The Perfect Inventor

EIGHTY YEARS AGO, IN A BACKYARD WORKSHOP IN upstate New York, a teen-age tinkerer toyed with a motorcycle he had bought for fifty dollars. The improvements he made marked the beginning of an inventing career that would bring him international fame and fabulous wealth. Over the next three decades he would win patents for more than a dozen high-performance aircraft and some of the world’s deadliest weaponry, develop the first color television, and inaugurate coast-to-coast airline service.

His giant electromagnet lifted thousands of tons; his photo-telephone, perfected in 1914, preceded the competition’s by thirteen years; he won records as a speedster on land and in air. He also found time to raise a genius son who became one of the bestknown inventors of the fifties and sixties. Junior conjured up a vertical-take-off jet, a lunar expedition, a space station, and a “Triphibian Atomicar.”

These inventors were, of course, Tom Swift and his son, Tom Jr. They were the product of the Stratemeyer Literary Syndicate, a secretive business that produced more than thirteen hundred serial books for children over a period of seventy-four years, inventing such heroes as Nancy Drew, the Hardy Boys, and the Bobbsey Twins. Their Tom Swift books were largely dismissed by adults as kid stuff and shunned by libraries, but the volumes were peppered with inventions that came true years later, and they embody one of the purest and most popular expressions of America’s infatuation with technology.

The vision that produced Tom Swift and son was that of Edward Stratemeyer, a native of Elizabeth, New Jersey, who in 1889, when he was twentyseven, began his career by scrawling a boy’s adventure story on wrapping paper while working behind the counter of a tobacco shop. He managed to sell the story to Golden Days , a serial paper. Encouraged by this success, he poured out a river of children’s fiction over the next several years. In 1898, a year after completing a ten-month stint as publisher of his own serial weekly, he submitted a war story to Lee & Shepard, a Boston children’sbook publisher. The yarn accidentally coincided with Commodore George Dewey’s triumph in Manila Bay in the Spanish-American War; modified and renamed Under Dewey at Manila , the story became a best seller.

Other successes followed quickly. Writing under the pseudonym Arthur M. Winfield, Stratemeyer introduced the enormously popular Rover Boys Series for Young Americans in 1899. His Bobbsey Twins made their debut in 1904. By 1906 he was overwhelmed with writing assignments, so he created a syndicate, a kind of literary factory, in New York City. With it he continued to write his own books, but he also spewed forth a stream of barebones plot outlines to be fleshed out by local newspaper writers. He paid the authors $50 to $250 a volume; in exchange they released all rights to the works. Credit for the books went to a stable of pseudonyms, chief among them Victor Appleton.

The syndicate enjoyed immediate and long-lasting success. An American Library Association survey in 1926 found that an amazing 98 percent of public school children said they enjoyed fifty-cent series books. A majority also said their favorite series of all was Tom Swift, which Stratemeyer had launched in 1910.

The son of a successful inventor named Barton Swift, Tom graduated from an academy in or near his hometown of Shopton, New York, but skipped college. Why waste time? Before the series began, he had already “taken out several patents.” No record survives of those first inspirations, but beginning with Tom Swift and His Motor-Cycle , the young inventor’s accomplishments were well-documented. He started relatively inauspiciously, repairing the motorcycle and a motorboat. Then came an event pivotal to Tom Swift’s career—he saved the life of an aviator named John Sharp, who asked him, “Ever invent an airship?”

Together they built a hybrid dirigible and airplane named the Red Cloud . It could lift off or take off and could stay up even if its twenty-cylinder engine failed, and it contained a plush lounge, a galley, and sleeping berths. Aviation became a Swift Construction Company specialty. From the family’s back-yard shops there followed a fleet of airplane-dirigibles, as well as the world’s first silent airplane, the Air Scout of 1919, and in 1927 a combination plane, automobile, and speedboat, the Air Monarch , in which Tom circled the earth. In 1911 Tom used one of his father’s engine designs for the Humming-Bird , a stabilized, twoseat monoplane that could reach a speed of 130 miles per hour. Two years before, America’s first real monoplane, the Walden III , had peaked at 52 mph.

Shopton became a commercial aviation center in 1926, when Tom inaugurated his Airline Express between New York and San Francisco. It relied on a passenger coach clamped to the underside of a special airplane. The Express would fly from New York to Chicago, where, like a pony-express rider switching horses, the autocar would be clamped to a fresh airplane heading for Denver; there the car would again change planes. Flying time to the West Coast was sixteen hours; the fare, one thousand dollars each way. When a real airline began transcontinental service four years later, the fare was only two hundred dollars, but the trip took thirty-nine hours.

