Tom Swift Research Articles

Misbegotten methodologies and forgotten lessons from Tom Swift's electric factor analysis machine: A demonstration with competing structural models of psychopathology.

Confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) and its bifactor models are popular in empirical investigations of the factor structure of psychological constructs. CFA offers straightforward hypothesis testing but has notable pitfalls, such as the imposition of strict assumptions (i.e., simple structure) that obscure unmodeled complexity. Due to the limitations of bifactor CFAs, they have yielded anomalous results across samples and studies that suggest model misspecification (e.g., evaporating specific factors and unexpected loadings). We propose the use of exploratory factor analysis (EFA) to evaluate the structural validity of CFA solutions-either before or after the estimation of more restrictive CFA models-to (a) identify model misspecifications that may drive anomalous estimates and (b) confirm CFA models by examining whether hypothesized structures emerge with limited researcher input. We evaluated the degree to which predominant factor structures were invariant across contexts along the exploratory-confirmatory continuum and demonstrate how poor methodological choices can distort results and impede theory development. All CFA models fit well, but there were numerous differences in replicability and substantive interpretability. Several similarities emerged between bifactor CFA and EFA models, including evidence of overextraction, the collapse of specific factors onto the general factor, and subsequent shifts in how the general factor was defined. We situate these methodological shortcomings within the broader literature on structural models of psychopathology, articulate implications for theories (such as the p-factor) that are borne out of factor analysis, outline several remedies for problems encountered when performing exploratory bifactor analysis, and propose alternative specifications for confirmatory bifactor models. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Tom Swift’s Three Inventions of Television

This article draws on fictional depiction of television in three novels in the Tom Swift series of boys' books, published in 1914, 1928, and 1933, in attempt to come to terms with different aspects of what sociologist of technology call the “technological imaginary” of television. As the novels’ depictions of the various television inventions demonstrate, the period of the first decades of the twentieth century was typified by a great deal of permutations in the very conception of what is television and what would it be good for. In particular, the article highlights the fast-changing intermedial context that surrounded the project of realizing television technology during this era.

Measurement Issues: Neuropsychological assessment with children and adolescents; unlocking the mysticism, methods and measures with the help of Tom Swift.

In this article, we provide a brief overview of the principles that guide paediatric neuropsychological assessment, the methods used and some examples of the measures available. We explore intellectual, adaptive and social functioning from a neuropsychological perspective and describe suitable measures for use in paediatric neuropsychological assessment in each domain. We provide an example of assessment and interpretation using a fictional character (Tom Swift) to demonstrate that neuropsychological assessment is important in understanding the everyday questions that arise in children's services around risk, needs, level of understanding and capacity to engage with services.

Derivation of Theory by Means of Factor Analysis of Tom Swift and His Electric Factor Analysis Machine

Problems in the use of factor analysis for deriving theory are illustrated by means of an example in which the underlying factors are known. The actual underlying model is simple and it provides a perfect explanation of the data. While the factor analysis explains a large proportion of the total variance, it fails to identify the known factors in the model, The illustration is used to emphasize that factor analysis, by itself, may be misleading as far as the development of theory is concerned. The use of a comprehensive, and explicit a priori analysis is proposed so that there will be independent criteria for the evaluation of the factor analytic results.

Tom swift and his electric airship

Sooner or later, the practices we call “green” will have to expand from the token gestures we make today (turning down the thermostat and driving hybrids) to a nearly universal avoidance of oxidizing fossil carbon. In terms of aviation, it's time to start thinking about how to move people and goods, in commercial quantities, with a zero-carbon footprint; indeed there are several schemes afoot. The pioneering Boeing and Lange/DLR fuel-cell prototype airplanes are an encouraging sign up to a point, but it seems more than bold to suggest that these models can be scaled up to commercial adequacy. The USAF/DARPA high-altitude Intel blimp provides ample carrying capacity and a ceiling of 65,000 feet, but again, not much of a useful turn of speed. Popular Science has reported on multiple-gas vehicles like the Sanswire STS-111 Stratellite and airship concepts such as Igor Pasternak's Aeroscraft. Of these, only the last seems to be well-targeted toward the goal, according to some accounts. This undertakes to apply some of the perennial concerns participants to a global fleet of dirigibles featuring fuel-cell-powered propulsion. That is, it adopts a global-system view taking the development of suitable vehicles for granted, rather than focusing on the vehicle innovations as their developers must primarily do. Discussions include performance and safety requirements for the airships, new terminal area concepts, collaborative-autonomous situational awareness and collision avoidance, weather considerations, in-flight refueling and towing, and intermodal possibilities.

