By the time of this report, son Willoughby had become the head of the fundamental development group of North American Aviation (Northrop, today, parent corporation of the B-2 bomber). Young Cady would pass away of cancer, in Huntington Beach, the next year.
That's interesting! I didn't know or had forgotten that link. Also ouch, sudden cancer just after heading up development of advanced aircraft. On that note: NEPA (Nuclear Energy for the Propulsion of Aircraft) had started in 1946, and become ANP (Aircraft Nuclear Propulsion) in 1951. (per
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear-powered_aircraft ) So, a definite workplace hazard possibility there.
and then in Cleveland, to do some further development work at Clevite Brush Co. According to the memos in the files of the top executive of the time, Townsend (who was there as a consultant, not an employee) gathered up Brush's research and carried it away with him. Years later, he would offer to return it in person and and bring some exciting news with it.
There seems to have been a complicated chain of companies spiralling out from Charles Francis Brush: eg
https://www.brushindustries.com/about-u ... px?id=1396 and
https://case.edu/ech/articles/b/brush-development-corp
The BRUSH DEVELOPMENT CORP., which became the world's largest producer of artificially grown piezo electric crystals, was organized in 1930 to market electronic devices utilizing the crystals, which had been developed in the Brush Laboratories. Located at E. 40th St. and Perkins Ave., the company, under the direction of president Alfred L. Williams, sold a wide range of products, including high-fidelity microphones and speakers, a practical application of the piezo electric principle. Brush transmission equipment found a ready market in the rapidly growing radio broadcast industry, and was used by Admiral Richard E. Byrd on his second Antarctic expedition in 1934.
Brush Industries has a rich history in the world of machine-readable devices. Originally founded in 1919 by Charles Francis Brush as Brush Labs, a research company based in Cleveland, Ohio, the company was started with the intention to develop phonographic products that utilized piezoelectric crystals. Mr. Brush died prematurely in 1929 but his backers founded the Brush Development Company in 1930 to commercialize the inventions of Brush Labs. The newly formed company became the USA's biggest manufacturer of instrument recorders and other test and measurement instrumentation in the latter half of the 1930s. Brush's main business in 1943 was the production of piezoelectric phonograph pickups.
The firm also offered several products in the magnetic recording field. It was the sole producer of the piezo electric hearing-aid receiver and marketed a sound mirror to aid in voice training. The Brush BK 401 Sound Mirror (1946) was the first tape recorder to be designed and built in the United States.
That Brush tape recorder, I believe, involved post-WW2 German technology.
Selected excerpts from:
https://www.gustogen.eu/history , which focuses on the British branch of the Brush family of companies, but includes the American and French branches.
(1849) Charles Francis Brush, born on March 17th in Ohio and raised on his family’s Walnut Hills Farm. He demonstrated an interest and aptitude with engineering from a young age – so much so that his indulgent parents allowing him space to build a workshop in their home. At the age of 12 he built a static electricity machine, using a bottle, a piece of leather and amalgam from an old mirror. He made batteries, electromagnets, induction coils and small motors. The coils were made with rusty wire, with the rust and some shellacked paper acting as insulation. During this time he learnt of Humphrey Davy’s 1808 experiment with an arc light and while at Cleveland Central High School had access to electrical apparatus at the physical laboratory and was able to build his first arc light before he left his High School with honours.
George Westinghouse Jr, was born in 1846 in Pennsylvania... Thomas Alva Edison was born in 1847 in Ohio, the same state as Brush.
1856 – Nicola Tesla was born on 10 July 1856 in modern day Croatia. He was a Serbian-American inventor, electrical engineer, mechanical engineer, and futurist who is best known for his contributions to the design of modern alternating current (AC) electricity supply system. He later worked with Continental Edison in Paris, then in Edison Manufacturing in New York and later with Westinghouse, who licensed his AC induction motor.
1869 – Charles’ education culminates in a graduation from the University of Michigan in 1869 with a degree in Mining Engineering, as academic qualifications in electrical engineering did not exist at the time.
1869 - George Westinghouse creates Westinghouse Air Brake Co (WABCO) producing air brakes for trains, which would bring him fortune and the start of a long string of Westinghouse companies. WABCO itself would later become WABTEC.
1870’s - Brush’s early work revolves around optimising the design of the arc lamp – first used in this decade for street illumination and a safer alternative to gas lighting.
1873 – Brush set up a small laboratory to continue his experiments with electricity and thought about the Arc light being powered by a dynamo. He reacquainted with George Stockly, a boyhood friend, who was vice president of the Telegraph Supply Company of Cleveland, and who, impressed with Brush’s findings, supported the development of Brush’s arc lamp and dynamo.
