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Three old friends of Brigadier- General John J. Carty paid tribute to his memory as a great scientist and engineer, and #8 a leader among men at a memorial service in Knowles Memorial Chapel at Rollins College last Thursday. General Carty, who died in Bal timore, Md., December 27, was a trustee of Rollins and a winter res ident of Winter Park. The upwakers were Dr. Frederick P. Keppel, president of the Carne gie Corporation in New York; Thomas A. Watson, who was ango ciated with Alexander Graham Bell and who made the first telephone ever seen by man, and Dr. David G. Fairchild, botanist, and explor er, whose wife is a daughter of Al exander Graham Bell. President Hamilton Holt, of Rol lins, who presided, called General Carty one of the world's greatest scientists and suggested that prob ably the world would not have half of its facilities for telegraphic and telephonic communications if Car ty had not lived. Referring to General Carty as a trustee of the Carnegie Corpora tion, Dr. Keppel said he had the three fundamental qualities which make a trustee great. These, he said, were a sense of responsibility, the understanding heart, and con structive imagination. Mr. Watson, whose historic tele phone conversation with Alexander Graham Bell in June, 1875, was the first ever achieved, and who was chief engineer and superintendent of the original Bell Telephone Com pany when he retired in 1881, paid tribute as an engineer to the work of General Carty in perfecting tele phonic communications. Describing the celebration ar ranged by General Carty in 1915 when Carty and his engineers es tablished telephonic communication across the continent, and the inter esting episode during that celebra tion when Dr. Watson, in San Fran cisco talked over the transconti nental circuit to Dr. Bell, in New York, who spoke through a replica of Watson's first telephone. Dr. Watson said, “I knew that even that great achievement of cross continental communication was only one big incident in the lives of General Carty and his army of engineers whose brains and hands have built up, from that first crude telephone, a system almost incom prehensible in its magnitude with its hundreds of millions of miles of wire connectting its tens of mil lions of telephones all over the world, pulsating in every direction, day and night, with human speech, Dr. Fairchild told of the intimate friendship that sprang up between Carty and Bell in the early days of ‘pioneer work in telephone engineer ing. “Carty's imagination,” he said, “appealed to Mr. Bell, and the gen tleness of the two men was of the same character. They were con genial spirits in the very highest sense, and there arose from their contact some of the most dramatic historical events of the century. “It would have been easy for ‘someone with a less sensitive feel ing of the emotional nature of man to have brushed Mr. Bell and his work aside and gone with the new er discoveries which reflected cred it on younger men and detracted from the picture of Mr. Bell as the inventor of the telephone.” Irving Raecheller, the author, a trastee of Rollins, read from Scrip tures, {
Newspaper Details
The Rollins Sandspur
Winter Park, Florida, US
Wed, Feb 15, 1933
Page 10
Full Page
Clipped by
Melissa H.
USA 17 Jun 2026
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