Years ago, a brash young man, visiting in the Beacon Street home of Godfrey Lowell Cabot, asked his host how it felt to be both a Lowell and a Cabot. The question was greeted with thunderous silence. The guest tried manfully to excuse his faux pas. "I'm afraid," he murmured, "that's a pretty silly question, Mr. Cabot." Replied Cabot: "Young man. it's the damnedest silliest question I've been asked in 80 years!"
It was indeed, for being a Cabot and a Lowell in Boston was not a feeling, but a state of being. Yet Godfrey Lowell Cabot was remarkable even for a member of Boston's two most famed families. He was not content to peer down from Beacon Hill and mourn, like the late George Apley, the passing of Victorian glory. He moved into the outside world and modern times with astonishing vigor and effectiveness, and he left behind him his own highly personal mark.
Carbon & Kitty Hawk. He was born in 1861 and, of course, was given the best sort of education. He attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology at 16, switched to Harvard, graduated magna cum laude in 1882 (the year Franklin Delano Roosevelt, perish the name, was born), went on to Zurich for further studies. Later, he journeyed into Pennsylvania looking for likely investments in oil and gas. Cabot concluded that there was money to be made in byproducts from the refining process. As usual, his judgment turned out to be correct. In 1887 he began manufacturing carbon black as a coloring agent in inks and paints. The business grew, and new uses were found for the chemical in fertilizers, batteries, tires, and finally, plastics. From this Cabot built a vast manufacturing empire, branched out into oil and gas production, pipelines and research facilities.
"If you haven't a zest for living." Cabot said, ''you weren't brought up right." He had enough zest for a dozen men, inherited from his father, Samuel Cabot, a physician (Harvard 1836). "About 79 years ago," said Godfrey Cabot one day in 1950, "my father told me that man is going to fly, and when he flies he will fly farther and faster than the birds. My father was a very farseeing man." Godfrey Cabot was bitten by the flying bug shortly after the Wright brothers lifted off a hill at Kitty Hawk. After the outbreak of World War I, Cabot pestered Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels into letting him try for the Naval Air service. "I wanted to swat the Germans," he explained. Cabot was 54, but he passed his test and flew antisubmarine patrols around Boston Harbor in a seaplane hunting eagerly for Germans he could swat. Still bedazzled by the promise of the air age, he experimented with a variety of inventions, patented a system by which planes could pick up air mail and other bundles from sea sleds while still in flight, and established pioneering research into the principles and mechanics of the ticklish art of mid-air refueling—which is today a commonplace technique used by pilots of the U.S. Strategic Air Command.