1878 - The Franklin Institute of Philadelphia launched an evaluation of dynamos and tested various models including the Gramme model from Europe.
The Brush dynamos were found to produce strong currents and to be easier to maintain due to the simplicity of their design and in the end the Franklin Institute purchased a Brush dynamo, which effectively endorsed it as the machine of choice for producing electricity.
The testing committee included the prominent electrical scientist, Elihu Thompson, who would later form his own company to produce arc lighting in competition with Brush, until the two merged in 1889.
1879 – John Wanamaker hired Brush to install lights in his Philadelphia department store. The lights were described by one observer as “twenty miniature moons on carbon points held captive in glass globes”. The age of electrical lighting had been born. Dynamo sales were meagre until Brush perfected and successfully demonstrated his new arc light system on Cleveland's Public Square on April 29, 1879, with twelve lamps around the park, powered in series by a dynamo housed in the Telegraph Supply Company of his friend George Stocky.
1879 - Both Edison in the US and Sir Joseph Wilson Swan in UK were working to produce a suitable filament for a lightbulb, it was Swan who demonstrated a working incandescent lightbulb using a carbon filament on 3 February 1879 at a meeting of the Literary and Philosophical Society of Newcastle upon Tyne, several months ahead of Edison.
After many experiments, Edison developed later that year an incandescent lamp that lasted 13.5 hours, and on November 4, 1879, filed for U.S. patent 223,898 for an electric lamp using "a carbon filament or strip coiled and connected to platina contact wires".
1880 – Over 5000 Brush arc lamps are in operation representing 80% of all arc lamps used at the time. In order to keep pace with the demand for Brush lighting systems, the Telegraph Supply Company of Cleveland underwent significant restructuring giving birth to the The Brush Electrical Company which capitalized at $3 million, with the aim of manufacturing and selling Brush street lighting systems. The company built a factory of 200,000 sqf. on Mason St., which employed 400 people.
The Anglo-American Electric Light Company recognised the superiority of the Brush arc-lamp and dynamo and bought the world-wide rights to the Brush system outside North America. It was reconstituted on 4th December 1880 as the Anglo-American Brush Electric Light Corporation Ltd and a larger factory, the Victoria Works, was set up at 112 Belvedere Road in Lambeth, near Waterloo Station.
1889 – By this time the Brush company lost its dominance by failing to develop a large-scale research facility or expand the firm. Competitors adopted and copied the basic process of arc lighting to design and build more and better improvements to the system. Brush launches legal action against Thompson-Houston Electric, accusing them of patent infringement. Rather than fighting a legal battle, Charles A. Coffin from Thomson offered to buy Brush at $40 per share. Brush suggested $75 per share, an asking price of $3 million. Thomson-Houston accepted the next day. This merger did not affect The Anglo-American Brush Electric Light Corporation based in London which had other investors.
Charles F. Brush now semi-officially retires from the world of the electric industry – continuing to produce research covering the kinetic theory of gravitation and selling the world’s first piezo-electric featherweight stylus.
On the 10th August 1889, Anglo-American Brush and Falcon Works become the Brush Electrical Engineering Company Limited
1891 - In Britain, Emile Garcke became Managing Director of Brush Electrical Engineering Co. He would hold that position and steer the fortunes of the company for the next 40 years.
1893 – Westinghouse gets a huge boost winning the contract to GE to light the World’s Columbian Exposition (Chicago, Illinois) with their AC system and using the Sawyer-Man design incandescent lamps.
The Compagnie Française Thomson-Houston (CFTH) was formed in Paris, a sister company to GE in the United States. It is from this company that the modern Thomson Group would evolve; demerged in 1999 to form Thomson Multimedia and Thomson-CSF (now Thales Group).
1895 – Charles F. Brush discovered the presence of the element Helium in the earth’s atmosphere.
1896 – British Thomson-Houston (BTH) was created as a subsidiary of (American) General Electric in May 1896. It used the name BTH as GEC had the rights to the General Electric Company trademark in UK
1903 – Emile Garke’s led British Electric Traction Co (B.E.T.) becomes the principal shareholder in the Brush Electrical Engineering Co.
1905 – Charles F. Brush founded the Linde Air Products Company after becoming interested in the invention of Dr Carl Linde for the production of oxygen from liquid air.
