Word: thomson
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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FRANCIS A. THOMSON President...
...learned & observant electrician & founder of General Electric Co., Dr. Elihu Thomson, 78, inventor of electric welding and more than 700 other patented ideas, onetime acting president of Massachusetts Institute of Technology, an unusually practical man, last week proposed to decoy male mosquitoes to a multitudinous death. The idea developed in this fashion...
Last year General Electric was operating a huge electric furnace along the swampy, mosquito-infested Saugus River at Lynn, Mass., where Dr. Thomson has his personal laboratories. None of the furnace attendants was bitten. Yet A. L. Ellis of the works noticed myriads of what seemed to be mosquitoes dead and resting on the furnace top and in its crevices. He told Dr. Thomson, who collected some of the corpses and found as he expected that they were all males. For he had a shrewd idea...
Before Dr. Thomson could put his reasoning to experiment, the mosquito season passed from Lynn, but not his curiosity. He spoke of the matter to Professor George Howard Parker, Harvard zoologist, specialist on the anatomy and physiology of sense organs and animal reactions...
...this being true, Dr. Thomson proposes: "To organize an electro-magnetic 'hummer' which, at small expense of energy, can spread over a large space the peculiar hum, and attract the males; perhaps also repelling the females. Various ways of trapping the males may be suggested, as they need not be desiccated or cooked to get rid of them...