor, Dr. Edward McCrady, auditing their courses in advanced theology.

 

Heath said that these interests, while seemingly diverse, were not in conflict or even unrelated, but complemented one another in active harmony. His philosophic contribution was one of synthesis, and he treasured the introduction he once received before an audience:

 

Mr. Heath is a specialist. But no ordinary specialist. Mr. Heath is a very special kind of specialist; he is a specialist in generalization.

 

His favorite sport was sailing. He once said that if he had another life to live, he would like to devote it to the design of racing hulls. He designed and built two of his own sailing boats, each a sixteen-footer, one when he was a boy in high school and another in law school. In light airs, they would out-sail the other boats on the Potomac. He likes to remember that when all of the big ones were standing around waiting for wind, the “Gem” would sail among them. When asked why he considered sailing the queen of all sports, he said, “I’d have to go into poetry for that.” And he could well have done that, for poetry was a deep love, and he enjoyed composing it. His “engineer’s report,” Citadel, Market and Altar, ends with a sonnet to Beauty.

 

Spencer Heath died in 1963. He was survived by three daughters, six grandchildren, and six great grandchildren living in Virginia, Michigan and New York. In the final years of his life, he was assisted in his work by one of his grandsons, anthropologist and namesake Spencer Heath MacCallum. MacCallum is completing the Spencer Heath Archive of his grandfather’s very largely unpublished writings and arranging for the digitized Archive to be domiciled at the Universidad Francisco Marroquín in Guatemala City and the Institute for Historical Survey Foundation in las Cruces, New Mexico.

 

 

Casas Grandes, Chihuahua, Mexico

August 11, 2013

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