Maybe Thomas Edison and Alexander Graham Bell never lived here, though they did both work with a future UT scientific scholar Brown Ayres, honoree of Ayres Hall, early in his career. Still, for at least 150 years, the city has seen its share of innovative thinkers.
One of the most celebrated in his time was Weston Fulton (1871-1946). Not known to be kin to steamboat inventor Robert Fulton, who lived about a century earlier, our own Fulton began his career as a weatherman, a federal meteorologist who began tinkering with labor-saving ideas to help him report river levels, and created a disarmingly simple device he called the Sylphon. Although it didn’t become a household word, the flexible metal bellows, eventually manufactured on a large scale at his plant on the west side of town—located at the site of modern University Commons–found hundreds of uses in everything from depth charges manufactured during both world wars, to automobile air-conditioning. You may have a sylphon in your car and not even know it.
Owner of several patents, Fulton was so successful by the 1920s that he built an extravagant mansion for his family on Lyons View, on the west side of town near what’s now Lakeshore Park. Designed in a Hollywood version of Spanish Colonial style, the mansion didn’t last long after Fulton’s death before it was torn down, but his large gatehouse still stands alongside the road, leading to Westcliff Apartments. Fulton and his family are buried at nearby Highland Memorial beneath a stylishly serene marble monument.
Edward C. Huffaker (1856-1937) grew up on the rural east side of town, along the French Broad River, but agriculture wasn’t for him. Fascinated with the possibilities of aviation, he studied physics at Emory and Henry and the University of Virginia before working with aerial pioneer Samuel Langley of the Smithsonian Institution, who was modeling new designs for gliders, crashing some of them into the Potomac. The two had a falling out, but Huffaker returned to Knox County, where he found the river breezes of home conducive to his model gliders, and continued his own experiments. Applying the well-known Bernoulli Principle to flight, he developed the concept of “wing warp,” suggesting that curvature in wings can offer major advantages in flight, and published papers on the subject…