A pioneering inventor teamed up with The Trust to establish the first donor-advised fund.
William S. Barstow (1866-1942)
Françoise Duclos Barstow (1876-1958)
Several times in his life, William Slocum Barstow showed daring and foresight. He invented systems for railways, lighting, battery storage, hydroelectric and steam systems. But arguably the most far-reaching and long-lasting innovation was a fund he and his wife created at The New York Community Trust in 1931.
The Barstows wanted to accomplish two goals: leave an enduring legacy to help charities for generation and give to their preferred nonprofits during their lifetime. The Trust helped them do both when it created the first donor-advised fund that let the Barstows give in their lifetimes. Today, donor-advised funds are central to most of the nation’s nearly 900 community foundations — and are a significant source of revenue by providing billions to nonprofits across the U.S.
William Slocum Barstow was born Feb. 15, 1866, in Brooklyn to Frank D. and Mary Warner Putnam Barstow. When he was only 21, William made a bold and prophetic decision: Against almost everyone’s advice, he took part in a revolution. It proved to be one of the greatest scientific revolutions of all time, the large-scale application of electric power to modern life. And because of his daring foresight, Barstow became one of the country’s leading electrical engineers, a profession that did not exist when he was a student. In fact, when the Alumni Association of the Columbia University Engineering Schools asked him years later to send biographical data for its records, he reminded the association pointedly that he had graduated in 1887 from Columbia’s liberal arts school, not engineering, and that “all of my engineering education was obtained with Mr. Thomas A. Edison and his companies.”
This incomparable education came about because he took a gamble his senior year. A chemistry major, he had planned to do graduate work in chemistry. But only a few years earlier, a self-educated Midwestern telegraph operator named Thomas Alva Edison had invented the first truly practical electric light and had set up the world’s first electric light power plant in New York City, where William was studying. In William’s senior year, Edison invented something he called a kinetoscope that electrically moved pictures across a screen. Fascinated by all this, William decided to switch from chemistry to the new field of electricity. He had a hunch it would become the future’s great industry. His Columbia professors tried to dissuade him, reminding him there was no electric industry and advising him that it was unlikely one would develop.
But William had the courage of his convictions. For $8 a week, he took an apprentice’s job with the Edison Machine Works in Schenectady, New York. (It later became General Electric.) Within a few months, he was in the field, testing and supervising the construction of Edison plants in New York and New Jersey. He worked in the testing department and on underground and station construction. At this time, Thomas Edison decided to move his New Jersey laboratory from Menlo Park to West Orange, and he picked young William to supervise the installation. This was the beginning of a close friendship between the two men that lasted until Edison’s death. Reminiscing on those days, William later commented: “There was no such thing as electrical engineering then; it was not taught in the colleges, and little was known of the subject; the Edison Machine Works issued loose-leaf pamphlets every week explaining new developments, and these constituted the principal textbooks then available.”
William was appointed electrical engineer of the Edison Illuminating Co. in 1889 and became its general superintendent, then its general manager. Under his supervision, the company was one of the first to install substation distribution. Sent to Europe to study the leading engineering companies there, he got interested in storage battery development and introduced the first central station storage-battery system in the United States. He worked with Edison to complete and expand his inventions, then went on to invent, patent, license and sell inventions of his own: the Barstow Booster System, feeder regulation of railway systems without resistance; a two-rate meter system of charging for electric energy; electric clock switches; and a method of charging storage batteries. He also designed and installed the Simplex low-tension arc lamp, the first system of arc lighting using direct current of 110 volts.
After this, he drew up plans for increasing the rail facilities of the Brooklyn Bridge and its electrification. And in 1892, he designed and installed in a Brooklyn Edison Co. station the first multi-phase-driven central station system in this country, whereby a three-phase alternating current of 25 cycles was converted through substations 10 miles away into a 5,000-volt direct current for street lighting. He also designed a 110- to 220-volt direct current for the Edison three-wire system, 133-cycle single-phase alternating current and 60-cycle two-phase alternating current.
