John Hays Hammond, Jr. : The Father of Remote Control

By Nancy R Stuart

The first biography of the American inventor known as "The Father of Remote Control" (1888-1963), who pioneered electronic remote control for modern radio devices, missile guidance systems, variable pitch propellers, other military innovations, and single dial radio tuning. After importing medieval architectural elements from Europe, he built the Hammond Castle, now a museum in Gloucester, Massachusetts. 

This book is an updated and digitzed reprint of the 1987 biography of John Hays Hammond, Jr.  

• Language: English
• Publisher: Nancy R. Stuart
• Release date: Mar 7, 2018
• ISBN: 9781732109209

Nancy R Stuart

NANCY RUBIN STUART has been writing since she was nine years old. She is the author of seven nonfiction books. Her most recent work, "Defiant Brides: The Untold Story of Two Revolutionary-Eva Women and the Radical Men They Married" was a selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club-2, the History Book Club and the Military Book Club.  A high-energy, award-winning author/journalist Nancy specializes in social history, social trends and women. Long before today's War On Women and the consequent MeToo movement, Nancy's books placed the lives of important but often forgotten women on the historical record.  Among her books are "The Muse of the Revolution:" "The Reluctant Spiritualist:" "American Empress;" "Isabella of Castile;" "The Mother Mirror" and "The New Suburban Woman." In 1987 Nancy published the biography of John Hays Hays Hammond, Jr., who is known as The Father of Remote Control. She has recently updated and digitized that work to make it again available to readers.  She has appeared on national television, been heard on national radio, including NPR's "Morning Edition," and often speaks before live audiences.  Nancy's journalistic work includes New York Times, the Huffington Post, New England Quarterly and American History magazine. She serves as Executive Director of the Cape Cod Writers Center and is a co-president of the Women's National Book Association, Boston chapter.  www.nancyrubinstuart.com. www.facebook.com/NancyRubinStuart

Book preview

Introduction

Inventors can’t help it, John Hays Hammond, Jr. shrugged when a Gloucester Daily News reporter asked what drove his extraordinary career. His response was vintage Hammond, wry, playful and self-deprecating.

In reality, Jack Hammond was one of twentieth century America’s most prolific inventors. He registered more than 435 patents with the U.S. Patent Office which led to the development of radio, telephone, photography, television and radar.

His work in radio weaponry spanned two world wars and resulted in the United States’ military use of remote control torpedoes in high speed ships, airplanes and underwater craft. Later refinements of this work were basic to today’s guided missile and space programs, earning him the title of Father of Remote Control. In addition, his work in communications (frequency broadcasting) became the basis for modern broadcasting.

Despite these accomplishments, Jack remained relatively unknown outside his profession. While he was an early officer of the Institute of Radio-Engineers and served for twenty-six years as a member of RCA’s Board of Directors, professional praise came late in life. In 1959, the Franklin Institute awarded him the Elliott Cresson Award, and in 1962, the Institute of Radio Engineers made him a fellow. A year later he received the Institute of Electric and Electronics Engineering’s medal of honor.

In appearance, Jack was a handsome, well-built man of medium height with brown hair and piercing blue eyes. Early newspaper accounts describe him as having an aristocratic face with a Byronic profile that fit well with the atmosphere of his castle home. As he aged, he became heavier, lost most of his hair and wore dark rimmed glasses. In manner, he was gentle, whimsical and thoughtful.

While he was a profoundly serious man, Jack Hammond had an irrepressible joie de vivre which is obvious in his eclectic castle home, in his wanderings to remote parts of the globe and in the vast range of his inventions. He was a master of understatement with a sudden droll wit which often delighted his friends. Traces of the Hammond humor are still apparent in the wallpaper of the castle’s Purple Room that hides the bathroom door, in the poison ivy he had planted around his grave and in the grand Bishop’s Chair of the Great Hall in his castle home, which still contains cigarette stains from his late night musings.

I have longed to have that chair with me to sit in during interminable directors’ meetings, he once wrote. …the seat is contrived so that you can’t fall asleep without your relaxed weight pitching you forward unceremoniously.

Jack Hammond was a legendary host and a superb conversationalist who attracted famous artists, actors and musicians as friends. Yet he was intensely curious about all humanity and charmed people wherever he went regardless of their life station. That curiosity extended even beyond the grave. As for the hereafter, he once confessed to a friend. My scientific curiosity has at times almost made me pull the trigger.

Today Jack Hammond’s brilliance lives on in the military, musical and communications inventions he created and in the sublime beauty of his castle museum.

1

Son Of A Millionaire Mining Engineer

From our earliest records, John Hays Hammond, Jr. had a driving curiosity, sense of humor and a vivid imagination that was to win the admiration of his peers, and to inspire his many contributions to modern technology.

Born to wealth and privilege on April 13, 1888 in San Francisco, Jacky was the second of four children of Natalie Harris Hammond and John Hayes Hammond, preceded seven years earlier by his brother, Harris. Strands of art, music and science run through his life like the threads of a medieval tapestry and were part of his legacy, a reflection of the natural gifts and talents of his parents. As an adult, Jack would disagree with his parents on everything from social mores to architecture, but their early influence on him was profound.

His mother, Natalie Harris Hammond, was the daughter of a distinguished Mississippi family which moved to New York during the post-Civil War era. Later, as Natalie matured and showed artistic talent, her parents sent her to school in Dresden, Germany. There she met a tall, brilliant Californian by the name of John Hays Hammond. A recent graduate of the Sheffield Scientific School of Yale, he was studying at the Royal School of Mines in Freiberg, Saxony. Hammond came from an old Maryland family whose ancestors dated to the pre-revolutionary era.

The attraction between John Hays Hammond and Natalie Harris was immediate, and they married on January 1, 1880.

The nature of Hammond’s mining work meant that the young couple spent their early years together on frontiers