North Shore is fertile ground for inventors

By JIM McALLISTER
Special to Essex County Newspapers

The North Shore's most prolific inventor, John Hays Hammond Jr. (1888-1965), began summering in Gloucester when his father purchased a waterfront estate on Lookout Hill in 1906.

The younger Hammond would later build his famous castle, Abbey-by-the-Sea, in nearby Magnolia and become a permanent resident of Cape Ann.

Hammond had shown a natural aptitude for science while growing up in Washington, D.C. He later attended the Sheffield Scientific School at Yale University and after graduation returned to Gloucester to pursue a career in scientific research.

Over the next half-decade, working in laboratories at Lookout Hill and later in the basement of his seaside castle, Hammond invented more than 800 devices ranging from smoke-eating ashtrays to guided missiles. In his lifetime, the inventor registered an amazing 435 patents with the U.S. Patent Office.

Many of Hammond's most important inventions were related to remote control. In 1911, the 23-year-old scientist dispatched a crewless, radio-controlled houseboat to Gloucester Harbor, terrifying superstitious fishermen.

He went on to develop many inventions of a military nature, including radio-controlled torpedoes and homing devices that would lock onto and follow an enemy ship.

More than 100 of Hammond's patents were acquired by the U.S. War Department in 1916.

The inventor's love of music and interest in radiodynamics led him to experiment with ways to improve the quality of sound transmission and recording. He was responsible for much of the technology used in pre-digital recording. The Radio Corporation of America (RCA) bought many of Hammond's patents related to phonography and elected him to its Board of Directors.

Hammond wasn't necessarily an ideal neighbor. He and his friend Henry Davis Sleeper enjoyed blasting classical music at full volume between their respective Magnolia and Eastern Point homes. And, on one occasion, the inventor's underwater detonating device blew a local fisherman and his boat 100 feet into the air.

Another neighbor who relocated to Cape Ann was Clarence Birdseye (1886-1956). The Brooklyn-born Birdseye, who studied biology at Amherst University for two years, worked as a naturalist for the U.S. government in Labrador. During a five-year stint of fur trading near the Arctic Circle, he noticed that food that froze quickly kept its taste and crispness, and began experimenting with various methods of freezing meat and vegetables.

Birdseye fared better financially than many other inventors. In 1929, a few years after a chance meeting in Gloucester with vacationing cereal magnate Marjorie Merriweather Post, the inventor sold his frozen-food business to Post's Postum Cereal Co. for a staggering $22 million.

Salem _ a city that produced George Parker of the Parker Brothers game company and Ralph Cowan Browne, inventor of the magnetic mine used to destroy enemy ships in World War I _ also attracted a number of famous scientists.

One of America's most important electricians, Moses Farmer (1820-1893), moved from New Hampshire to the Witch City in 1849. Farmer would soon become famous as the inventor of a fire alarm system initially installed in buildings around Boston and later sold nationally.

In July 1859, Farmer illuminated his Salem home at 11 Pearl St. with battery-powered incandescent lamps. This was the first demonstration of electric lighting in America. He later put his apparatus to work in his Boston office, but left it to Edison to make the electric light bulb economically feasible.

Farmer often served as a consultant to Alexander Graham Bell (1847-1922). As Bell's assistant Thomas Watson recounts in his recently reprinted 1926 book, "Exploring Life," a miserable Farmer, after reading his protege's description of the telephone for the first time, said he was unable to sleep for a week.

According to Watson, Farmer groused, "That thing has flaunted itself in my face a dozen times during the last 10 years and every time I was too blind to see it."

In October 1873, Bell relocated from Boston to Salem. The young Scotsman moved into a house owned by the grandmother of 5-year-old George Sanders, one of his hearing-impaired students, and received free room and board in exchange for teaching George how to speak.

Mrs. Sanders turned part of her house over to Bell for a laboratory. There he continued his efforts to develop a telegraph system capable of sending multiple messages simultaneously. Other experiments, conducted both in Salem and in a Boston laboratory, led to the invention of the telephone. On one occasion, Bell ran tests over wires strung between the Sanders house and a keyboard in an adjacent Chickering Piano store.

George's father, Thomas Sanders, became interested in Bell's work and became his primary financial supporter. That investment paid handsome dividends after the U.S. Patent Office awarded the now-famous Patent No. 174,465 for "Improvements in Telegraphy" to "Alexander Graham Bell of Salem, Massachusetts" on March 7, 1876.