Chief Bender's Burden: The Silent Struggle of a Baseball Star (review)

Reviewed by: Chief Bender's Burden: The Silent Struggle of a Baseball Star Ron Briley Tom Swift. Chief Bender's Burden: The Silent Struggle of a Baseball Star. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2008. 339 pp. Cloth, $24.95. In Chief Bender's Burden, journalist Tom Swift provides an entertaining biography of Charles Albert Bender, who was elected to Baseball's Hall of Fame in 1953. Nevertheless, Swift often relies upon conjecture to discuss the response of Bender as a Native American to the racial stereotypes of baseball and American society during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Relying primarily upon newspaper and periodical accounts of Bender's life and baseball career, Swift paints a picture of an athlete who attempted to assimilate into the dominant white culture, but who finally succumbed to societal pressures and sought solace in alcohol. The major problem for Swift's study is that the taciturn pitcher rarely shared his innermost thoughts about topics such as race, so the author is often reduced to assuming how Bender must have felt when subjected to racial profiling and caricature. Swift frames his account of Bender's life around the pitcher's final disastrous appearance for the Philadelphia Athletics during the 1914 World Series against the Boston "Miracle" Braves. The flashbacks to episodes in Bender's [End Page 158] early life are developed in a somewhat cinematic fashion as the reader is returned at the end of each chapter to the struggling Bender on the mound attempting to retire the Boston lineup. The larger historical and cultural context in which Bender lived is best developed in the chapters on the young Native American before he entered professional baseball. Charles Albert Bender was born on 5 May 1884 in Minnesota. His father was of German-American descent, while his mother was a member of the Chippewa nation. The family lived in difficult economic circumstances on the White Earth Indian Reservation. Bender often quarreled with his father, and in 1896 he left his family for the Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania. Rather than being forcibly separated from his family and culture through the Indian boarding school experience, Swift observes that Bender embraced the opportunity to leave his troubled family structure. At Carlisle, Bender was exposed to the assimilationist policies of school founder Richard Henry Pratt, who, along with legendary coach Glenn Scobey "Pop" Warner, believed that sport provided an opportunity to instill character in the school's Native population. Based upon examination of some compositions prepared by Bender during his Carlisle years, Swift concludes that the athlete internalized Pratt's philosophy or prudently pretended to have adopted his ideas. Swift writes, "Carlisle was a place where American Indians learned to self-censor and where incorrect behavior was sometimes met with a lashing. Besides, Charley [Bender] knew he wanted a place in the dominant culture, so he was willing to tell the dominant culture that he accepted, or at least conceded, its version of the narrative" (55). After graduation from Carlisle in 1902, Bender pitched for Dickinson College and the Harrisburg, Pennsylvania Athletic Club. Appearing with the Harrisburg club, Bender defeated the Chicago Cubs 3–1 and gained the attention of major league scouts. After signing with the Philadelphia Athletics and their manager/owner Connie Mack, the nineteen-year-old Bender won seventeen games as a rookie in 1903. Off the playing field, Bender established a reputation as the stoic Native American, unflappable and taciturn. Swift argues, Given that this sensitive unheralded rookie happened to be an American Indian trying to dispel a set of stereotypes that were so pervasive they might as well have been written on the outfield wall, it's not hard to understand why he chose his words carefully. He would have enough doubts without making more with loose lips. (97) Between 1903 and 1914, Bender won 193 games for the Athletics. He played an essential role in the 1905, 1910, 1911, 1913, and 1914 American League pennants garnered by the team, as well as the world championships of 1910, 1911, and 1913. Swift maintains that during Bender's heyday with the Athletics, [End Page 159] the athlete apparently embodied the assimilationist ideas of Carlisle Indian...

The modern age: turn-of-the century American culture and the invention of adolescence

The Modern Age examines the discourses that have come to characterize adolescence and argues that commonplace views of adolescents as impulsive, conflicted, and rebellious are constructions inspired by broader cultural anxieties that characterized American society in early-20th-century America.The idea of adolescence, argues Kent Baxter, came into being because it fulfilled specific historical and cultural needs: to define a quickly expanding segment of the population, and to express concerns associated with the movement into a new era. Adolescence - a term that had little currency before 1900 and made a sudden and pronounced appearance in a wide variety of discourses thereafter - is a 'modern age' not only because it sprung from changes in American society that are synonymous with modernity, but also because it came to represent all that was threatening about 'modern life'.Baxter provides a preliminary history of adolescence, focusing specifically on changes in the American educational system and the creation of the juvenile justice system that carved out a developmental space between the child and the adult. He looks at the psychological works of G. Stanley Hall and the anthropological works of Margaret Mead and explores what might have inspired their markedly negative descriptions of this new demographic. He examines the rise of the Woodcraft Indian youth movement and its promotion of 'red skin' values while also studying the proliferation of off-reservation boarding schools for Native American youth, where educators attempted to eradicate the very 'red skin' values promoted by the Woodcraft movement.Finally Baxter studies reading at the turn of the century, focusing specifically on Horatio Alger (the Ragged Dick series) and Edward Stratemeyer (the Tom Swift, Nancy Drew, and Hardy Boys series) and what those works reveal about the 'problem' of adolescence and its solutions in terms of values, both economic and moral.

