Few bodies of water have a scientific pedigree of any sort, let alone one as impressive as Lake George’s. The lake was a summer laboratory for those who worked in General Electric’s Research Lab, the so-called House of Magic. Among them: Guy Suits, the lab’s director, Katherine Blodgett, the first woman to receive a PhD from Cambridge University in physics and most notably, Irving Langmuir, the only industrial scientist to ever win a Nobel Prize.
“Even when he was at play, he was at work,” says his grandson, Roger Summerhayes, the writer and director of the documentary “Langmuir’s World.”
“We measure temp. of Lake. 46o at 174’ depth between Dome Island and Buck Mountain. 66o at surface. Made up sounding line to measure depth of lake. Built 2 sounding devices: one with steel wire; one with silk line. Bathythermograph data and soundings.”
Thus reads a characteristic entry in the diary of the vacationing scientist.
In 1925, Langmuir and a Schenectady neighbor and fellow GE man, Harry Summerhayes, Sr, purchased Crown Island near the entrance to The Narrows for $20,000.
Their children, Barbara Langmuir and Harry Summerhayes, Jr, married and their son – Roger Summerhayes – still lives on Crown Island for at least a part of every year.
Summerhayes once wrote of his grandfather, “his insatiable curiosity drove him to watch the weather around the lake, record copious measurements, and scribble notes.”
Summerhayes is driven by the same curiosity. Not unlike Langmuir, he routinely measures the temperature of the water and collects data about its clarity and its food web.
He exercises that curiosity, however, not in the solitude of his section of the lake, but in public, as the Educator aboard the Lake George Association’s Floating Classroom.
However much the Lake George Association may have changed since its merger (or reunification) with The Fund for Lake George in 2021, the decades-old Floating Classroom is a constant.
In the spring and fall, the Rosalia Anna Ashby is literally a classroom or high school chemistry lab, where students from a score of local schools study the lake’s ecosystem.
In July and August, tourists, summer residents and locals are taught from a similar science-based curriculum, when the boat sails out of Lake George Village.
This year, the LGA added Bolton Landing, Hague and Ticonderoga as points of departure.
Excursions have also been booked by, among others, children’s camps, the Lake George Club and the Lake George Land Conservancy, which organized a special cruise focusing on aquatic and terrestrial invasive
Species on August 13.
Summerhayes, who taught physics, chemistry and biology in the Peace Corps and then private schools for roughly forty years, has been the LGA’s Educator for both student and public sessions for two and a half years.
“I love doing it; I love anything where the chemistry of water is the topic of discussion. That’s my wheelhouse,” he said.
Summerhayes begins each excursion by explaining the mission of the Lake George Association.
“It’s twofold,” he says. “First, we want to keep the lake clean. Second, we want to educate the next generation about how to keep it clean.”
Learning how “to keep Lake George clean” begins, of necessity, with learning something about the lake – its natural history, its topography, its seasonal turnovers, the forces that have led both to its development and protection.
“I’m always amazed by how little most people, even the locals, know about Lake George, so telling its story is another educational component that I love,” Summerhayes said.
He leads students, families and adults in a variety of simple experiments that enable them to measure – and appreciate the significance of – water clarity and temperatures, and to see in microscopic detail the life that is teeming within every drop of water.
“I hope some of it sticks,” he says. Enabling students and members of the public to conduct their own tests and experiments has a more lasting impact than a lecture, he adds.
“It empowers them,” he says. “They’re much more engaged. They start to ask questions. My philosophy as a science teacher was, ‘get them out of their chairs. Get them doing stuff.’”
Summerhayes not only explains to his audiences why the lake is as clear as it is, but the types of threats that could endanger that clarity: excessive nutrients, harmful algal blooms, climate change, invasive species.
To stop the introduction of new invasive species, “we now have a program that mandates that every boat launched on Lake George be cleaned, drained and dry,” he tells them.
Of the invasive species that have already established themselves in the lake, “the worst is Eurasian water milfoil. It gets so thick that it blocks the sun and kills the native plants. It can get so thick that you can’t swim through it or get a boat through it,” he says.
Summerhayes also talks about the Lake George Park Commission’s use of the aquatic herbicide ProcellaCOR as a means of eradicating it.
“Allegedly, it only attacks milfoil and will not harm the native plants. If it works, if there are no ill effects for human beings or for pets, that’s great. But the jury is still out,” he says.
As the boat passes a Jefferson Project vertical profiler – a buoy that collects physical, chemical and biological data from the lake four times every second — Summerhayes says, “That innocent-looking little device has about $200,000 worth of technology aboard it, helping to make Lake George what we call ‘the smartest lake in the world.’ And anybody, anywhere, researching fresh water is consulting the Jefferson Project.”
Summerhayes says “we get a lot of positive feedback from the passengers.”
In fact, a tourist recently tried to tip him.
“I said, ‘we don’t take tips, but you are welcome to make a donation to the LGA,” Summerhayes recounted.
While the Floating Classroom plays a valuable role in educating tourists about a unique resource which they may have known only as a vacation destination, it has educational value for residents as well, says Summerhayes.
“We’re all guilty of focusing only on our own sections of the lake to the exclusion of the others, and of forgetting to look beyond our own families and friends,” Summerhayes said. “The Floating Classroom enables us to see how the LGA’s conservation efforts are lake-wide and how united our interests are. It serves a very useful role, or at least I hope it does.”
