Ingenuity Prize

In the broad field of U. S. education, youth is encouraged by many curious scholarships. The Princeton Club of New York annually sends a boy to Yale. Harvard gives special aid to smart youths named Murphy. The Chinese Government ships students to study in the U. S. from the proceeds of the Boxer Rebellion Indemnity. Last week Franklin David Hayes, 18, of North Brookfield, Mass., won the $500 scholarship offered at Worcester (Mass.) Polytechnic Institute for "Yankee ingenuity."

Ninth recipient of the Yankee Ingenuity Scholarship since it was founded (only for New Englanders) by Alumnus Henry Jones Fuller, Manhattan broker, ingenious, bespectacled Freshman Hayes won it by describing and exhibiting a contraption he manufactured to record and regulate temperature in greenhouses. As a youngster Franklin had to scoot out day & night to the greenhouse on his father's North Brookfield farm to see that the plants were neither forced by heat nor nipped by cold. Last year he tacked to the greenhouse walls two strips of zinc, which cold contracts, heat expands. The strips he hitched to a set of geared wheels taken from an old clock. A drop of three degrees moved the strips sufficiently to joggle the wheels, light a set of Christmas tree lamps mounted on a board inside the farmhouse, warn Franklin to be up & doing.

Later Franklin attached the lights, through the transformer of his toy electric train, to the base of his mother's discarded vacuum cleaner, attached the cleaner to the furnace. The lights switched on the cleaner, sucked the fire into flame. Father Hayes, who has been using the apparatus since Son Franklin went off to school this autumn, assured Worcester's President Ralph Earle that it really works.

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