Cannibal Joyce

Reviewed by: Cannibal Joyce John Gordon (bio) Cannibal Joyce, by Thomas Jackson Rice, with a foreword by Sebastian D. G. Knowles. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2008. 210 pp. $59.95. Reviewing Richard Adams's best-selling Watership Down for The Atlantic, Phoebe Adams spoke highly of the author's talents as a teller of adventure stories but wondered why he had chosen to confuse things with a cast of characters "inexplicably camouflaged as rabbits."1 Thomas Jackson Rice's Cannibal Joyce is a collection of smart, provocative, wide-ranging essays on matters having to do with Joyce. Good for it, and for all such. What it is not is a book about Joyce and cannibals. Cannibalism is certainly one of the many subjects considered in its pages but one that competes for attention with, for instance, the histories of Berlitz Schools, condoms, television, and much else. The problem is not so much that the title is a red herring for the reader—who really cares that The Merchant of Venice is not really about the merchant of Venice or that A Midsummer Night's Dream is set in May?—but that it was apparently one for the author as well. The book's weakest chapter is the first, precisely because it attempts to set up cannibalism as a master trope for all to come; and its weakest moments thereafter are those that try to make good on the promise by corkscrewing the meaning of "cannibalism" into odd shapes so as to insert it into spaces where it has no business being. If, like me, you are familiar with some of these chapters in their original forms, you cannot help but notice a kind of "and now a word from our sponsor" rhythm to the way the very word "cannibal" has been, as Stephen would say, "spatchcocked" onto patches of text once innocent of its presence (U 9.991). In short, and in spite of the title, this is far from being what Hollywood scriptwriters call a high-concept project. But high-concept is not everything. The digressive, the free-form, the shaggy-doggish have their claims too. With Cannibal Joyce, the best policy is to dispense with any lingering rage for order on your part or the author's and settle down to enjoy a ramble through a lot of interesting stuff more or less related to Joyce and his times. Rice is curiously learned. In accumulating material for this book, he has followed where his curiosities led him, and, because he is a determined fellow with an interesting mind and a knack for tracking those curiosities down through library stacks and Google rabbit holes, one is usually happy to follow after. Symptomatically, some two-thirds of the bibliography consists of non-Joycean sources; a typical list of entries in the index is [End Page 585] this one, under "V": "Valensi, Georges; Valéry, Paul; Vampirism; Vico, Giambattista; Victor Talking Machine Company; Virgil." Of the six items, only "Vico, Giambattista" sounds an expected note. Accordingly, the main virtue of Cannibal Joyce is that it surprises. Think doctoral dissertation, and then imagine its opposite. The close readings of Joyce, when they appear, are, on the whole, of very high quality, but the real appeal of the book is the background noise churning behind those readings, noise from which the subject of Joyce fades in and out like a song from a staticky radio. At times, it seems to be daring the reader to protest: "All very interesting, Mr. Rice, but exactly what does this have to do with the issue at hand?" The section on Tom Swifties is as good an example as any. Is anybody out there old enough to remember the Tom Swifties fad of the early sixties? ("You may take the prisoner down, said Tom condescendingly"; "She loves me, she loves me not, said Tom lackadaisically.") Rice gives us some entertaining examples, discusses their American genesis (Minneapolis, believe it or not), and points out that Tom Swifties got their name from the immensely popular Tom Swift series of boys' books, whose hero's specialty was inventing things, like television, well ahead of the technological curve. To which...

Chief Bender's burden: the silent struggle of a baseball star

The greatest American Indian baseball player of all time, Charles Albert Bender, was, according to a contemporary, 'the coolest pitcher in the game'. Using a trademark delivery, an impressive assortment of pitches that may have included the game's first slider, and an apparently unflappable demeanor, he earned a reputation as baseball's great clutch pitcher during tight Deadball Era pennant races and in front of boisterous World Series crowds. More remarkably yet, 'Chief' Bender's Hall of Fame career unfolded in the face of immeasurable prejudice. This skillfully told and complete account of Bender's life is also a portrait of greatness of character maintained despite incredible pressure - of how a celebrated man thrived while carrying an untold weight on his shoulders. With a journalist's eye for detail and a novelist's feel for storytelling, Tom Swift takes readers on Bender's improbable journey - from his early years on the White Earth Reservation, to his development at the Carlisle Indian School, to his big break and eventual rise to the pinnacle of baseball. The story of a paradoxical American sports hero, one who achieved a once-unfathomable celebrity while suffering the harsh injustices of a racially intolerant world, Chief Bender's Burden is an eye-opening and inspiring narrative of a unique American life.

