OBITUARY. 383 



PETER COOPER HEWITT 



MEMBER 



Mr. Hewitt was bom in New York City, March 5, 1861 ; son of Abram Stevens and 

 Sarah Amelia (Cooper) Hewitt. His father was a prominent iron manufacturer and mer- 

 chant of New York, member of Congress from New York and mayor of that city, and his 

 mother was a daughter of Peter Cooper, founder of The Cooper Union for the Advance- 

 ment of Science and Art, manufacturer and philanthropist of New York. 



Mr. Hewitt was educated in Stevens Institute of Technology, Hoboken, N. J., and Co- 

 lumbia University, New York City, making a specialty of economics, physics, electricity and 

 chemistry. Inheriting a taste for mechanics, he devoted his attention to the improvement of 

 mechanical processes and to scientific and mechanical investigations of a miscellaneous order. 

 He obtained patents on improvements in glue-making machinery, invented and patented new- 

 forms of centrifugal machines and evaporators,and applied his inventive ingenuity to the devel- 

 opment of automobiles, flying machines and electrical devices. During the war against Germany 

 and Austria he invented and built a helicopter which would fly straight up without a "take off" 

 and come straight down. He is best known to the public through his work in electricity, to 

 which he began to devote his serious attention in 1898. On April 12, 1901, he announced the 

 laws governing the electrical conductivity of gases at Columbia University, and demonstrated 

 the requirements necessary to obtain a gas or vapor as a conductor having definite resistance 

 characteristics and called attention to many associated phenomena. He invented the Cooper 

 Hewitt lamp which creates light by causing a gas or vapor to conduct the electric current. 

 The invention is utilized, by means of a specially constructed lamp made of blown quartz, 

 to provide a powerful source of ultra violet rays for therapeutical use, sterilization and for 

 promoting chemical reaction. 



Mr. He^vitt invented a light transformer. The light transformer receives light waves 

 of one length or color, transforms the energy so received and radiates it as light waves of 

 another color. It is useid as a reflector in connection with the Cooper Hewitt lamp, to gen- 

 erate the red rays in which the light of the Cooper Hewitt lamp is deficient. 



Another important invention is a device called by Lord Kelvin "Static Converter," but 

 more popularly known among engineers as the "Cooper Hewitt Converter." It is used to 

 transform alternating currents into direct currents. He invented an electrical interrupter 

 for rapidly turning off pow^erful high tension currents, and a vacuum, gas or vapor device for 

 automatically making and breaking an electric circuit, and used it for producing alternating 

 currents from a direct source, and for producing high frequency impulses and alternating 

 currents such as are used in wireless telephony and telegraphy. 



Mr. Hewitt invented a vacuum, gas or vapor amplifier for relaying of telephone mes- 

 sages and amplifying them and for amplifying other electric variations. 



These six fundamental inventions in the electrical field, the Cooper Hewitt lamp, the 

 Cooper Hewitt converter, the interrupter, the Cooper Hewitt pulsator, the electric wave 

 amplifier, the telephone relay and the wireless receiver, Avere all developed by Mr. Hewitt as 

 the result of years of experimental study of the phenomena attendant upon the flow of an 

 electric current through a vacuum, gas or vapor. 



In 1907 Mr. Hewitt constructed one of the first hydroplane motor boats. It weighed 

 2,000 pounds and had four sets of gliding planes, each set consisting of several planes 

 in tiers. He also devoted considerable time to the subject of aeroplanes and dirigible 

 balloons and obtained patents thereon. He received the honorary degree of Science Doctor 



