Mosquito Betrayer

The 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.

The three-phase 60-cycle hum of the heaters in the furnace was to his ear "an exact representation of the noise one hears as a female mosquito visits one in the night, and one endeavors to crush the annoying creature by a slap of the hand on the side of the face where the pest appears to be ready to draw blood from the victim of its attention."

Reasoned he: "Can it be possible that this hum . . . serves as an attraction for the males which gather where the noise is prevalent? Certainly, if the male can be drawn to a spot and cooked, then the egg-laying power of the female would be curtailed, and we shall have a great diminution in the mosquito population, provided the above reasoning is in accordance with fact and provided devices are developed to produce a three-phase 60-cycle hum where mosquitoes are bred and spread about, with means for destroying the mosquitoes which are so attracted. They may be burned, or drowned, or shocked, or cooked."

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.

Very, very possible, said Professor Parker. Only the female mosquito sings or produces its characteristic note when flying. The males are provided with bushy antennae projecting from the head on each side. These are the organs of hearing by which the male recognizes the presence of the female somewhere near. The males do not bite. The females do, to get nutrition for the eggs which they lay in stagnant pools.

All 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."

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