Tom Swift and His Electric Prefrontal Cortex, or Standing in the Shadow of Phineas Gage

Tom Swift and His Electric Prefrontal Cortex, or Standing in the Shadow of Phineas Gage

Electromagnetic modelling of current flow in the heart from TASER devices and the risk of cardiac dysrhythmias

Increasing use by law enforcement agencies of the M26 and X26 TASERTASER is an acronym for Thomas A. Swift's Electric Rifle from the book Tom Swift and His Electric Rifle (1911) by Victor Appleton, ISBN-10: 1594561257. electrical incapacitation devices has raised concerns about the arrhythmogenic potential of these weapons. Using a numerical phantom constructed from medical images of the human body in which the material properties of the tissues are represented, computational electromagnetic modelling has been used to predict the currents arising at the heart following injection of M26 and X26 waveforms at the anterior surface of the chest (with one TASER ‘barb’ directly overlying the ventricles). The modelling indicated that the peak absolute current densities at the ventricles were 0.66 and 0.11 mA mm−2 for the M26 and X26 waveforms, respectively. When applied during the vulnerable period to the ventricular epicardial surface of guinea-pig isolated hearts, the M26 and X26 waveforms induced ectopic beats, but only at current densities greater than 60-fold those predicted by the modelling. When applied to the ventricles in trains designed to mimic the discharge patterns of the TASER devices, neither waveform induced ventricular fibrillation at peak currents >70-fold (for the M26 waveform) and >240-fold (for the X26) higher than the modelled current densities. This study provides evidence for a lack of arrhythmogenic action of the M26 and X26 TASER devices.For more information on this article, see medicalphysicsweb.org

Boys' Books, Boys' Dreams and the Mystique of Flight (review)

Reviewed by: Boys’ Books, Boys’ Dreams and the Mystique of Flight Robert von der Osten (bio) Fred Erisman . Boys’ Books, Boys’ Dreams and the Mystique of Flight. Fort Worth: Texas Christian UP, 2006. Having grown up on Tom Swift and the boys' series books I salvaged from our basement and flea markets, I leapt at the opportunity to review Erisman's detailed study of aviation series books from 1905 to 1958. Erisman's project is an important one since all history is also a history of technology, whether it was the stirrup that altered warfare and medieval society (White 38) or the airplane that similarly radically changed warfare and our society. Technological changes that contribute to changes in social relations are related to values and symbols that are incorporated in a relatively unmediated manner in popular literature. As Erisman points out, the series books "lead their young readers into and through a time of awesome change" (26). Therefore, the study of often neglected "marginal" literature such as the aviation series books plays an important role in articulating the conceptual sinews of a culture. Erisman attempts to demonstrate that aviation series books had a significant historic role in promoting an interest in aviation and the values of aviation to young boys. He argues that "In book after book the series writers spelled out the history, the expectations, and the possibilities of flight, linking it with adventure, with commerce, and with romance, and communicating it to the young in the most positive and appealing of manners" (298). To make his case, he provides a detailed history of the series book to indicate how these books often offer an authentic account of aircraft, the vocabulary and techniques of aviation, the procedure for flight, the growing assimilation of aviation into American society, and "the evolving image of 'the aviator' as a paragon of American integrity and manhood" (291). Erisman's study is giddily optimistic in its vision and defined by an almost anachronistic master narrative that aviation and aviation values incorporated in the series books are a driving force for a better world. "Progressive America will lead the way, but, through the agency of popularly accessible aviation as it spreads throughout the world, all mankind will ascend to a new and higher level of human capability. It is an admirable, worthy vision, and its tragedy is that the reality of world events and the accelerating course of technology worked to frustrate its realization" (299). This is a vision that I cannot share because it seems both naïvely technocratic and dangerously colonial; and it offers a constrained narrative that limits Erisman's scholarship. Erisman's first chapter "Setting the Stage: Technology and the Series Book" places the aviation series within a useful and concise history of boys' series books, though I would recommend the collection of essays American Boys' Series Books 1900–1980 edited by Barbara Bishop to [End Page 192] anyone doing research in this area. Erisman traces the history of the aviation series chronologically from the "Airship Boys" of 1909 through both world wars to Isaac Asimov's "Lucky Starr Adventures" that ended in 1958, comprehensively considering a very large number of texts. He places these texts within the context of a concise and detailed history of aviation, one so abbreviated that it sometimes loses the drama of the struggle, including the failures, of a developing technology and becomes a cavalcade of advances, which could be daunting for those lacking any technical enthusiasm for aviation. He provides brief biographies of a number of the authors and summaries of a substantial numbers of books, summaries that were nostalgically satisfying for me, could provide a useful overview for potential researchers, but could be tedious for those less invested in this literature. In discussing the works, Erisman seemed most in his element applying painstaking research in showing how the works included accurate details of aviation development. "Steve's Waco E is a modern private plane, introduced in 1940 and supporting impressive speed and a 23,000 feet service ceiling" (234). Most chapters end with a clear statement of Erisman's analysis of the contribution these books make to the development of aviation whether it is...

