THE VISIONARY
In the spring of 1922, George Owen Squier, a major general in the U.S. Army, paused under a large tree in Rock Creek Park, the 1,700-acre preserve that snakes through the nation’s capital. After studying the tree for a moment, Squier pulled a coil of copper wire out of his pocket, grabbed one end of the wire, and tossed the other end into the air, snagging a lower limb. Then, reaching into the kit bag slung over his shoulder, he pulled out a device that resembled a telephone and attached it to the wire. With a hammer, he nailed the wire to the trunk of the tree.
The slim, balding man in his late 50s with a reddish mustache was not only the first officer in the U.S. Army with a doctoral degree but also a technology visionary who revolutionized telephone communication, helped build the nation’s first air force, and knew such pioneering figures as Alexander Graham Bell, who had been credited with inventing and patenting the first practical telephone; Guglielmo Marconi, the Italian inventor and electrical engineer who developed wireless telegraphy; and Orville and Wilbur Wright, the American aviation pioneers. Nevertheless, his unimposing physical appearance and odd behavior that day made it easy to for the park police officer who had been scrutinizing Squier from a distance to mistake him for a run-of-the-mill vandal.
Squier aimed to patent a device that would convert a tree into a towering radio antenna.
“Get out of here and quit spoiling that tree!” the policeman admonished Squier, according to Homer Croy, a correspondent for Boys’ Life, who was tagging along with the general that day to write a profile of him for the popular monthly magazine.
Fortunately, Squier was able to convince the policeman that he wasn’t desecrating nature but pursuing a legitimate mission: demonstrating one of his most unusual inventions. In 1919, knowing that soldiers in the field couldn’t quickly communicate with headquarters over long distances, Squier had sought to patent a device that connected a radio transmitter and receiver to a tree and converted it into a towering antenna. That day in Rock Creek Park, to prove to the young readers of Boys’ Life that his device actually worked, he carried on a conversation with another operator 10 miles away.
“Thus has it ever been in his life,” Croy later wrote in his profile of Squier. “Every time he has undertaken to do something there has been somebody to stop [him], to tell him he couldn’t.” But what might seem like heroworshipping hyperbole was, in Squier’s case, true. He had overcome a hardscrabble,
