NATHAN "BILL" MORRIS

© 1997, Clayton Davis

Bill Morris is an inventor who made significant contributions to aviation, mainly by testing components in chambers that simulated high altitude conditions.

More visible, but not as long-lasting, is Kentmorr Airport. It is a private airfield and residence a few miles south of Bay Bridge Airport. All the houses alongside this grass strip have attached hangars.

At age 90-something, Morris still flys his Cessna 182 across oceans and to the Arctic Circle. "Spirit of Maryland" is painted on the nose.

Not the least of his contributions to this world, Morris made the incubator Dr. Jonas Salk used to create the polio vaccine.

We are indebted to Bill Morris' daughter, Annette (Morris) Lerner, for her family history "Nothing is Impossible, The Adventures and Inventions of Nathan 'Bill' Morris," privately published.

He was born in east Baltimore July 19, 1907, and given the name Nathan by his mother. He prefers to be called "Bill".

Always busy with his hands, inventing and modifying things, when he was only fifteen years old, Bill Morris found a job working for Julian P. Friez, an inventor. It was a good learning experience for the job Bill landed at the American Instrument Company in Washington.

Bill Morris has been flying since 1938. He learned in a Model K Aeronca powered by a Continental 50 horsepower engine. George Brinkerhof taught him at College Park Airport. Lessons were $4 for half hour once a week.

Just when Bill got his pilot rating, along came World War II. The aviation industry needed to test components. High altitude fast bombers and fighters were being developed. The only way to test new things was to climb high and fly around for several hours to see how something worked. It would be better to test it in the laboratory.

But there weren't any chambers that could precisely control pressure and temperature to simulate the effects of flying at extreme altitudes. Bill Morris invented some test chambers.

He used dry ice and controlled temperatures down to minus 130 degrees Fahrenheit. Testing brakes and tires, electronic components, gears, fittings and levers suddenly became routine and cheap.

He wanted to join the military as a pilot, but Bill Morris was too valuable at his civilian job. The government told him to stay out of the war.

Determined to serve, Morris landed a position as First Lieutenant in the Civil Air Patrol. During the war he flew off- shore, hunting submarines in the Atlantic with a depth charge strapped between his landing gear. Official records do not credit First Lieutenant Nathan "Bill" Morris with sinking anything, best we can learn.

When the war ended August 1945, Bill Morris started looking for a place to build a house and runway near the water. He flew up the Atlantic coast to Nantucket and back. He decided on something closer to Baltimore.

Kent Island on the Eastern Shore had just what he wanted. Morris bought 140 acres of what had been the summer home and estate of Governor Carvel of Delaware.

Beatrice Saviola says, "My grandfather still owns that property with the original house standing. It continues to be used as a vacation property."

That was before the Chesapeake Bay Bridge was built. The Morris family had to catch the ferry at Sandy Point north of Annapolis and ride a half hour to Matapeake. A dusty dirt road bumped along southward on Kent Island when they visited the house and runway they were building.

Mr. Morris still had business in Silver Spring. His children, Annette and Allen, were in school. Commuting was simple. They all loaded into the airplane and flew back and forth to College Park airport every morning and evening.

Sitting in his study at the Kentmorr house alongside the runway and watching boats in the Chesapeake Bay, you are impressed by this soft-spoken aviation pioneer. A pioneer is one who goes there first and does it, putting the bricks in place.

Anybody can look at a building and say, "Yes. It is a building."

Few people ever get to see the bricks being laid. Even fewer know where they should be put, or how to align them.

You can go to the airport and buy a ticket, even ride in one, twenty-four hours a day, round the clock. There it sits, ready when you are. You can say, "Here is an airplane. Wonder how all those exquisitely fitted and dependable parts were tested?"

People like Bill Morris have been putting the bricks in place, one by one after the Wright Brothers and others got the first airplanes off the ground.

Always curious about how things worked, a young Bill Morris sought and found jobs making and inventing things, improving life for those around him.

How does the mind of an inventor work? Bill Morris first sees a new device sitting there in front of him. Look at some thing you use every day. There. See it? Before the first one was made, however, some visionary had to see it.

What Morris does is construct it in his mind, then work backward, developing processes and procedures as he goes along. If there is nothing in existence yet, he makes one, installs it and goes on.

Among his other inventions, Bill Morris designed the first laboratory incubator for Dr. Salk. The world breathed a sign of relief April 12, 1955. Jonas Edward Salk, M.D., had developed a vaccine to prevent paralytic poliomyelitis. People called it infantile paralysis. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt had suffered from it and served all his years in the White House riding around in a wheel chair. It was a dreadful disease, causing fears similar to AIDS in later years.

