Stamp of Integrity Was His Hallmark

 

                 By JOHN CHAMBERLAIN

 

THE “IMAGE” of the American businessman and industrialist, as projected by our intellectuals, has generally been one of a cheater who would sell his own mother into slavery for a fast buck.

 

  The meat packers, according to the fiction of Upton Sinclair, made money out of poisoned beef; the airplane manufacturers, as depicted in a recently popular Broadway play, have been willing to risk
their own aviator sons in defective planes In time of war. 

 

  In the days when I was doing a column of book criticism, this     sort of stuff came over my desk regularly. Like any cliché, it got to be a bore. It also happened to be a tremendous distortion of the truth, as I came to know when I deserted the book world to write corporation stories for a business magazine.

 

  The world of business is like any other world, a mixture of elements. It has produced villains, no doubt, but it has also produced saintly characters, such as my friend Spencer Heath.

 

  Mr. Heath died last week at the age of 86 in his native Virginia, and was buried in a family plot in the Shenandoah Valley town of Winchester. The news of his death caused only the faintest of ripples, for he had been a quiet man for many years. There were only a few to remember that he was one of the great originating pioneers in the field of aviation manufacturing, and I doubt that there were ten people in the country who recalled the details of his effort to force manufacturing rectitude on the United States government in its aviation program for World War I.

 

  Spencer Heath was the first man in the United States to develop a machine for the mass production of airplane propellers. His factory in Baltimore was turning out some 250 propellers a day when the United Skates entered World War I in 1917. Naturally, the government depended almost entirely upon the celebrated “Paragon” propellers that came from the Heath factory.

 

  No American-made plane was produced in time to carry such aces as Eddie Rickenbacker up over the German lines, but manufacturers like Mr. Heath gave it a good try, and if the war had lasted a little longer the “Paragon” propeller would surely have made an enviable wartime record.

*   *   *

AS LONG as Mr. Heath made propellers to his own specifications, they were good ones. But at one point during the war the government ordered a type which Mr. Heath felt was quite unsound. When he presented an alternative design, he was informed, “Mr. Heath, this is wartime. You make those pro­pellers, or we’ll shoot you.”

 

  With a federal gun at his head, Spencer Heath complied with government orders. He was, after all, under military discipline. But before shipping the propellers out he had a rubber stamp made which read: “Made under protest. Condemned by manu­facturer.” This warning was stamped on every de­fective propeller that left the factory. The stamp is still in the proud possession of the Heath family.

 

  When he tried to trace the fate of the defective propellers he had made under duress, Mr. Heath was told they had wound up in a warehouse in Texas.

 

  After World War I Spencer Heath made the first practical engine-powered, controllable and reversible pitch propeller. This did for aircraft what the gear shift did for the automobile. Without it, the airplane would not have been adaptable to commercial use.

 

  I knew Mr. Heath in the days of his retirement, long after he had sold his patents and technical facilities to the Bendix Aviation Company. In his book, “Citadel, Market and Altar,” printed by. the Yale University Press for his own Science of Society Foundation, Inc., Mr. Heath developed some remark­able theories bearing on inventive creativity that have been commended by Roscoe Pound, former dean of the Harvard Law School, and philosopher William Ernest Hocking.

 

  An original man always, Spencer Heath doubted that the Western nations were menaced by the higher birth rates of countries such as China and Soviet Russia. Since the populations of the high birth-rate nations have short life expectancies, the fund of experience in those countries never deepens. Mr. Heath worked it out mathematically. “If you have half as many people who live twice as long,” he used to say, “they will live to do something more than merely eat, grow to adolescence, reproduce their kind, and die.”

 

 

Copyright, 1963, King Features Syndicate, Inc.