Solar Attack

Godfrey Lowell Cabot of Boston speaks to almost anybody, but his thoughts are definitely heavenward. He is 77, and in his old age he broods much about the vast stores of energy in sunlight which man does not utilize. In his youth he was closer to earth. Fresh from Harvard with a magna cum laude (1882), he went out to western Pennsylvania to help his brother build a plant for making carbon black (used in printing ink, shoe polish, automobile tires, etc.) from natural gas.* From carbon black he made a fortune. During the War, when he was nearing 60, he learned to fly a seaplane, patrolled Boston's harbor for the Naval Reserve, looking for German U-boats, spotted a whale. He also invented a mechanism by which airplanes could pick up objects while in flight. As an officer of Boston's Watch & Ward Society, he once went after a blackmail gang so strenuously that he was indicted for conspiracy but acquitted.

There are three major ways of harnessing sunlight directly; mechanical (concentrating the rays with parabolic reflectors); electrical (using photoelectric cells to convert light energy into electricity); chemical (imitating the natural photosynthesis of plants). Since plants themselves store solar energy, there is also the possibility of using plants themselves for fuel--e.g., powdered cornstalks instead of powdered coal. Last year sun-minded Mr. Cabot gave Harvard $615,773 for a long-range research program to increase the rate at which plants store solar energy (TIME, June 21).

Last week Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where Mr. Cabot studied before he entered Harvard, announced that it had received from him a gift of $647,700 for a research program to investigate the direct methods of harnessing solar power --mechanical, electrical, chemical. Far from being floored by the prospect of such an enterprise, M. I. T.'s President Karl Taylor Compton feels that the Institute is well equipped to carry it out. Said he: "Mr. Cabot's generous gift makes it possible for the Institute to begin a great research program in which the combined efforts of scientists and engineers . . . will be concentrated. .

*Mr. Cabot still treasures as a great compliment a remark he overheard in the gas fields: "Hell, Mr. Cabot's as common as anyone."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.