The Secret of the Hardy Boys: Leslie McFarlane and the Stratemeyer Syndicate (review)

The Secret of the Hardy Boys: Leslie McFarlane and the Stratemeyer Syndicate Chris McGee (bio) The Secret of the Hardy Boys: Leslie McFarlane and the Stratemeyer Syndicate. By Marilyn S. Greenwald . Athens, Ohio: Ohio UP, 2004. By now it is probably no surprise to anyone interested in children's literature that there never was a Franklin W. Dixon or a Carolyn Keene, those infamous names behind the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew mystery series. They were of course the fabrications of Edward Stratemeyer, founder of a fiction-writing syndicate in the early 1900s that used ghostwriters to produce series titles from The Rover Boys to Tom Swift. While a fair amount of biographical attention has been paid to Stratemeyer, and even to Mildred Wirt Benson (the first and most prominent Nancy Drew writer), Marilyn S. Greenwald's excellent new biography The Secret of the Hardy Boys: Leslie McFarlane and the Stratemeyer Syndicate is the first to examine in detail the life of Leslie McFarlane, a freelance writer from Canada who anonymously wrote the first 16 Hardy Boys mysteries, and over twenty in all. [End Page 430] Greenwald's rich biography of this little-known figure in the history of literature for young people describes a prolific and ambitious young writer who always wanted to produce the great Canadian novel, but instead found himself straddled with the business of writing "juveniles," as he called them, to support himself while he sent stories off to prominent magazines (92). At twenty-four, after several years on the newspaper beat, McFarlane answered an ad placed by Stratemeyer seeking experienced freelance writers. Anxious to have the time and freedom that comes from making a living at writing, McFarlane took a job writing Dave Fearless titles, though he was unsatisfied by the demands for stilting dialogue and the constant action. After writing several books, for which he was generally paid a hundred dollars in exchange for confidentiality and loss of rights, McFarlane was close to quitting until Stratemeyer tempted him with a new series about a pair of young detectives and their famous father. Excited about the possibility of starting a series fresh, and promised that the series would focus more on dialogue and narrative, McFarlane would, over the next several years, become Franklin W. Dixon. But, and this is perhaps most disappointing to the legion of young boys who grew up on the series, myself included, McFarlane was always ambivalent about his work with Stratemeyer's syndicate, always on the brink of giving up the work for good, always coming back when he needed the money, and always disappointed that despite writing for newspapers, magazines, radio, and film, it was those "Hardy brats" that would be his most memorable achievement (142). McFarlane was also a man who respected his audience and refused to write down to them, who took his job seriously, and wrote stories with a degree of sophistication not often seen in serial stories. Greenwald makes the case that the Hardy books are thoroughly invested with complex themes close to McFarlane's heart. His father a respected schoolteacher and principal, McFarlane grew up in the lush Canadian outdoors of Haileybury, Ontario. Well-read as a child, and an avid fan of Charles Dickens, McFarlane would later explore the themes of humble beginnings and the capacity to overcome adversity in the Hardy series, as well as giving his villains—Sarah Flegg, Otto Knapp—particularly Dickensian names. The richness of the outdoors, which he discovered as a young boy while bobsledding, and the active life found there, would also become a recurrent theme in the books. Greenwald consistently paints him as a man who took the simple outlines provided by Stratemeyer and invested the stock characters with humor, complexity, and an ambivalence toward authority inconsistent with the tone of previous Stratemeyer books. "At his own initiative," writes Greenwald, "Les [as she calls him throughout the book] subtly and stealthily transformed some standard stereotypical characters, including three respectable policemen and a kindly maiden aunt, into subversives" (xiii). Among McFarlane's proudest developments was the memorable Aunt Gertrude. When Stratemeyer recommended that McFarlane tone down his portrayal of the bumbling [End Page 431] Bayport police, McFarlane turned...

The 7 Professors of the Far North (review)

Reviewed by: The 7 Professors of the Far North Timnah Card Fardell, John The 7 Professors of the Far North. Putnam, 2005 [224p] ISBN 0-399-24381-X$14.99 Reviewed from galleys R Gr. 4-6 In the rollicking tradition of Ian Fleming's fanciful Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (BCCB 1/65), three children traverse Europe and the Arctic using a series of ingenious inventions to save the world from the malefic plots of a megalomaniacal scientist. Sam and his friends, Zara and Ben, witness the nighttime kidnapping of six geriatric professors (including Zara and Ben's great-uncle) by the henchmen of the dastardly Professor Murdo. Knowing the police won't believe the testimony of children, the trio follows clues left by one of the abductees, rallies up some aid, evades the security systems protecting Murdo's lair, and overthrows his regime, rescuing Murdo's victims in the process. Though the tried and true premise is heavily scented with eau de yesteryear, the inventions and scientific threats are all gleaming twenty-first century. The children (two of them multiracial) evince flashes of individuality but usually function as a single unit; that's fine, because the point of the story is adventure, not juvenile introspection. The narrative occasionally cuts to the story of Marcia, the neglected child of a pair of social climbers who put her at Murdo's mercy so she can be genetically altered into the daughter of their dreams; these shifts in perspective are initially slightly confusing, but they do show Murdo's operation from the inside and so prepare the reader for the multiple-player climax. Plenty of warm dialogue and lively cameos by bit characters make reading aloud an attractive option, as well as increasing the digestibility of the long text for the younger readers who will most enjoy the easy accessibility and inventive effervescence of the plot. Black-and-white illustrations of rumpled knapsacks and cartoonish rockets add a dash of Tom Swift. Copyright © 2005 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

