Harold R. Hay: Solar Pioneer
(Page 5 of 17)
September/October 1976
By Mother Earth News Editors
PLOWBOY: And what did you do for Celotex?
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HAY: The company had been threatened with lawsuits over its use of arsenic in a wood preservative. It was my job to research about 150 years of medical literature—written in six different languages—to determine whether or not the claims against the firm had any merit. As it turned out, they didn't. My research—and the tab experiments that grew out of it—reversed the whole 150 years' worth of conclusions on the subject. When we presented my findings—that arsenic used as a wood preservative presented no toxic hazard—to a professor in the field, who happened to be the editor of a journal of tropical medicine, he published them. So one of the first things I ever published was in the field of medicine.
PLOWBOY: What did you do next at Celotex?
HAY: I walked out. They wanted to tell me what to work on and I couldn't really get interested in the project so I went looking for one that I could get involved in. That was in Peoria, Illinois with the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Northern Regional Products Laboratory. Then I went with Philadelphia Quartz, where I developed a water purification treatment that, environmentally speaking, was quite valuable at the time. The process cleaned up some of the mess made by industry and was good enough, at one time, to be used for 90% of all the municipal water in Florida. It's still in use in many parts of the world, although it's being replaced now in this country by an even simpler system.
PLOWBOY: And this was ... when?
It's a shame that so many oftoday's " big names" in so many fields relegate the so-called "dirty work" to assistants.
HAY: The early 40's. During the war. And then the atomic bomb was dropped on Japan and I suddenly realized—as a chemist—the tremendous effect that the nuclear age would have upon the world. So I resigned, determined to move on to something that would no longer confine me to just the United States. I wanted to reach out, work with other nations, foster the cause of brotherhood,
I tried UNESCO, but that organization wasn't ready—at the time—to accept any Americans. The bureaucrats at UNESCO gave me quite a runaround, just as bureaucrats in any big organization in any country always do. They get in the way and undercut you behind the scenes and you never know what's really happening. It's that way all over the world.
So I gave up on UNESCO at the time and I went to Sweden and took charge of a laboratory for the biggest manufacturer of hardboard mills in the world. Once again—as with some of my former jobs—I liked the environmental aspects of this position. I was working with a company that helped make it possible to take waste fibers and miscellaneous trees that had no real commercial value ... and turn them into useful building materials.
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