Crackpots' Haven

One of the gadflies that made official Washington miserable in World War I was the crackpot inventor, buzzing with mosquitoey ideas for winning the war--schemes for crashproof airplanes, inescapable torpedoes, mole-burrowing bombs.

Once in a thousand times such crackpottery held water. One day when a sentry in the Navy Department slipped away for lunch, an inventor slipped into Assistant Secretary Franklin D. Roosevelt's office, sold him an electrical antennae device that implemented the successful North Sea mine barrage.

Last week at a long mahogany table in Washington's Commerce Department Building a group of scientists and engineers sat down for their first meeting. Appointed by Commerce Secretary Harry Hopkins, the National Inventors' Council has only one reason for existence: to listen to all inventors, cracked or solid, tap them for soundness. Head of the council was one of the U. S.'s most famed industrial scientists, who has been known to have some queer ideas himself--horse-faced, talkative Charles Kettering, General Manager of Research Laboratories of General Motors Corp., inventor of the self-starter, electric cash register, etc. Around the table were nine others: Chrysler's crack Engineer Fred M. Zeder, Du Font's Research Director Fin Sparre, General Electric's Research Laboratory Director William David Coolidge, Dean Frederick M. Feiker of George Washington University School of Engineering, Manhattan Patent Lawyer (and Theatre Guild director) Lawrence Langner, Ethyl Gasoline Corp.'s Vice President Thomas Midgley, Director Watson Davis of Science Service, Engineering Dean Webster N. Jones of Carnegie Tech, U. S. Patent Commissioner Conway Coe. Absent from the first meeting were Industrialist George Baekeland (Bakelite Corp.) and Dr. Orville Wright, once rated a crackpot tried & true.

Said Conway Coe when the council had finished organization, decided to meet again later: "We expect to get about 100,000 inventions a year. If ten of them prove to be useful . . . the idea will have been very much worthwhile. There's no such thing as a crackpot inventor. Edison might have been the crackpot of the century. . . . But his stuff clicked."

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