In 1934 Tom conceived a floating airport in the mid-Atlantic, made of thirty-six pontoons held together by radio-controlled electromagnets. In storms the pontoons could be allowed to drift, preventing damage to the structure; later they could be rejoined into a field eighteen hundred feet square.

That invention was one of many in which magnetism figured prominently. In the series’s fourth book, Submarine Boat , Tom used magnetic-propulsion technology developed by his father to power the Advance , a submarine capable of diving three miles. In 1932 he invented a lightweight electromagnet so powerful that two of them, mounted on barges, could hoist a sunken Navy submarine from the ocean floor. Nine years later, in Magnetic Silencer , he erased airplane noise with a new magnetic ore that attracted sound waves.

The boy genius was no slouch with electricity either. His 1910 Electric Run-about followed the world’s first battery-powered car by nineteen years, but its lithium and potassium-hydrate battery moved it along at 100 mph, several times as fast as the standard issue. In 1911 Tom devised a smokeless and noiseless rifle that zapped its targets with bolts of electricity, and he used it to kill snakes, elephants, lions, arctic musk oxen, and a whale, and to stun unfriendly natives.

Other technologies proved a cinch too. In 1928 Tom developed color television, beating out Bell Laboratories’ efforts by a year; by 1934 he was laboring to make the picture three-dimensional. In 1933’s impressive Television Detector , Tom built a machine capable of seeing through walls. Using a tube containing “prisms and a secret projector in which there was a radium chemical"—that’s about as detailed as the technology ever got—the camera-like device produced a startlingly high-definition picture on its eight-by-ten-inch screen, as Tom’s faithful sidekick Ned Newton learned when he aimed it at an old barracks filled with hoboes: ‘Through the brick, wood and plaster walls Ned could see as easily as a doctor does through the fluoroscope the beating of his patient’s heart; more plainly, in fact… . Ned could note every form and shape even to the color of the garments, the hair and beards of the frowsy tramps… .” Tom sold the machine to the United States Secret Service.

He also showed an early interest in space. In Chest of Secrets , in 1925, Tom announced he was building a mammoth telescope “to settle the disputed point as to whether or not the moon is inhabited.” He finally completed the telescope in 1939, and with it discovered life on Mars.

All the books followed a tried and true formula. Tom typically introduced the notion of a new invention early in a volume. He and Ned then encountered a villain, or a gang of villains, who would menace not only the boys but the good people of Shopton and New York State. These foes might be neighborhood bullies, shadowy foreigners, anarchists, or, worse yet, patent thieves. Tom and Ned, snooping around, would be kidnapped, attacked by wild animals, or dealt hard blows to the skull. Despite their punishment the boys would perfect Tom’s invention. And as the Tom Jr. author James Duncan Lawrence points out, “Whatever invention Tom Swift was working on always conveniently happened to be just what was needed to beat the bad guys at the end of the story.”

Amid all his inventing the young engineer found time to pursue a nineteen-year courtship of the pretty, blushing Mary Nestor. One of their most memorable moments came in 1929, when Tom escorted Mary into his new House on Wheels: “When Tom and Mary came out of the House on Wheels a little later, he had made certain of what he had suspected a long time, that Mary Nestor was worth to him more than all else in the world.” He did right by her a few pages later.

The inspiration for Tom’s genius was probably manifold, but the early volumes appear to have been patterned after the achievements of Glenn Hammond Curtiss, the pioneer aviator who, like Tom, hailed from upstate New York. Curtiss, like Tom, began his engineering career with motorcycles and then advanced to flying machines. Curtiss, like Tom, achieved international fame for his aerial speed records. Tom constructed the Humming-Bird only three years after Curtiss built his famous June Bug, and each built his craft in a breathtakingly short time and used it to win a big pile of cash. “It certainly seems that Glenn Curtiss was a model for the first five books,” says James Keeline, a San Diego Tom Swift buff. ‘The syndicate was very keen on coming up with ideas that were contemporary.”

That the young inventor was mimicking real-life accomplishments was by no means a shortcoming. The century’s new technology was as exciting as any fiction for the typical adolescent. “You’re talking pre-World War I,” notes Gil O’Gara, the publisher of Yellowback Library , a journal for serialbook collectors. “For a young inventor to be working on an automobile, or an airship, or even a motorcycle, was really something interesting.”