The Secret of the Hardy Boys, Leslie McFarlane and the Stratemeyer Syndicate (review)

Reviewed by: The Secret of the Hardy Boys, Leslie McFarlane and the Stratemeyer Syndicate William J. Vande Kopple (bio) Marilyn S. Greenwald . The Secret of the Hardy Boys, Leslie McFarlane and the Stratemeyer Syndicate. Ohio UP, 2004. Much of the material for my boyhood reading was supplied by a bookmobile, a bulky, top-heavy vehicle that stopped regularly in my neighborhood back in the 1950s. I don't remember many details about that bookmobile's interior. But I do remember a shelf that I regarded as special—the shelf displaying all the Hardy Boys books. Back when I was nine or ten, it never occurred to me as I sped through these mysteries that the name Franklin W. Dixon corresponded to no actual person in the real world. I had a mental image of Franklin W. Dixon, and to me it was both comforting and intriguing. I even had a notion of how his voice would sound, if he ever could find the time to leave his writing desk and visit my school. Perhaps, then, it was all for the best that it was not until I was in my forties that I first learned some of the details of how the Hardy Boys books were written and produced. These details left me with a swarm of questions, many of which I can now answer because of Marilyn S. Greenwald's recent work. In this book, Greenwald uses extensive archival resources––including thousands of pages of diary entries and personal letters—to examine the [End Page 283] life, especially the literary life, of Charles Leslie McFarlane (known throughout his life as Les), the author of around twenty of the first twenty-four Hardy Boys books. As a part of her examination, Greenwald describes the relationship that McFarlane had with the Stratemeyer Syndicate, which produced several series of books so familiar to young readers throughout the twentieth century: books featuring the Hardy Boys, the Bobbsey Twins, Nancy Drew, Tom Swift, Dave Fearless, and others. Furthermore, she explores questions about the quality of the Hardy Boys books and the role they have played in the lives of young readers. From Greenwald's book, it is clear that for Les McFarlane, to live, in large measure, was to write. As she puts it, "throughout his life, nothing compared to the exhilaration of a good day of writing" (214). And Les clearly had many such days, as evidenced by the quantity, quality, and variety of pieces he produced. He began his formal writing career composing for newspapers, first in his beloved boyhood town of Haliebury, northern Ontario, and later in such cities as Sudbury and Cobalt, Ontario, and Springfield, Massachusetts. After he stopped working for newspapers, his writing ranged remarkably widely, from detective thrillers, mystery novellas, and sports stories, through speeches for officials of the Canadian Department of Munitions and Supply, to scripts for radio shows, for films produced by the Canadian Film Board, and for television dramas aired by the Canadian Broadcasting Company. However, the writing that Greenwald is most interested in is that which McFarlane did after responding to an advertisement seeking someone who could write fiction following plot outlines supplied by others. This ad had been placed by Edward Stratemeyer, who gave McFarlane what amounted to a writer's try-out and then invited him to be one of several writers laboring for him in what is sometimes called a "fiction factory." McFarlane was to work in this factory on and off from 1927 to 1947, producing most of the early Hardy Boys books. It is difficult to imagine anyone today agreeing to abide by the rules and procedures that Stratemeyer set for his writers. In beginning a new book, writers would receive from Stratemeyer (and, after his death, from one or the other of his two daughters) about two pages of single-spaced text detailing the important incidents in the plot. If writers followed the outlines correctly, they would produce books that were between 204 and 218 pages in length and that included many chapters which ended with some sort of cliffhanger. In most books, the second chapter was special since in it the narrator would pause in order to...

