Sherman Mills Fairchild - Inventor

Sherman Mills Fairchild
Inventive Genius

Millbrook Mirror & Round Table

about 1925

 

 

Sherman Mills Fairchild

 

The experts were stumped.

 

It was back in July of 1917 when the staff technicians of the largest photographic manufacturing plant in the world had evolved an aerial camera for America's fledgling birdmen to employ in taking pictures of the Hindenburg line.  It was a good camera, if only it could be made to function.  The trouble was in the automatic film spacing mechanism.  The long reel of celluloid would jump and overlap, jam and tear.  Every apparent solution, including perforations along the edges, proved abortive in practice.  With urgency a prime consideration, the army officer in charge of experiments wired to Washington for the best camera specialist available.

 

Among the patriotic horde of volunteer specialists which had invaded the Capital following the declaration of war had been a twenty-one-year-old student named Sherman Mills Fairchild.  As an amateur inventor he had devised several novel camera mechanisms, including an automatic flashlight device that permitted the taking of snapshots of moving objects at night.

 

"I can build a better aerial camera than any now in use, one that will be entirely automatic and fool-proof," he told a high officer in the Signal Corps.  "Let me use an electric mechanism and I'll simplify it, too."  The army officer refused to agree to the use of electrical contacts but he told the anxious youth to go ahead and build his better camera.

 

The Armistice was being negotiated before Sherman Fairchild completed his contract, but, so revolutionary and at the same time satisfactory was the new "box" that an order for two more was immediately given him.  He began work on the new machines in a dinky little office, with two draftsmen.  So tiny were the dimensions of the room that when a visitor called, it was necessary for one of the employees to pass out into the corridor before the caller could gain admittance.  That was in 1919.

 

Today, enterprises developed from Mr. Fairchild's camera have offices in principal cities throughout the country, and branch production plants in Dallas, Los Angeles and Grand Mere, Canada.  he has a small, but up-to-date air-craft factory at Farmingdale Long Island, for manufacturing airplanes according to his own ideas.  Over a hundred and twenty-five employees are on his payroll. Whenever you look at an aerial photograph, or reproduction, the chances are ten to one that if the picture was not snapped by one of Mr. Fairchild's flying photographers, it was at least recorded through the lens of a Fairchild camera.  Fairchild aerial picture-taking machines are the official cameras of the United States Army and Navy, the Brazilian and Canadian Governments.

 

At twenty-nine years of age the young man whose genius confounded the experts at Rochester in 1917, is president of five-financially successful companies growing out of the aerial camera.  And still he goes on inventing more and more remarkable devices.  Meanwhile, through the recent death of his father, the late Geo. W. Fairchild, new responsibilities have been heaped on the shoulders of the remarkable young man. He is now administrator of one of the great American fortunes and a director in several nationally known corporations.--Everybody's Magazine

 

[Compiler note:  Sherman Mills Fairchild was born April 7, 1896 in Oneonta, Otsego Co., NY, the son of George Winthrop and Josephine (Sherman) Fairchild.  He grew up in Oneonta and attended Harvard, Arizona and Columbia universities.  He was never married.  He died Mar. 28, 1971 in New York City.  He was an inventive genius, promoter, industrialist and pioneer in many phases of aviation and photography.]