Businessman Industrialist philanthropist
Godfrey Lowell Cabot was born in Boston, Massachusetts and attended Boston Latin School. His father was Dr. Samuel Cabot III, an eminent surgeon, and his mother was Hannah Lowell Jackson Cabot. He had seven siblings: three being, Lilla Cabot, among the first American impressionist artists, Samuel Cabot IV, chemist and founder of Cabot Stains, and Dr. Arthur Tracy Cabot, a progressive surgeon.
Cabot was educated at the Brimmer, Boston Latin, and Hopkinson schools, and attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) for one year before entering Harvard College in 1878. He graduated magna cum laude in 1882 with a B. A. in chemistry. He studied chemistry at the Zurich Polytechnicum and the University of Zurich in 1883-1884.
Upon graduation from Harvard College, Cabot was hired by his older brother Samuel, a chemist who, among other things, manufactured lampblack. The Cabot brothers, in search of a blacker carbon and a cheaper source of fuel for making it, began experiments with carbon black, the soot of burning natural gas. Samuel built a small carbon black plant at Worthington, Pennsylvania, in 1882, and Godfrey worked there in 1883 before leaving for eighteen months of travel and study in Europe. Upon returning home, Cabot went into partnership with his brother and then educated himself in the natural gas business by tramping the oil fields of western Pennsylvania, where the gas was often burned off just to be gotten rid of. He bought out Samuel's interest in the Worthington plant in 1887, acquired natural-gas rights in the area, and began making carbon black on a large scale.
In 1891, Cabot returned to Harvard for graduate work in chemistry and geology, but his business travels precluded regular attendance. Both Cabot's business and the demand for carbon black increased. He built the Grantsville Carbon Works in West Virginia in 1899 and purchased the Pennsylvania and West Virginia Carbon companies in 1911 and 1913, respectively.
Meanwhile, new uses for carbon black developed: as coating for carbon paper and as an ingredient in fertilizers, batteries, insulating materials, and plastics. It also became important in such processes as the hardening of steel and the toughening of the rubber used for automobile tires. As Cabot acquired natural gas for making carbon black, he branched out into the production and distribution of gas for lighting and heating. In time he became a producer of oil field equipment, crude oil, gasoline, and industrial chemicals.
He traveled frequently to all corners of the world, crossing the Atlantic by steamer forty-four times prior to World War II, and became an early enthusiast of flying. Only four days after the flight at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, in December 1903, Cabot congratulated the Wright brothers on their success, and within the month he had proposed to Senator Henry Cabot Lodge that the government take an interest in aircraft for defense purposes. At fifty-four he learned to fly. In March 1917, Cabot became a lieutenant in the Naval Reserve Flying Corps and at his own expense and in his own plane patrolled Boston Harbor and the New England coastline, looking for German submarines. On May 3, 1918, he conducted the first successful pickup of a package from the ocean surface by an aircraft in full flight.
Following World War I he established the Wright Brothers Memorial Trophy and served as president of the National Aeronautic Association.
Solar energy was another forward-looking interest of Cabot's.
He devoted much money and effort to the suppression of vice and corruption in Boston. In 1900 he joined the Watch and Ward Society, became a member of its board in 1908, and served as treasurer from 1915 until 1940. Under his direction in the 1920's and 1930's, the society's work made Boston synonymous with blue-nosed puritanism. Showing little sensitivity for the constitutional rights of their quarry, Cabot and his associates used economic, social, and legal pressures and harassing techniques to block the sale and distribution of books of which they disapproved. Among their victims were many of the foremost writers of the era: Conrad Aiken, Sherwood Anderson, John Dos Passos, Theodore Dreiser, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, Aldous Huxley, James Joyce, Sinclair Lewis, Bertrand Russell, Upton Sinclair, and H. G. Wells. The society also forced changes in, or the omission of "offensive" parts from, plays and moving pictures; waged war on saloons and alcohol; and attacked prostitution, gambling, narcotics dealing, and other vices. Almost single-handedly Cabot brought about the disbarment of Joseph C. Pelletier, district attorney of Suffolk County, Massachussets, for failing to prosecute criminals and for accepting bribes to drop pending cases. Yet during the era of Senator Joseph McCarthy, he spoke out in defense of professors and others accused of Communist sympathies. He died in Boston at the age of 101.
Controlling eleven plants, he became the nation's leading producer of carbon black and an important figure in the chemical industry. He was a famous aviation pioneer and World War I U. S. Navy pilot. He also founded the Aero Club of New England. In 1922 he patented a system for refueling planes in the air. His gift of $647, 700 to MIT in 1930 to support solar research resulted in important discoveries in photochemistry and thermal electricity and in the construction of experimental solar houses. Other Cabot philanthropies included $615, 773 to Harvard to establish the Maria Moors Cabot Foundation for Botanical Research and funding for the annual Maria Moors Cabot prizes awarded by the Columbia School of Journalism to newspaper editors and writers who most advance international friendship in the western hemisphere. In 1973, Harvard's Godfrey Lowell Cabot Science Library was named in his honor.
Quotations: "If you haven't a zest for living, " Cabot declared, "you weren't brought up right. "
Cabot served as president of the National Aeronautic Association. He was a member of the Watch and Ward Society.
In spite of the breadth of his interests, Cabot's views on morality were narrow. He completely abstained from alcoholic beverages and drank neither coffee nor tea.
On June 23, 1890, he married Maria Buckminster Moors; they had five children.