1907 – Emile Garcke becomes Chairman of Brush remaining in that position until his death in 1930. Garcke had founded the British Electric Traction Company (BET) in 1895 as an organisation to promote electric tramways as a means of public transport, and more than 80 companies became affiliated to it
1910 – Charles F Brush developed his Kinetic Theory of Gravitation read before the American Association for the Advancement of Science, where he demonstrated that certain materials of the same shape and mass can fall faster than others. It also postulated that the energy of the ether of space exists in the form of isotropic ether waves of very short wave lengths.
1913 – The American Institute of Electrical Engineers awards Brush the Edison Medal
1915 - Brush Electrical and Engineering is chosen to support the Royal Navy in the provision of aircraft – producing 650 planes by 1919.
1921 – Brush Laboratories was started in by Charles Brush, Jr. with the support of his father Charles F. Brush and Dr. Baldwin Sawyer, who pioneered work in the extraction of beryllium from ore and the production of beryllium metal, oxide and master alloy. After the death of Brush Jr in 1927 it would be renamed Brush Beryllium Company, the predecessor to the present Materion Corporation.
1925 – Charles F Brush developed the theory that certain minerals could generate heat due to absorption, by matter, of isotropic ether waves.
1928 – Brush was awarded the Franklin Medal by the Franklin Institute
British Thomson Houston (BTH) became part of Associated Electrical Industries (AEI), which saw BTH merged with its rival Metropolitan-Vickers. This deal made the GE controlled AEI the largest military contractor of the British Empire during the ‘30s and the ‘40s during World War II.
In France, Alstom (originally as Als-Thom) was formed from a merger between Compagnie Française Thomson Houston and the electric engineering division of Société Alsacienne de Constructions Mécaniques.
1929 – In April of that year Brush presented before the Franklin Institute his updated “Kinetic Theory of Gravitation”
Charles F. Brush dies on June 15th, shortly after reaching the age of 80, after complications with pneumonia. His Mansion of Euclid Avenue would be soon dismantled as those were his wishes once no one in the Brush family occupied it.
1939 – The world’s first gas turbine for electricity production is created. Located in Neuchatel, Switzerland, and designed by Brown Boveri & Cie.
Frank Whittle successfully runs in April, the first turbojet engine – the WU. His company Power Jets Ltd was supported by British Thompson Houston and the engine developed at one of their facilities
1943 – Brush Electric once again contributes to the war effort by taking over the production of military aircraft from de Havilland - producing DeHavilland Dragon Rapides/Dominies for WW2. This sees the company eventually build 346 aircraft before winding down production in 1945 in the wake of VE day.
The British side gets complicated after WW2, as is the style of the time (with similar shell games happening in the USA no doubt):
1957 –The company becomes part of the Hawker Siddeley Group...1971 – The former Rotating Machines division was formed into Brush Electrical Machines Ltd, (abbreviated to BEM Ltd), which continued to produce electric motors and generators over a wide power range. Concurrently the other two main product divisions were converted into Brush Transformers Ltd and Brush Switchgear Ltd. The traction Division was converted into Brush Traction Ltd... 1988 - ASEA AB of Sweden merge with BBC Brown Boveri Ltd forming ABB (ASEA-Brown Boveri) 1992 – Brush Traction formed with ABB the Eurotunnel Locomotive Consortium and won the contract to supply the “Shuttle” locomotives. 1996 - FKI Group acquired the Hawker Siddeley Electric Power Group from BTR for a price of £182 million. Brush becomes part of FKI Energy Technologies. 2000 – In view of the worldwide demand for generators, FKI sees the opportunity to acquire HMA Power Systems - a mainstay of the electrical industry in the Netherlands since its founding in 1892. It would be rebranded as Brush HMA. 2008 – The company was acquired again by Melrose PLC – leading to a redesign and modernisation for the older Loughborough offices in a drive to eventually make the business “smaller and more profitable”. Melrose finalise the acquisition of FKI for £480m, bringing with it Brush SEM – integrating the different wings of the company into ‘one brush’, made up from Brush UK, Brush CZ, Brush NL, and Brush Americas in Houston. 2010 – Under the new Melrose management, the Generator and Motor Services of Pennsylvania (GMS) is acquired by the Brush Group. First formed in 1987 by former Westinghouse technicians, GMS had a large and well equipped workshop in Pittsburgh and provided generator repair services. 2011 – Melrose PLC sells Brush Traction to the WABTEC group, an American company formed by the merger of the Westinghouse Air Brake Company (WABCO) and MotivePower Industries Corporation
1989 – Brush Celebrates 100 years with the visit of the founder’s grandson, Charles F. Brush III an archaeologist and an adventurer himself who was also the president of the famous Explorers Club of New York, which counts among its members some of the greatest adventurers of all time.