In fact, the closeness to real life was a strength, for it gave Tom Swift’s inventions credibility. Tom was always just a step or two ahead of his time- his authors were looking to the horizon, not beyond—and that’s why his feats were so exciting and hold up so well. He reflected a love of new, current technology, not of far-fetched fantasy technology.

Jack Dizer, a retired engineering professor at Mohawk Valley Community College, in Utica, New York, published a book in 1982 called Tom Swift & Company that includes a chapter on similarities between Tom Swift’s Shopton and Curtiss’s home town of Hammondsport, New York. He says, “The early inventions were very much based on Glenn Curtiss. Then you branch off, and there’s a little of everybody- there’s a little of Edison, for instance.”

While there is agreement about Tom’s real-life model, a consensus on who wrote the books—all nominally by the pseudonymous Victor Appleton—has proved more elusive. Until ten years ago, Stratemeyer was thought to have written all the first thirty-four volumes, through 1931. A good many aficionados now dispute that. Stratemeyer probably plotted most or all of the books, but Howard Garis, his chief lieutenant, most likely did the bulk of the writing, including all the first thirty-five Tom Swifts.

Garis, born in Binghamton, New York, in 1873, was an apparently tireless reporter for the now-defunct Newark Evening News . While churning out copy for the newspaper, he took on a heavy syndicate workload and independent writing assignments as well. He was the creator of the Uncle WtggiIy series of children’s books.

Stratemeyer would create a sheet of plot outlines and run them past his editors at Grosset & Dunlap, according to James Keeline. The editors would select the ones they wanted, and Stratemeyer would assemble more detailed outlines for them; then Garis would take the outlines and produce two-hundred-page texts around them.

In May 1930 Stratemeyer died of pneumonia. His daughters, Harriet Adams and Edna Stratemeyer, assumed control of the syndicate and moved it from Manhattan to East Orange, New Jersey. Shortly thereafter the newly introduced Nancy Drew series began to outsell Tom Swift. In 1941 the Stratemeyer daughters pulled the plug on Tom, after forty volumes.

By that time Tom was wealthy and world famous, the baron of a sprawling factory complex. He had been married for twelve years, and he and Mary had had a couple of kids never acknowledged in the series: a boy, Tom Jr., born in 1936, and a girl, Sandra, born a year later. Their existence was revealed in 1954 with the introduction of a second Tom Swift series, “The New Tom Swift Jr. Adventures.”

If Tom Sr. had been impressive, his son’s accomplishments were dizzying. At eighteen, the lanky blond boy constructed the Sky Queen , a nuclear-powered supersonic jumbo jet outfitted with an array of high-tech laboratories. The plane’s home field was a much-changed Shopton. Swift Construction, managed by Tom Sr.’s old friend Ned, had become a subsidiary of Swift Enterprises. “It was into space projects, undersea exploration, everything,” recalls the main Tom Jr. author, James Duncan Lawrence. “This was a vast research layout, with all sorts of electronic security.”

Tom had apparently won his pilot’s license for multiengine jets and government clearance to handle highgrade nuclear fuels before the first book opened, despite his tender age and his failure to earn a lick of college credit. He wasted no time putting his gifts to use. In 1954 he and his best friend, Bud Barclay, entered a race to be the first humans to orbit the earth in two hours. They succeeded seven years before Yuri Gagarin.

In 1955 Tom put a roomy space station into orbit. He reached the moon in 1958, eleven years before Apollo XI , and built his Megascope Space Prober twenty-eight years before the Hubble Telescope was launched. His Sea Dart jetmarine appeared in 1954, the same year as the Navy’s Nautilus . Tom’s far superior two-man craft was fueled by Swiftonium, an isotope discovered by the family; its reactor was shielded by Tomasite, a durable, heat-resistant, radiation-absorbent plastic; and its engine parts were coated with “osmiridium,” an alloy of osmium and iridium that Tom developed to withstand sea water. In place of old-fashioned torpedoes, the jetmarine used an “oscillator ray gun,” which at one point reduced a giant octopus to “a thousand bits of disorganized protoplasm.”

As her father had before her, Harriet Adams (her sister was no longer active in the syndicate) fashioned the series as the work of a single author: Victor Appleton II, supposedly the nephew of the original. In reality, James Lawrence penned twenty-four of thirty-three volumes in the series.

