Arthur was the son of Eliza Coxe and
Philadelphia landscape painter
Charles Morris Young. He was interested in developing a comprehensive theory of
reality from an early age. He felt that to acquire the intellectual tools needed for such rigorous study, he should first develop an understanding of
mathematics and engineering. With this decision he was following a career path similar to that of philosopher
Alfred North Whitehead, who was a mathematician before he developed the first process philosophy. Thus after graduation from
Princeton University in 1927 Young searched for a suitable invention to develop. In 1928 he returned to his father's farm in
Radnor, Pennsylvania, to begin twelve solitary years of efforts to develop the
helicopter into a useful device. Young's private experiments with helicopter design had mostly involved small scale models. After twelve years on his own using the models, he took his results and models to the
Bell Aircraft Company in
Buffalo, New York, in 1941, and the company agreed to build full-scale prototypes. While war was looming for the US in late 1941 he was issued the key rotor stabilizer bar (also known as a
flybar) patent, assigned it to Bell and moved to Buffalo to work with them. In June 1942 he moved his five-person team to
Gardenville, New York, a hamlet on the north border of
West Seneca, New York, where they could work in relative secrecy. The first test flight of the prototype Model 30 occurred in July 1943, and on March 8, 1946, the company received Helicopter Type Certificate H-1 for the world's first commercial helicopter, the
Bell Model 47. This was the "whirlybird" featured in the
M*A*S*H movie and television series and was so successful that it continued to be manufactured through 1974. A design as well as a utilitarian success, it was added to the permanent collection of the
Museum of Modern Art of
New York City in 1984. Young had become profoundly disturbed by the development of nuclear weapons at the end of the Second World War and decided that humanity needed a new philosophical paradigm. In August 1946 Young recorded in his notes the idea of the
psychopter – the helicopter as the "winged self", a metaphor for the human spirit. By October 1947 Young felt his work at Bell was complete, and he turned to the next phase of his career as a philosopher of mind (or soul). In 1949, the
Franklin Institute awarded him the
Edward Longstreth Medal. In 1952, Young and his wife Ruth organized the Foundation for the Study of Consciousness in
Philadelphia, the forerunner of the Institute for the Study of Consciousness. Also in 1952, Young and Ruth participated in seances conducted by
Andrija Puharich's
Roundtable Foundation.
Marriages Young married Priscilla Page in 1933. He was divorced from Priscilla in 1948, and later that year, married artist
Ruth Forbes Paine (1903–1998) of the
Boston Forbes family, a great-granddaughter of
Ralph Waldo Emerson and the mother of
Michael Paine. Ruth Forbes was formerly married to
George Lyman Paine Jr. Their son, Michael Paine, married
Ruth Hyde Paine, a friend of
Lee Harvey Oswald's wife,
Marina Oswald, who was living with her at the time of the
assassination of John F. Kennedy.
Death On 30 May 1995, Arthur Young died of cancer aged 89, at his home in Berkeley, California. ==Works==