Emil R. Capita (1900 - 1986)

Emil R. Capita Sailing



1966 electric car that traveled over 60 MPH.

History of the Capita Foundation

The founder

Emil R. Capita (1900 - 1986) suffered with a hearing disability for several years of his life until Otolaryngologist, Dr. Jules G. Waltner at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital in New York, successfully restored Emil's ability to hear, which inspired him in 1985 to form the Emil Capita Charitable Foundation, a 501(c)3 non profit organization dedicated to funding hearing research at Columbia University.

With a modest endowment provided by Emil R. Capita, the Foundation was able to fund a long term project to design, build and use for continual research purposes, a heterodyne interferometer microscope in a lab at Columbia University, which was run for many years by Shyam M. Khanna, Ph.D.

The transformation

By 2004, the majority of the Emil R. Capita Charitable Foundation Trustees had agreed to form a new 501(c)(3) non-profit corporation called the Capita Foundation, with a goal of providing seed money to scientists affiliated with any University or non-profit research facility, that proves to have a novel hearing research project but is unable to receive NIH funding.

Using a combination of networking and grant advertising publications, including Nature Magazine, the Capita Foundation has over the last four years funded some of the most cutting edge hearing research projects in the Country with 10K to 40K dollar grants, and we continue on our quest each year to fund hearing reasearch projects, especially those with clinical application possibilites.

More about Emil R. Capita

Emil R. Capita was a self educated electrical engineer, who was indirectly involved with many of the life changing inventions during the past Century, including devising a method of melting large quanities of uranium, which enabled the United States of America to win the nuclear arms race, and the design and production of one of the first Epitaxio Reactors used by Texas Instruments to fabricate some of the first silicon wafers for computer chips.

His company, Ecco High Frequency Corp. , located in North Bergen, New Jersey, was where he spent much of his life designing and producing high frequency production heating equipment for melting precious metals as well as tinkering with other ideas, including in 1966 an electric car that traveled over 60 MPH.

While at his place of business, Emil would be buried under a pile of blueprints and mathematical tables, drafting instruments and what have you, but when someone would mention the word boat - everything else was cast aside.

Emil, or "Capy" as he was called by friends and associates, had a passion for yacht racing. He owned several racing sailbots throughout his life, including the Hi-Q II, which was designed by Phill Rhodes, and had a monel frame structure and centerboard case built in his factory in North Bergen NJ, and a double planked mahogony hull built by Seth Pearson in Old Saybrook CT.

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