THROWBACK: L. RON HAMMOND

John Hays Hammond Jr.’s legacy survives, however remotely

BY CHRIS FARAONE

According to the dated tour video playing on a loop in his unwelcoming foyer, John Hays Hammond Jr. liked his visitors to feel uncomfortable. He obsessed over lingering awkwardness, and in that regard the legacy of the most prolific inventor in Mass history endures. As I walk around his Gloucester castle, a red hot attraction 50 years after his passing, on a rainy weekday I trip twice — once while descending a jagged stone staircase feeding the entrance, then again indoors while twisting down a tricky marble corkscrew.

There are also inconveniences that Hammond couldn’t have imagined — my cell phone slipped into oblivion en route through cliffs as marvelous as any scene on Earth. The lack of 4G service would fit most Medieval habitats, but not this manse. Built by Hammond in the 1920s for his wife, Irene Fenton Hammond, and for his Hammond Research Corporation, where he hatched 400 patents and twice that many inventions, the joint is fully-automated. Eighty years and multiple technological generations before Bill Gates pimped his flat with a famously fly…