page_title: Godfrey Lowell Cabot
section_title: Philanthropic work
hierarchical_section_title: Godfrey Lowell Cabot / Career / Philanthropic work
caption_attribution_description: Day 217. On Saturday, we headed to the Harvard Museum of Natural History, one of my favorite museums in the area and a big hit with my son. Photos from this museum have featured in my 366 project before, on &lt;a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/sackton/6898214593/in/set-72157629136971557"&gt;Day 49&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/sackton/6804790118/in/set-72157629497592301"&gt;Day 63&lt;/a&gt;. This is a 3-image panorama of the Kronosaurus fossil featured at the museum, a complete 42-foot long specimen, excavated on a Harvard expedition to Australia in 1931. I know I should have taken the time to clean up the reflections in Photoshop, but who has time for that? As it is already past midnight, this will have to do. Taken Aug 4, 2012 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States ¹⁄₂₅ sec at f/3.2, ISO400, no flash. Lens: EF28mm f/1.8 USM @ 28 mm
context_page_description: Godfrey Lowell Cabot was an American industrialist who founded the Cabot Corporation.
context_section_description: Cabot was also a significant benefactor of MIT, primarily in solar research, resulting in important discoveries in photochemistry, thermal electricity, and in the construction of experimental solar houses. He also established the Godfrey L. Cabot Award for the advancement of aviation, Harvard's Maria Moors Cabot Foundation for Botanical Research, the annual Maria Moors Cabot prize awarded by the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, as well as an endowed professorship at the institution. In 1973, Harvard's Godfrey Lowell Cabot Science Library was named in his honor.
  Cabot was associated with Calvin Coolidge from Coolidge's Boston days. There is also an audio recording of a discussion between Cabot and Dwight D. Eisenhower on the influence of public opinion on government policy, communism, the Soviet Union, aviation, and V-2 rockets in 1950, kept by the Miller Center of Public Affairs.
  While in his nineties, Cabot sponsored the restoration of the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology's (MCZ) complete Kronosaurus skeleton. Having been interested in sea serpents since childhood and thus often questioning MCZ director Alfred Romer about the existence and reports of sea serpents, it thus occurred to Dr. Romer to tell Mr. Cabot about the unexcavated Kronosaurus skeleton in the museum closet. Godfrey Cabot thus asked how much a restoration would cost and "Romer, pulling a figure out of the musty air, replied, 'Oh, about $10,000.'" Romer may not have been serious but the philanthropist clearly was because the check for said sum came shortly thereafter.
caption: K. queenslandicus at Harvard University which may have been reconstructed with too many vertebrae
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