Evening Republican, Volume 19, Number 204, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 28 August 1915 — John Hays Hammond.Jr. A NOTABLE INVENTOR [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

John Hays Hammond.Jr. A NOTABLE INVENTOR

HE old rule that sona of able men don’t amount to fjy much is ill observed in the E»f - United States. A notable case in point is John Hays Hammond, Jr., son of the mining engineer and finan--1 A. cier. r Just at present young Hammond is getting greater publicity than his father. It seems probable that the German army technicians have appropriated his thermit shell, which will gnaw its way through steel girders. His wire-less-controlled, torpedo for harbor defense is about to be adopted by the United States military services. He will probably sit some day on Secretary of the Navy Daniels’ new board of inventors, with Edison and Ford and Stelnmetz. This is considerable progress for even a young American to make in five years out of college. Hammond follows right after his dad in that unofficial gazette of celebrities, “Who’s Who in America.” We learn there that the inventor wks born in San Francisco April 13, 1888. He is there fore twenty-seven years old. Hammond is a hard-bitten young American, to use a phrase of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Just at the “tango age,” when with his father’s great wealth he could cut a wide swath in gay and frivolous society, he has devoted his days and nights to abstruse calculations, endless blueprints and sputtering dynamos. His keen, lean face and spare figure remind one much of Henry Ford. Both m#n are hard-headed, practical Yankees, without a bit of fuss or palaver about them. Reading further in our “Who’s Who,’’ we find that in 1912, two years after his graduation from the Sheffield Scientific school of Yale university, Mr. Hammond was a delegate by appointment of the United States government to the Radio-Telegraphic convention at London,

Be is, moreover, the treasurer and chairman of the committee on membership of the Institute of Radio-Engi-neers, a member of the advisory committee of the aerodynamic laboratory of the Smithsonian institution, and a member of the Royal Society of Arts of London. All this Mr. Hammond has done with three years still to go to the thirty mark—not by being an infant prodigy, but by hard work, by driving every nerve and fiber of his wiry body at full speed. Mr. Hammond has an office in lower Broadway, New York city, but has done most of his work in the more inspiring and less distracting atmosphere of a beautiful little slate-roofed laboratory situated in the side of a crag overlooking the water at Gloucester, Mass. Here he has conducted the important experiments which may mean much to America some day in repelling a powerful enemy; -Nikola Tesla was the pioneer in telautomatics, as the branch of electrical science to which Mr. Hammond has devoted himself is called. Telautomatlcs is the control of mechanical movements at a great distance by means of wireless waves. Mr. Hammond is not the first person to control a water craft at a distance by wireless. But he is the first man to do this effectively. He has taken out more than one hundred patents to protect his inventions. Incidentally he has spent $50,000 in experiments. Until Mr. Hammond improved on the previous devices, it was not possible to guide by wireless a torpedo making a greater speed than eight miles an hour, and even then it was impossible to prevent the interference of a hostile wireless apparatus. The young inventor has solved both these difficulties. He can control a boat or torpedo making 33 knots, or 38 miles an hour. Wireless transmitters much more powerful than his own have tried in vain to check'the direction of his boat. The secretary of war, Mr. Hammond recently announced, has recommended that the Hammond system be purchased by this government and be kept as an American secret. If congress will appropriate the money a number of wireless plants and torpedo units to be directed by radio will be constructed. One of the

first of these will be installed at Fish; er’s island, Long Island sound, and here all the testwork in torpedo units will be carried out. The war department is keeping very mum on the subject. It is not regarded as desirable that any official publicity be sought, especially as agents of the belligerent European powers are ever ready to grab up any new device which seems to promise use in warfare. It was well known in Washington, however, that the army officers of the commission which visited Gloucester were enthusiastic when they returned here. They saw Mr. Hammond put his famous wireless boat, the Natalia, through its paces without a single failure to respond to radio control. Sitting in his laboratory on shore, the inventor put the Natalia on her course and held her there until he wished to. turn, when she took the precise angle he desired. He demonstrated that he could control the Natalia for the ordinary range of vision, which is about eight miles on the ocean surface. Indeed, the distance of control is limited only by the power of the high radio station. He used a five-kilowatt station. A big battleship carries a station of from thirty to fifty kilowatts. Gen. E. M. Weaver,. chief of the coast artillery corps, said in regard to the Hkmmond invention; “If such a means of attack were added to those we now have we would then be able to attack an enemy’s ships by mortar fire falling vertically on the decks of the ships, by gunfire against the side, turret and barbette armor and by mines and radio-con-trolled torpedo below water.” To test the possibility of interfering with the wireless control of the Natalia the Dolphin, which has the best radio-transmitting apparatus In the United States navy, was sent to Gloucester, and by breaking in with her powerful waves attempted to neutralize or disarrange the messages from the shore. The experiments continued many hours. Throughout all this time the little Natalia darted about under perfect control, while the Dolphin operator tried in vain to fathom the secret and send out ether vibrations which would confuse her. Not until the Dolphin was only 230 feet distant from the Natalia could the shore control be affected. That would be too close for its battleship victim to stop a torpedo. It is suggested that the final form the radio-directed torpedo may take will be that of a submarine running a few feet below the Burface or a hydroplane traveling at Immense speed on the surface of the water. Sir. Hammond's second important device is the thermite shell, which he says was handed over to the Germans by a traitorous German employee of his and is now being used in the war in Europe. As Hammond’s projectile flies through the air the composites of thermite, oxide of Iron and finely divided aluminum are brought together inside it and unite, with the production of a

temperature of 5,400 degrees Fahrenheit, the greatest artificial heat known except the electric arc. ** In another compartment of the shell, a second chemical reaction produces deadly hydrocyanic gas, or prussic acid. When the projectile penetrates a battleship or a fort, a small bursting charge cracks the shell. The prussic acid gas prevents approach. The thermit produces a white hot mass of metal which, showered about the spot, will instantly set fire to anything inflammable, or eat through a battleship’s decks and right down into the ocean. A third invention of Mr. Hammond is his curious electrical dog, which will follow anybody who has a lantern about the Hammond lawn at Gloucester in the darknesn. The interior of the dog consists of a battery, relays and a motor. On either side is a selenium disk, which is so affected by the light that it pursues a visitor until he puts out his lantern.