Educator in Orbit

For ten years, one of the more arresting sights of Minneapolis has been burly Professor Athelstan F. (for Frederick) Spilhaus, 47, dean of the University of Minnesota's Institute of Technology, tossing his huge head at cocktail parties and spouting fantastic scientific ideas faster than water flows over Minnehaha Falls. Last year Spilhaus' friend, William Steven, executive editor of the Minneapolis Star and Tribune, hit on the idea of harnessing this awesome flow by getting the learned professor to do a scientific comic strip. As a result, a Spilhaus-scripted strip, Our New Age, now appears weekly in 102 U.S. and 19 foreign newspapers. The professor earns about $193 a week, and thousands of Americans are being instructed and entertained by one of the most torrential personalities of U.S. higher learning.

Icebergs & Porpoises. Scholar Spilhaus is a world authority on meteorology and oceanography, and a member of the U.S. National Committee for the International Geophysical Year. As a member of the executive board of UNESCO three years ago, he made--only half facetiously--some arresting proposals: hauling Antarctic icebergs to water the Mojave desert, dyeing the ocean to control absorption of solar heat and thereby curb hurricanes, training porpoises to shepherd fish.

But in his comic strips, the professor tries not to get too far out for his young readers, and he has lately taken to conning scientific journals and newsmagazines for topics ("I've become positively immoral about tearing pages out of magazines on airplanes"). Spilhaus and his artist, Carl Rose, dish out lightly sugared fare about the ionosphere and how it is used as a global "radio mirror," about the winds and how they flow round the earth, about harvesting fish with electric currents.

"Athel" Spilhaus, as his Minneapolis friends call him, was born in South Africa, the grandson of the Scottish founder of the country's educational system and son of Premier Jan Smuts's Portuguese-German trade commissioner. Ever since he left Cape Town to drive with his bride to Cairo, Spilhaus has been doing and saying things that astonish his less impulsive colleagues.

Trap Drums & Businessmen. After studying at M.I.T. and the famed Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, he offended a department of meteorology at New York University with the breezy claim that he could forecast more accurately than the local U.S. weatherman. At Minnesota he outraged College of Education colleagues in 1957 by blithely asserting that they had replaced the three Rs with "the three Ts--typing, tap dancing and tomfoolery." Once he thrust his martini glass at Minneapolis Symphony Conductor Antal Dorati and said: "Tony, we can build a machine that can compose music." Retorted Dorati: "Well, then you'd better build a machine that can listen to it."

At the moment, his cartoon strip is Spilhaus' favorite occupation. "I love to try something I don't know how to do and then damn well do it," he exults. He has recently taken up trap drumming and dabbled in abstract painting. Last week he broke off a highly technical account of the installation of radar wind-finding devices in Iceland to tell a colleague: "I want to be a whole man. I want to know how private enterprise works." It turned out that Scholar Spilhaus had joined the board of a St. Paul publishing firm and become adviser to two investment houses. "Businessmen are as thoughtful as university professors," was his first discovery. Says a fellow professor: "Spilhaus is swinging in wider and wider orbit, so that people have a chance to get over being mad before he gets back to them."

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