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Show THE CITIZEN 6 East ATstands tions and remarks, was gathered from his friends. His life is a romance and an inspiration to Americans, who delight in seeing the poor boy rise to fame. Nathaniel Baldwin was bom at Millard, Fillmore county, Utah, in His parents were simple 1878. farming people, and there was little in his childhood to distinguish him from other boys, except an early and persistent desire for study, and an unusual aptitude for Tinkering and inventing. At the age of 9 he invented a miniature threshing machine, operated by water from a small irrigation stream. With this machine he threshed weeds and other small plant's. the grammar AFTER infinishing the schools of Millard he entered the Brigham Young University at Provo, in the face of the most dire poverty. During his four Mill Creek, Utah there a little frame shack, in the center of a group of modern factory buildings. Even in its best days it must have been a sorry and delapidated habitation. Why, I asked, is this old shack preserved while the rest of this property has grown to be such a thriving manufacturing center? That, I was told, Is the factory where Nathaniel Baldwin first began the manufacture of his radio headphone. It represents the beginning of Nathaniel Baldwin, Incorporated, which now manufactures Baldwin units for distribution from this plant to every civilized country on the face of the earth. In that little shack Mr. Baldwin first began to manufacture his head set, after struggling eight years to perfect it. He was able to produce only two sets daily. Now we have a capacity of 3,000 loud speakers per day. Nathaniel Baldwin Incorporated, began in 1914 with an original investment of less than $100. Since then it has contributed tens of mil- lions of dollars to the wealth of Salt Lake City and the surrounding ter- -, ritory. It is one of the oldest, and now one of the leading radio products manufacturing companies in the United States. years at this institution, he lived on the outskirts of town, in a dugout called Baldwins Castle. He made his own furniture, repaired his own clothes, cooked his .own meals meanwhile astonishing his fellow classmates with his mastery of physAfter anics and mathematics. other year at the Agricultural College at Logan, and one at Leland Stanford University, California, lie returned to the Brigham Young University as a professor of physics. He taught here for three years, and then severed his connection with college work and for another year found employment only intermittantly. His future looked anything but auspicious, while his financial condition grew from bad to worse. He worked for three years as operator of the air compressor at the Mountain Lake Mine of Uncle Jesse Knight, on a salary of $3 per day. Himself and family were housed in the little cabin occupied by the machinery, fpr three long years. While here, at a little work bench which he fitted up with tools of his own manufacture, a stamping machine, a lathe, scraps of steel and fine wire he conceived the idea of a receiving unit, which, constructed according to the laws of physics and sound reproduction as he knew them, would be superior to existing head phones and felephone receivers. -- out the man whose gen1 SOUGHT ius had made this splendid in- him that years more, idea so captivated THIS worked for five dustry possible. I found him in his laboratory at work upon a number before he had perfected it. Then his battle was only half even finished. No one wanted it though many conceded it to be a superior unit. Even Marconi was only completing the first of his successful experiments in transmitting electri- of inventions which seem destined to play as important a part in the future of the radio industry as his famed unit has played in its past. Nathaniel Baldwin is a modest, g quiet man, a bit hesitant in express-in- The first workshop, below, and at himself upon any subject except work. His story, his with the exception of a few correc top of page, one of the modern Nathaniel Baldwin Plants all-import- ant i cal impulses through the ether. Radio was a babe as yet in the industrial world. It remained for the United States Navy, under the;;' )' |