Manfred Curry

Manfred Curry (1899 to 1953) was a physician, inventor, sailor and author, born in Munich to an American father and a Russian mother and holding American citizenship. He is best remembered in yachting: he represented the United States at the 1928 Olympic Games in Amsterdam, sailed more than 1400 regattas, and in 1925 wrote a pioneering book on yacht aerodynamics and racing tactics after testing rig configurations in a wind tunnel at Gottingen. His developments include the fully battened mainsail and the cam cleat. In medicine he took a doctorate in 1929 with a thesis titled Myom und Altersbild, and in later life worked as a doctor specialising in bioclimatics, founding the American Bioclimatics Research Institute at Riederau on the Ammersee. He also promoted the so-called Curry Grid of earth radiation, an idea the source classes as pseudoscience because it can only be detected by dowsing. He died at fifty-three.