In 1901, for the second time in his life, William Barstow showed daring and foresight. He resigned from the Edison company to strike out on his own as a consulting engineer. He designed and installed a high-speed railway system in the Willamette Valley in Oregon. He continued to help Edison, developing a direct-current watt-hour meter for him. But, foreseeing the expansion of water power in the United States, he became an authority on hydroelectric and steam systems. This, in turn, led him to become an expert in the developing field of public utility financing and management. As an engineer, he installed hydroelectric and steam stations in Oregon and New York; as a financier, he organized two firms that dealt with the problems and profits of utilities: W.S. Barstow & Co. Inc., which acted as financial and operating manager of public utilities, and General Gas & Electric Corp., a utility holding company that developed and operated a large group of utilities in eight Eastern states. As a result, William Barstow was president of 30 electric light, power, and gas companies and a director of nearly 50 more.
This might have confused some men, but an acquaintance of William wrote: “In him, you could find no disturbing hustle and bustle—he always moved like a piece of well-oiled machinery, and every move was calculated with studied precision.”
As the 1920s waned, the calculation and foresight that had characterized William led him to sell the two firms he had founded for about $50 million—exactly six months before the 1929 stock market crash and the start of the Great Depression.
So, when many others lost their fortunes, William Barstow did not. This enabled him to organize a smaller New York firm that became Barstow, Campbell & Company and to become a philanthropist, which suited his nature. William was a generous man, never pompous and somewhat reserved, yet naturally friendly. When informed that a member of his firm was making more money than he was, he replied that this was splendid. And when he retired, he made generous gifts to his staff. He also appreciated whatever someone else did for him. A close friend said: “I never knew a finer man.”
In 1931, William and his wife established the William and Françoise Barstow Foundation in The New York Community Trust for charitable and educational purposes, the first of two Barstow funds. And he never forgot the man who launched his career: At Menlo Park in New Jersey, he built the Edison Tower, a 131-foot steel shaft in Thomas Edison’s memory, topped with a three-ton replica of Edison’s incandescent lamp. Also in Edison’s honor, in 1918 he had helped organize—and later was president of—the Edison Pioneers, a group of Edison’s first associates and old-time employees. He arranged with Henry Ford to move Edison memorabilia to the Dearborn Institute in Michigan and was both secretary and treasurer of the Association of Edison Illuminating Companies. After William’s death in 1942, at age 76, the president of the Edison Pioneers wrote: “To know Mr. Barstow was to admire him; to know him well was to love him.”
William Barstow was a trustee of Adelphi Academy in Brooklyn, where he had studied in 1883. He also was a commencement speaker and was given an honorary Doctor of Science degree by Columbia University, where he had been a member of Delta Upsilon fraternity and the tennis club. And although he had not attended Stevens Institute of Technology, he became one of its trustees and was made an honorary alumnus and awarded a Doctor of Engineering degree.
William wrote for many engineering journals, lectured on electric power to both scientific and lay audiences, was president of the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences, was a fellow of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers, and was a member and often an officer of all the leading engineering and electrical associations. Somehow, he found time to tinker in his workshop, go sailing, do some sailfish fishing from his winter home in Hobe Sound, Florida, attend the opera, and play an organ at his home in Kings Park, a Long Island community he founded and, from 1926 to 1940, served as its first mayor. In a way, this carried on a family tradition: One of his ancestors, William Barstow of Yorkshire, England, arrived in Plymouth, Massachusetts, in 1635 and later helped found Hanover, Massachusetts.
Many of William’s benefactions were made with, and furthered by, his wife. Françoise Melanie Duclos of New Brunswick, New Jersey, was the daughter of a prominent New York architect. They were married in 1894, and their son, Frederic, was born two years later. Françoise was active in the Episcopal Church and women’s club affairs and donated generously to 46 charities, including many for children and the technical training of underprivileged youth. She also was interested in Vermont, especially the Chittenden area, where the Barstows had a summer home and where, as a hobby, Françoise renovated an old farmhouse that evolved into a well-known inn, the Mountain Top Resort.
A number of the Barstows’ charitable gifts were associated with their son, a Columbia University graduate and amateur aviator who had a silver fox ranch in Chittenden and traveled extensively. Frederic’s health was undermined by service overseas in World War I, and he died of pneumonia in Honolulu in 1931, when he was only 35. In his memory, his parents built the Frederic Duclos Barstow Memorial School in Chittenden and, to support the school in the future, they established the first donor-advised fund at The Trust.
William Barstow died December 26, 1942. Françoise Barstow took an active interest in the school until her death in 1958. A year later, a second, unrestricted Barstow fund was set up at The Trust, and it has supported medical research, the elderly, education, the arts, immigrants, the environment, low-income housing, and hundreds of other causes.