Spencer Heath Archive

Item 3107

Verbatim words of Heath and other recollections by Spencer MacCallum

No date

 

 

If necessity is the mother of invention, she’s a poor mother.

 

Heath kept a large mother-of-pearl button on the left side of the music holder of his piano so that he could be inspired by its beauty.

 

Heath oriented his house at Roadsend Gardens toward the north star rather than aligning it with Montgomery Road which passed in front of his house. That meant that the oval front lawn, which had ornamental evergreens all around and a great Deodar Cedar (his favorite) at the east end, was egg-shaped rather than truly oval. His grandson Spencer MacCallum discovered this when cutting the grass one day. Asking Heath about it, he learned that the house was oriented toward the north star and that it had been a lot of trouble making the lawn appear to be oval when it was not. As to why he had done this, he just said he wanted to be able to know where north was.

 

When Heath developed the first machine mass production of airplane propellers before World War I, he designed the machinery entirely in his head, including testing it at different rpm to see where it broke down. He never needed to make prototypes but would put the new item of machinery directly into the production line, and it always worked without any need of alternation. This was not known to his family; it only came up incidentally in conversation with his grandson Spencer MacCallum. MacCallum later wrote _________, author of such books as ___________, who replied saying this was not an unknown ability and asked if he might have permission to use the example sometime in his future writing.

 

 

Once when they were children, Heath’s cousin, Isabelle Payne, teased him by saying she was going to call him “Willy” (his name then being William Spencer Heath), to which he replied, “That would be very nice, Belly.” He heard no more about it.