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Abram Hewitt's son, Peter Cooper Hewitt, inherited and brought to full fruition the inventive genius of his Grandfather Cooper. The late, great Michael Pupin marveled not only at the imaginative brilliance of his mind but also at his extraordinary physical grace, especially marked in the deftness of his hands. Rich and unorthodox in his methods, he invented the widely-used mercury vapor lamp, discovered the basic principle of the vacuum-tube amplifier, made many an other prime contribution to electricity and radio. He also pioneered in the development of hydro-airplanes, speedboats, aerial torpedoes, heliocopters. He died in 1921. Peter Cooper Hewitt's only child was a daughter, Ann Cooper Hewitt, born in 1914 when he was 53. She was illegitimate until her father married her mother in 1918 after Mrs. Hewitt I obtained a divorce. By the terms of his will, Mrs. Hewitt II receives one-third of the income from a $1,300,000 trust fund, Ann Hewitt two-thirds—the daughter's share to pass to her children, if any, or to revert to her mother if she should die childless. In San Francisco last week Daughter Hewitt brought suit for $500,000 damages against Mother Hewitt, two physicians and a State psychologist. She charged that her mother, greedy for the whole trust fund income, had had her sterilized. From the fantastic miasma of charges and counter-charges which promptly enveloped the case, the following facts emerged undisputed. On Aug. 14, 1934 Mrs. Mary S. Scally, a State Health Department psychologist, examined Ann Cooper Hewitt in San Francisco, gave the 20-year-old girl a mental age of 11. Dr. Tilton Edwin Tillman, Mrs. Hewitt's physician, recommended that Ann be sterilized as feebleminded. On Aug. 18, suffering from appendicitis, the girl was taken to San Francisco's Dante Sanatorium. In the course of an appendectomy the surgeon, Dr. Samuel George Boyd, at Mother Hewitt's request and without Daughter Hewitt's knowledge, performed a sterilization operation.
Daughter's Story. "My life has been terrible," sobbed Daughter Hewitt last week. "I was locked up all the time. I never had any boy friends or friends of any kind."
Last week in Trenton, N. J., where the Hewitt trust fund is administered, it was revealed that Mother Hewitt had asked for a nine-month extension of time to account for some $400,000 of Ann's share of the income which she had received as her daughter's guardian during her minority. In her formal complaint Daughter Hewitt charged that her mother had squandered that money in gambling and high living at Deauville, Monte Carlo, Villa d'Este, Agua Caliente. She further charged that her mother had deprived her of an education, dressed her poorly, kept her confined, continually abused her. "She never had any affection for me, none whatsoever," moaned the girl. ''I can't account for it. I tried in every way to gain her love, but she never liked me. ... She would drink all night and drag me out of bed at 4 in the morning to tell me if I'd die she would have all my money. . . . I'd go to her room and she'd be drunk and mistreat me, throwing up to me that I was a love child."