Salk was only forty years old, married with three boys. And he was a saint, some said, for he did not patent the vaccine. He insisted that all people get free and equal access to the cure.

The day I visited him, Bill Morris was working on a sanitary device for boats for treatment and direct overboard discharge from toilets, free of bacteria and visible solids. His is better because it kills bacteria instantaneously, using heat. Bacteria can not survive at 150 degrees. His runs at 190 degrees, well below boiling point. The EPA loves his device.

While we visit, Bill Morris is describing a trip to the wilderness he was getting ready to make. It would be his umpteenth in a single-engine airplane, far offshore, far away into primitive country, where no man had gone before. Well, yes, a few men did go there before, but they didn't walk.

He will be visiting Alert Airport in the North West Territory, 82'31"N 62'16"W, 450 miles from the geographic North Pole. The airport has a 5800 gravel strip, NDB and TACAN. And a telephone number.

He explains, "I make a complete study and research every one of these strips. I put in the same amount of work and study as those trail-blazing aviators did in the old days, way back before there were any telephones at these places."

As he talks about this and other trips, he picks up what appears to be a television channel switcher. I know he is an inventor and wonder what it is.

"Click"

He looks up. My eyes follow his. Suspended from the ceiling all around the four walls of this huge office is a model railroad layout with two tracks. There is a train chugging along looking happy. On the other track is a train sitting still.

"Blow the whistle?" I ask.

"That's on the other train. Broke down right now," answers an aviation pioneer who has shown the "Pride of Maryland" to every continent on the globe.

Here is a man who can pick up a remote control and see his trains run around the office, crossing book shelves containing scrapbooks of many journeys in his Cessna 182 N58845 named "Pride of Maryland."

On the desk between us are some Amtrack tickets. I ask, "You planning to ride a train soon?"

"Oh, sure. Going down to Florida next month for the Sun- and-Fun fly in."

"Why not take the Cessna?"

"Come downstairs to the hangar. Want to show you why."

There it sits, fastidiously clean, back seats removed, extra gas tank installed. On a workbench laid out in neat order are the survival gear and things he needs for such a venture into hostile territory.

He has an emergency position locator that will send out a signal to be picked up by satellite. The signal will contain data identifying the airplane and who is in it. Next is a tool kit, emergency blankets, first aid kit, oxygen, and life raft.

Bill Morris explains, "Just starting to get some of it together. I will weigh every piece of it. Then I'll jack the airplane up and examine the tires with a magnifying glass. Flat tire is a disaster up there."

"How do you choose what to carry?"

"The Canadian government gives you a list, what you personally should have, what the airplane should have. Blow a tire and you would have to make a telephone call. Some places up there have tires and spare parts. But you have to know where they are. Sometimes it's a 1000 miles away."

"Then you would have to change the tire in that climate."

"Yes. It's very difficult taking a tire off in weather up there," he concludes.

Bill Morris' Cessna 182 N58845 has two of everything: electrical power source, GPS, loran, and ADF. If the generator goes out, there is a backup battery.

He adds, "I have a backup vacuum system and a backup fuel pump too."

Bill Morris has been making flights like this since at least July 1968. His neat scrapbooks of each and every trip indicates he visited Pierre Miquelon, Novo Scotia that year.

Perhaps his most memorable flight was on June 16, 1985. Bill Morris joined 68 other airplanes participating in the rally commemorating Charles A. Lindbergh's 1927 flight to Paris.

Genius knows no age limit.

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PATENTS Date Description Patent Number

October 5, 1937 Automatic Switch 2,094,713

May 23, 1939 Portable Refrigeration Unit 2,159,907

June 27, 1939 Thermostatic Switch 2,164,282 for Scientific Baths

June 17, 1941 Electric Heater Terminal 2,245,602

July 22, 1947 Thermostatic Regulator 2,424,250

Nov. 2, 1948 Refrigeration Employing Dry Ice 2,452,594 to Minus 130 F.

March 29, 1949 Heating & Cooling with Dry Ice 2,465,389 Minus 100 F. to Plus 250 F.

Nov. 8, 1949 Refrigeration to Minus 100 F. 2,487,068

August 23, 1949 Automatic Electric Heater 2,479,587

April 13, 1982 Marine Sanitation System 4,324,007

Dec. 11, 1984 Marine Steering Thruster 4,487,149

1993 New Marine Sanitation System Applied For

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