Athelstan Spilhaus, 86, Dies; Inventor With Eye on Future
By HOLCOMB B. NOBLE
Published: April 1, 1998
Athelstan F. Spilhaus, a geophysicist and meteorologist who invented a device that measures temperatures at the depths of the sea and who became the first United States representative on the executive board of Unesco, died on Monday at his home in Middleburg, Va. He was 86.
Dreamer, futurist, creator or fixer of untold numbers of other devices, including some 3,000 varieties of children's toys, Dr. Spilhaus listed his occupation in his later years as ''retired genius,'' and throughout his life he had been involved in complex scientific, mechanical, educational, architectural and military projects.
Some were top secret, and one caused a half-century mystery.
Because of his work with undersea wave and temperature measurements, he was asked to take part in similar geophysical studies and design balloons that would float up and monitor atmospheric waves. The balloons become part of an Air Force system used to spy on Soviet nuclear testing, but part of the apparatus crashed in eastern New Mexico in 1947 -- and the wreckage almost immediately disappeared.
This led many people to believe for decades that they had solid evidence that the planet had been visited by aliens from space. The Air Force disclosed in 1994 that it had whisked away the wreckage, including collapsed balloons and radar reflectors, to keep the project secret.
Dr. Spilhaus's work with the Government led President Dwight D. Eisenhower to name him to Unesco, the educational and cultural arm of the United Nations, in 1954. He received 64 out of 65 votes, including 5 from Soviet delegates, to become his country's first Government representative on Unesco's executive board.
After leaving Unesco in 1958, he returned to the University of Minnesota, where he resumed his deanship and stayed until 1966. He then served as president of the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia until 1969.
President John F. Kennedy later named Dr. Spilhaus to direct the United States exhibit at the Seattle World's Fair in 1962.
Athelstan Frederick Spilhaus was born on Nov. 25, 1911, in Cape Town, South Africa. He graduated from the University of Cape Town in 1931, and soon afterward settled permanently in the United States, where he received a master's degree in science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Years later, he returned to Cape Town for his doctorate, which he received in 1948.
He became a research assistant at M.I.T. in 1933 and then an assistant director at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, he was named an assistant professor at New York University in 1937. There he started the meteorology and oceanographic department and invented the bathythermograph, which was used in World War II to correct inaccuracies in sonar readings that were allowing German submarines to elude detection and sink American destroyers. The readings were varying with the water temperature so that to correct them the precise temperatures had to be known. Dr. Spilhaus's bathythermograph was a tube-shaped projectile that sank fast in seawater and contained a stylus that recorded temperature changes on interior glass. It could be hauled up quickly by winches aboard rapidly traveling destroyers.
Dr. Spilhaus became director of research at New York University in 1946, but two years later moved to the Minnesota to become dean of its Institute of Technology.
The Minnesota winters drove him, perhaps as a matter of survival as a native-born South African, to conceiving the idea of covered skyways, walkways and tunnels that were built in Minneapolis in the 1950's to connect buildings in cities and thus protect people in severe weather.
He is survived by his wife, Kathleen Ann Fitzgerald Spilhaus; a daughter, Margaret Ann Morse of Richmond; two sons, A. F. Jr., of Potomac, Md., executive director of the American Geophysical Union, and Karl Henry, of Needham, Mass.; 13 grandchildren and 5 great-grandchildren.
The grandchildren were not among the least to have benefited from his inventiveness.
''I do love to play with ideas, and I always have had the conviction that the elegance of an idea has nothing to do with its practicality,'' Dr. Spilhaus said in a 1984 interview. Strewn about his house in northern Virginia were repaired antique or newly made toy dirigibles, toys that pump water, saw wood or play the piano, a working wire bicycle, space clocks with 12 functions, like measuring tides or planetary positions.
''Every prototype of every new invention is a toy, because a toy doesn't have to be efficient or balanced,'' he said. ''But it's easy to make a toy demonstrate a rudimentary principle.''
Photo: Athelstan F. Spilhaus, at home in Virginia, was an avid collector of toys. (Don Heinen, 1987)