Mike Towle, General Manager/Editor of the Tennessean, shares his experience of discovering the Samuel C. Collins Room at the Portland TN library.
“It’s often amazing, even uncanny, what you can find when you aren’t looking for it. This is better known as stumbling onto something really cool. Or in this case, not just cool but extremely cold, as in approaching absolute zero.
“During a recent trip to the new Portland library for a chamber luncheon, I had a few minutes to kill before lunch was served. So I took a stroll around the 10,000-square-foot facility, during which I came across a room off to the side known as the Samuel C. Collins Room.
“My assumption was correct that the room had something to do with the prominent Collins family of Portland, among the benefactors who helped fund the $2 million library. What I found in the room was not just another wing with books on shelves, but an impressive display of framed photos, drafting tools, scientific diagrams, diplomas, newspaper and magazine clippings, and other memorabilia depicting the life and career of teacher, inventor and researcher Samuel C. Collins, the father of well-known Portland businessman Larry Collins.
“So, who was Samuel C. Collins? A brochure in the display states he was the Father of Cryogenics, the science that deals with the production of very low temperatures and their effect on the properties of matter. Very cool. In 1946, Collins, a 1916 graduate of Sumner County High School in Portland, invented the Collins Helium Liquefier, which made possible the industrial production of liquid helium in large quantities.
“A large chart in the Collins Room details how the application of cryogenics technology has been instrumental in dozens of other developments, ranging from steelmaking, food preservation and biomedical applications to space technology, frictionless bearings and fusion research.
“Collins was no one-hit wonder, either. Holder of B.S. and M.S. degrees in agriculture and a doctorate in physical chemistry, he held more than 50 patents in areas of cryogenics, ship design and medical devices, most if not all of which came after he began his career as a farmer and schoolteacher, later to become a college professor.
“Along with a Boston physician, Collins created the heart pump-oxygenator, a device which took over the work of the heart and lungs in circulating fresh blood to the body during surgery. At the time, 1961 (by then in his 60s), he also was director of the cryogenic engineering department at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology). Today, we call that multitasking.
“When we talk about great and/or successful people who have come out of Sumner County, Collins belongs somewhere high on the list. His might not have been a household name throughout America, but his work was, and is. During the 1940s and for several decades following, Collins was a true American pioneer, changing the world through his work in a still-emerging field of science that in the 21st century remains a fascinating subject both in the real world and science-based popular culture. Collins’ work is the kind of stuff you might find in a Ray Bradbury novel or on an episode of the original Star Trek.
“Maybe the Democrat, Ky.-born Collins, whose family moved to Portland in 1906, didn’t actually rub elbows with the science/engineering-genius likes of Albert Einstein and Wernher von Braun. He was certainly in their class, however. It’s conceivable that much of his work remains locked away among classified secrets that were foundational to national defense developments before, during and after World War II.
“Collins was 85 when he passed way in 1984, but almost up to the very end of his life he stayed busy, building on his years of futuristic work. At the age of 83, in 1982, he was still working as a scientist at the Naval Research Laboratory. One of the display’s clippings, taken from the Oct. 21, 1982 edition of The Weekly Navy News, quotes Collins: “The ideas of hovercraft ships, using a cushion of air to support the ship on the surface of the water, and the liquefaction of oxygen for use on high-flying aircraft came to me as early as 1929, but I found no sympathetic listeners to the ideas, so I continued to teach chemistry.”
“It’s pretty astounding what one trip to a library can turn up.”