A Machine Named Ginger: Steve Kemper, Code Name Ginger

A Machine Named Ginger:Steve Kemper, Code Name Ginger Jonathan Coopersmith (bio) The first time I saw a Segway was at a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Dean Kamen described a robotics competition for high school students sponsored by FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) while effortlessly riding his computerized mechanical marvel back and forth. My second sighting was a photograph of President Bush falling off one (hint to future riders: read the instructions, and do not hold a tennis racket while steering). The third time was on a sidewalk, appropriately, in Atlanta during the 2003 SHOT meeting. What a nifty boy toy. And what a nifty book is Steve Kemper's Code Name Ginger: The Story behind Segway and Dean Kamen's Quest to Invent a New World (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2003). Writing in the tradition of Tracy Kidder's 1981 Soul of a New Machine, Kemper focuses on Kamen's efforts to create, develop, and commercialize a gyroscopically stabilized, two-wheeled, battery-powered vehicle capable of carrying one person and some cargo at speeds up to 20 kilometers per hour. Segway's progenitor was a stair-climbing wheelchair, financed by Johnson and Johnson, whose spinning antics earned it the nickname of Fred, after Fred Astaire; what else could this wonderful new contrivance have been called but Ginger? Kemper follows Ginger through the early years, almost up to its commercial introduction. In many ways this is a Pilgrim's Progress for inventors, but Kamen is clearly not Everyman—nor, he hopes, is Ginger just any invention. One noteworthy difference between Code Name Ginger and Soul of a New Machine is the former's sustained focus on the problem of raising money. Partly this simply reflects the high-fliers Kamen negotiates with; would you rather read about Steve Bezos's first ride on Ginger and the [End Page 603] machinations of Silicon Valley financial entrepreneur John Doerr and a gang of New York bankers, or engineers designing a dial? But the other, more significant reason is engineering's dirty little secret: without adequate funding the best idea is worthless. And Kamen needed over fifty million dollars to commercialize Ginger. Kamen is clearly an engaging, dynamic character who has earned his egoism, not only by myriad inventions through his company, DEKA (DEan KAmen), but also by his efforts with FIRST to excite kids about science and engineering careers. Another theme of the book is Kamen's tireless promotion of FIRST to the same people he is trying to get money from, sometimes putting that project ahead of the need to raise capital. Like Tom West in Soul, when Kamen wanted to begin work on Ginger he sought out young engineers "who didn't yet consider anything impossible" (p. 34). Kemper depicts them all, Kamen included, as guys whose main joy in life is bashing metal, giving concepts physical form, finding problems, and then bashing more metal until the wee hours in a well-equipped machine shop. There happens to be such a shop in Kamen's mansion, which is handy when he needs to jump into his helicopter or plane to fetch a part or round up a specialist. This merry band of metal bashers are independent, action-oriented engineers who pride themselves on being a breed apart from their colleagues trapped in large corporations. It's Tom Swift on steroids. But when Kamen decided not to license Ginger but to produce it himself, tensions began to emerge, springing from the realization, reluctantly arrived at, that corporations do not exist solely to enslave engineers but to perform the acts of organization and discipline necessary to commercialize and manufacture things. Commercialization also meant that Kamen would have to relinquish some control over the creation he was most attached to. This he was loath to do, to Ginger's detriment. Peter Pan does not want to grow up and have to deal with subcontractors, the boredom of production engineering, the tyranny of final decisions. And who can blame him? Moving beyond DEKA's focus on research and development into designing production prototypes meant hiring different types of engineers and managers with corporate experience...

Four Generations of Tom Swift: Ideology in Juvenile Science Fiction

Written as science fiction for young teenage boys, Tom Swift appeared as four distinct series between 1910 and 1993. This article examines the core attitudes conveyed about the young rational hero, technology, nature, and science in the first, second, and fourth of the series. While the first two series tend to idolize the rational hero, glorify technology, treat nature as a resource, and increasingly place technology within a scientific framework, the final series instead emphasizes the dangers of technological and scientific hubris.

Of Pulp, Substance, and Science Fiction

Of Pulp, Substance, and Science Fiction Gary D. Schmidt (bio) C. W. Sullivan III , ed., Science Fiction for Young Readers. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1993. A tenet of C. W. Sullivan's collection of essays Science Fiction for Young Readers is that science fiction—especially that for young readers—has not been accorded sufficient critical attention. This battle is, of course, one that children's literature in general has fought and, to some extent, won. But Sullivan is right in pointing out that this one subgenre has not held tightly onto its parent's coattails. Like children's literature, science fiction has had to struggle against the conception that it is not "serious" literature, or, to use the words of one of the essayists in Sullivan's collection, Millicent Lenz, that it is writing that flies below the level of critical radar (115). Indeed, to many science fiction is not the stuff that one grows up with as much as the stuff that one grows out of. When we were children, we read Tom Swift novels, but now we have put away childish things. This image of science fiction as mere pulp has, unfortunately, been confirmed in reality over and over again. One need only walk up and down the aisles of the science-fiction section of any B. Dalton bookstore to see the problem. Most—yes, most—of the stuff is silly, derivative, and slick. It is almost all paperback (which is suggestive). It attracts an audience almost exclusively male. It is often escapist, sometimes lurid, and frequendy annoyingly facile in its easy criticisms and cozy solutions. If we would only not depend on our technology, this one suggests. If we could only use our technology wisely, that one counters. If we could only take a cosmic view, a third whines. We are not alone, another tantalizes. [End Page 45] Sullivan recognizes these perceptions and sets out to challenge them. In entering these lists, the jousting Sullivan wields sixteen essays whose uniform assumption is that science fiction should be taken seriously. It would be difficult to finish this book without agreeing, as one by one the essays unhorse the derogatory stereotypes about science fiction for the young. Raymond Jones's "'True Myth': Female Archetypes in Monica Hughes' The Keeper of the Isis Light" is an incisive examination of Hughes's tracing of female development that places it in the context of mythic female roles—tumbling the perception that science fiction is exclusively male to the dust. K. V. Bailey's "Masters, Slaves, and Rebels: Dystopia as Defined and Defied by John Christopher" depicts that author's cogent portrayal of Utopia as more than the absence of distress, not to be achieved by simply dismissing technology—defeating another misconception. And Sullivan's own "Heinlein's Juveniles: Growing Up in Outer Space" suggests that a science-fiction writer such as Heinlein goes well beyond a slick and lurid plot for plot's sake to say something about how one matures—another illusion vanquished. At their best, then, this is what the essays do: assault the image of science fiction as pulp. Indeed, several of these critics claim, rather largely, that science fiction is important for its place as modern myth (Jones), or for its ability to instruct a fuddled world in critical thinking (Lenz), or for its antiwar messages (Howard Hendrix), or for its mirroring of contemporary life (Thorn Dunn and Karl Hiller). Dunn and Hiller in fact conclude that "those who teach young people have a responsibility to acknowledge the profound values to be gleaned within the realms of science fiction" (122). While if one substituted any other genre for "science fiction" the sentence would be equally true, the essays in this volume certainly affirm this point. Given these purposes, it is puzzling to find in this collection little discussion of the nature of science fiction as a genre. Perhaps Sullivan takes it as axiomatic that we all know science fiction when we see it, but this collection itself suggests otherwise. M. Sarah Smedman's "The 'Terrible Journey' Past 'Dragons in the Waters' to a 'House Like a Lotus': Faces of Love in the Fiction of Madeleine L'Engle" is an...