Anyway. My takeaways from this are:
1) Clevite/Brush were SUPER SUPER into the defense contracting scene, on both sides of the Atlantic, so no wonder Townsend, who had an unerring nose for both money and high-end military, was all over that scene
2) Both Cleveland and Philadelphia seem to have been hotbeds of electrical research, and the Franklin Institute, which I believe turns up in Winterhaven, seems to be especially deeply linked to Brush.
3) If it was specifically CF Brush's personal research that Townsend was interested in, and not the less exotic but more strategic tape recorder and semiconductors stuff (what became early data-recording and computing), then I imagine it was his evaluations of "gravity absorbing materials", "thermogravity" and "pushing gravity" from the 1920s, since Townsend referred specifically later in the 1950s and 1970s to all these theories of Brush. And Roger Babsons's Gravity Research Foundation was (before the academics took over) specifically looking for a "gravity absorber" - this doesn't seem a coincidence.
4) Charles F Brush III - sounds kind of "Nassau", was he doing spy stuff with all that "adventuring"?
https://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/11/nyre ... brush.html
Charles F. Brush, Archaeologist Who Piled Adventure Upon Adventure, Dies at 83
June 11, 2006
Charles F. Brush III, an archaeologist who as president of the Explorers Club persuaded his brethren to take on a singular adventure — admitting women to their den of stuffed polar bears, tarantula appetizers and overstuffed armchairs — died on June 1 in Manhattan. He was 83.
The cause was congestive heart failure, his son, Charles IV, said.
Dr. Brush, who lived in Shelter Island, N.Y., took up mountain climbing at 49, ran his first marathon at 54, and climbed the sheer Devil's Tower in Wyoming at 70, two days after taking up rock climbing. One of the legendary parties he had at his Park Avenue penthouse had Allen Ginsberg sitting in the nude chanting in front of a Buddha sculpture in the living room, The New York Times reported in 1993.
Dr. Brush was an eccentric, even in the eccentric Explorers Club — and he could afford to be. His grandfather, Charles Francis Brush, perfected the arc light and was making money from illuminating city streets while Thomas Edison was still working on his first bulb. Dr. Brush III's father, with some help from his own father, started what is now Brush Engineered Materials, a leading producer of beryllium metal.
Dr. Brush III, who was never bothered by a 9-to-5 job, was a director of this family company, now publicly traded, for 45 years until 2003. He explained to The Plain Dealer newspaper of Cleveland that he served because as an anthropologist, he was fascinated with boardroom dynamics.
Charles Francis Brush III was born in Cleveland on April 3, 1923, and in later years collected wines from that year, though hardly exclusively. His father died when he was 3. Then his only sibling, a sister, died, and he and his mother moved to Riverdale in the Bronx. The two traveled around the world when he was 17.
He graduated from the Fountain Valley School of Colorado and from Yale. His college education was interrupted by service in the Army Signal Corps during World War II. After living on a plantation in Jamaica, where he owned a restaurant, he began doctoral studies at Columbia.
He met another graduate student, Ellen K. Sperry, in the anthropology department's "bone room." She became his third wife in 1958.
She survives him, along with his son, Charles IV, of Manhattan; his daughters Karen, of Manhattan, Barbara Brush Wright of Shelter Island, and Danielle Brush Schmid of Huntington Beach, Calif.; seven grandchildren; and a great-granddaughter.
After climbing three Mexican volcanoes at 49, his first year of climbing, he soon made up for lost time by scaling the highest summits in North America, South America, Europe and Africa. He switched to running marathons at 54 because he was disenchanted with the downscale crowd of climbers who greeted him at the top of Mount McKinley in Alaska on July 6, 1976; he was two days late for a Bicentennial celebration because of the death of a fellow climber.
At the Explorers Club, of which Dr. Brush was president from 1978 to 1981, he did little to belie his swashbuckling reputation. His dinner jacket was lined with fabric showing the club's flag, which has accompanied polar pioneers and astronauts. Members long remarked on the mountain climbers he sent rappelling from a balcony at a banquet at the Waldorf.
Correction: June 14, 2006
An obituary on Sunday about Charles F. Brush III, an archaeologist and former president of the Explorers Club, incorrectly listed his third wife, Ellen Sperry Brush, as a survivor. She died in 1999.
Oh, and there's another bit of a Nassau flavour: Institute of Noetic Sciences.
https://www.celestis.com/participants-t ... brush-iii/
Dr. Brush was a director of the Institute of Noetic Sciences, Trustee of the Sierra Club Foundation from 1981-1987, and President of the American Scandinavian Society from 1983-1985. He was a competitive racewalker and competed in numerous marathons, and was a member of the Century Association.
Nate