Williams news., 1915-09-09


 Hammond is getting greater publicity than his father. It seems probable that the German army technicians have appropriated his thermit shell, which will gnaw it's way through steel girders. His wire iess-controlled torpedo for harbor de- 1ense Is about to be adopted by the United States military services. He VIII probably sit some day on Secre- tary Of the Navy Daniels new board or inventors, with Edison and Ford and Steinmetz
 This is considerable progress for even young American to make in nve years out of college Hammond foiloWs right after his dad in that un- official gazette of celebrities, Who's Who in America" We learn there that the inventor was 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 Ar thur Conan Doyle. Just at the tango age," when with his fathers great wealth he could cut a wide swath in gay and frivolous society, he has de- voted 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 men are hard-headed, practical Yankees. without bit of fuss or pa layer 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, Mir. Hammond was a delegate by ap- pointment of the United States gov ernment to the Radio-Telegraphic con- vention at London
 He is, moreover, the treasurer and chairman of the committee on mem. bership of the Institute of Radio-Engi. neers, a member of the advisory com mittee of the aerodynamic laboratory of the Smithsonian institution. and a member of the Royal Society of Arts of London.
 All this MT. 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.
 MT. Hammond has an office in lower Broadway, New York city, but has done most of his work in the more inspiring and less distracting atmos. phere of a beautiful little slate-roofed laboratory situated in the side of a crag overlooking the water at Glouces. ter. Mass. Here he has conducted the important experiments which may mean much to America some day in repelling powerful enemy.
 Nikola Tesla was the pioneer in tel. automatics, as the branch of electri. cal science to which MT. Hammond has devoted himself is called Tel automatics is the control of mechani- cal movements at a great distance by means of wireless waves.
 MT. Hammond is not the first person to control 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 $5o,e90 in experiments.
 Until MT. Hammond improved on the previous devices. it was not pos- sible to guide by wireless a torpedo making greater speed than eight miles an hour. and even then it was impossible te prevent the interference of hostile wireless apparatus.
 The young inventor has solved both these difficulties. He can control a boat or torpedo making B knots, or 38 miles an hour. Wireless transmit ters much more powerful than his own have tried in vain to check the direc. tion of his boat
 The secretary of war, MT. Hammond recently announced, has recommended that the Hammond system be pur- chased 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