Godfrey Lowell Cabot

Godfrey Lowell Cabot

Godfrey Lowell Cabot (February 26, 1861 - November 2, 1962), was born in Boston, Massachusetts, USA, the son of Samuel Cabot, a physician, and Hannah Lowell Jackson. He became a leading American industrialist and philanthropist. His firm, Godfrey L. Cabot, Inc. (and its successor, the Cabot Corporation), was an industrial empire which included carbon black plants and tens of thousands of acres of land rich in gas, oil, and other minerals; 1,000 miles of pipeline; seven corporations with worldwide operations; three facilities for converting natural gas into gasoline; and a number of research laboratories.

By 1890, Cabot's company, Cabot Corporation, had become America's fourth largest producer of carbon black, which was used in products such as ink, shoe polish and paint. But with the subsequent advent and popularity of cars, carbon black became in much greater demand as six pounds of it was required in the production of a single tire, and Cabot's incomes soared.

He gave $647,700 to MIT in 1930 to support solar research, resulting in important discoveries in photochemistry and thermal electricity and in the construction of experimental solar houses. Other Cabot philanthropies included $615,773 to Harvard to establish the Maria Moors Cabot Foundation for Botanical Research, and funding for the annual Maria Moors Cabot prizes awarded by the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, as well as an endowed professorship at that institution.

He devoted much of his money and efforts to the suppression of vice and corruption in Boston. He joined the Watch and Ward Society, and under his direction of the organization in the 1920s and 1930s, it used economic, social, and legal pressures and even harassment techniques to block the sale and distribution of books which they disapproved of for moral reasons. Among the writers to which they objected were Conrad Aiken, Sherwood Anderson, John Dos Passos, Theodore Dreiser, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, Aldous Huxley, James Joyce, Sinclair Lewis, Bertrand Russell, Upton Sinclair, and H. G. Wells.

The Godfrey Lowell Cabot Science Library at Harvard University's Science Center is named after him. {He graduated in 1882.}

Mr. Cabot's middle and last names appear in the ditty: "And this is good old Boston, The home of the bean and the cod, Where the Lowells talk to the Cabots, And the Cabots talk only to God" [1]

Further reading