Lawrence, who had a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering from the Detroit Institute of Technology, had been writing scripts for radio serials when in 1954 he read an article in The New Yorker about plans to resurrect Tom Swift. He recalls, “Network dramatic radio was just about dead, so I was looking for new markets. I wrote them, got a reply, and as a result I wrote the Atomic Earth Blaster .”

The book was the fifth in the series; the first four had been written by three other ghost writers. Lawrence wrote twenty-three of the next twenty-four volumes over the next ten years. After joining the syndicate’s full-time staff, in 1962, he constructed eleven of the books from scratch, devising his own plot outlines and settings.

The new series relied on more than its writers’ imaginations. “As I look back, there was a hell of a lot of research and planning that went into those books before the writing ever began, to make sure everything worked nicely,” Lawrence says. “I tried to keep in touch with what was going on in science—I got Science Digest and a science newsletter. We’d take a bit of science news and try to develop that into an invention. Or—and this was more fun—I’d try to imagine some sensational effect or phenomenon and then come up with what sort of invention would bring this about.”

When he was plotting Triphibian Atomicar , “lasers were in the news. There happened to be a lot of talk of them. So lasers wound up in the story. And in Sonic Boom Trap there was another adaptation of lasers. The notion was to develop something that would generate sound as acoustically piercing as laser is a concentrated beam of light.” Likewise, when Hovercraft was in the news it provided the inspiration for Tom’s go-anywhere car.

From its inception, the new series also depended on the know-how of outside consultants, among them Donald Grote, a high school physics teacher who helped Mrs. Adams devise plot outlines, and John Ollom, a physics professor at Drew University and part-time researcher at Bell Laboratories. Ollom, now retired, recalls that his job was to prevent “any real scientific bloopers. It wasn’t necessary that things be practical, but they had to at least be feasible.” Ollom has a souvenir copy of Mystery Comet with a handwritten dedication by Lawrence signed Victor Appleton II.

Harriet Adams continued her father’s tradition of plot outlining. She or her staff would conceive a book’s premise and then issue an outline as long as twenty pages. Devising the general plot was sometimes a communal effort. While developing the Polar-Ray Dynasphere, Lawrence met with Adams and Andrew Svenson, her partner in the syndicate after 1961, “to talk about what this thing was going to look like.” Lawrence recalls, “I remember that Mrs. Adams said, ‘Well, let’s give it a string-bean shape.'” The book’s cover depicts the resulting spaceship. It looks exactly like a string bean.

Lawrence left the Tom Swift business in 1971, after a dispute with Andrew Svenson. The series didn’t last much longer. He explains, “The Tom Swift Jr. series was really in sync with the space program. Once the moon landing took place—well, what can you do once men have walked on the moon? He seemed to become less thrilling.” An activity book and paperback reprints were issued in the eight years that followed, but no new stories. The syndicate stayed busy with the Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew, and the Bobbsey Twins. Svenson died in 1975; Mrs. Adams still carried on, moving the offices to Maplewood, New Jersey, and changing publishers.

The new publisher, Simon & Schuster, issued a new Tom Swift series beginning in 1981. This series, whose first volume was titled The City in the Stars , was so radically different that one is hard-pressed to understand why it bears the Tom Swift name. Tom was no longer an inventor but a space adventurer and traveler. The plots were pure futuristic science fiction.

After heading the syndicate for nearly fifty-two years, Mrs. Adams died in March 1982, reportedly while watching The Wizard of Oz on television. She was eighty-nine. In 1984 the remaining partners sold the operation.

Tom Swift, meanwhile, had evolved from prophet to collectible. The Tom Jr. books can frequently be picked up at used bookstores and garage sales for two to five dollars a copy. The original Toms are much harder to come by and fetch much higher prices. Throughout the country a network of collectors like Geoffrey Lapin, a cellist with the Indianapolis Symphony, and Ernie Kelly, a public relations representative for a defense contractor, line their bookshelves with Tom Swifts and exchange volumes and trivia at occasional Tom Swift conventions.

A larger, unorganized network probably exists out there too: the millions of Americans who first developed a fondness for a romantic notion of technology and inventing when they cracked open a Tom Swift book in their childhood. Especially in the era of Tom Sr., those readers grew up in a time when technology seemed to be performing miracles. Tom conveyed that limitless sense of possibility as well as anyone ever did.