Going up river with Sue Scholar and John D. Dollarsense

Going upstream to find out and do something about "drowning" children one finds Knowledge and Research Land and Public Policy Land separated by a widening river. Our fearless hero, Tom Swift, explores with Sue Scholar what is known about prevention and then with John Dollarsense what those in power and control of resources would support. For example one must weigh the increasing research on what makes early childhood experiences helpful to children with the now needs of children on alcohol and drugs, children living in abusive homes and teenage pregnancy. Several specific courses of action are suggested as possible ways of building a bridge between knowledge producers and public policy makers.

A Bully Bunch of Books: Boy Scout Series Books in American Youth Fiction, 1910-1930

A Bully Bunch of Books:Boy Scout Series Books in American Youth Fiction, 1910-1930 M. Paul Holsinger (bio) During the first three decades of this century, hundreds of juvenile series books, often of the ten- to fifty-cent variety, poured off publishers' presses to fuel the almost insatiable reading appetites of America's young boys. Indeed, so many series were written that it was often difficult to keep them all straight. There were Airship Boys, Aeroplane Boys, and Air Service Boys. There were Motor Boat Boys, Motor Boat Club Boys, Motorcycle Chums, Motor Cycle Chums, and Motor Rangers. There were also Boy Aviators, Boy Chums, Boy Hunters, Boy Fortune Rangers, Boy Troopers, and Boy Volunteers. Despite this plethora of series stories, however, no one group, fiction or non-fictional, so dominated the field of juvenile writing as did the Boy Scouts of America. Almost from the very moment of the chartering of the national B. S. A. in 1910, publishers, especially those specializing in cheap children's fiction, sensed a ready market for sales. Soon new books ostensibly featuring Scouting heroes began to appear at a dizzying rate. More than one hundred full-length novels dealing with the Boy Scouts were pubished between 1911 and 1914; well over three hundred different books had appeared in print by the advent of the Great Depression.1 As might be expected, much of the earliest literature that appeared on dealers' shelves was little better than the worse pulp fiction. Like the already ubiquitous Stratemeyer Syndicate's "Tom Swift," most of the boys depicted in the Boy Scout novels of the day were fantastic superheroes who were larger than life itself as they took on spies, enemy agents, thugs and murderers of all kinds, and, with relative ease, overcame them all in the name of Scouting and the American Way. Easily the most productive author of the genre was "Scoutmaster" G. Harvey Ralphson. From 1911 to 1916, Ralphson, writing under his own name and as "Major Archibald Lee Fletcher," authored thirty-two full-length Boy Scout novels, all published by M. A. Donohue and Company, one of America's largest publishers of cheap, juvenile fiction. Though Ralphson ceased writing about Scouting after 1917 and, instead, turned his attentions to the excitement of the First World War in a five-volume series of "Over There" stories, his many Boy Scout novels continued to be reprinted by the thousands throughout the 1920s. The plots of most of the Ralphson volumes were ludicrously unbelievable except perhaps to the most gullible of adolescent readers. In the twenty volumes published under his own name, the author created a group of Boy Scouts from two separate New York City patrols. These young men, each of whom was between thirteen and seventeen years of age throughout all the volumes in the series, never go to school or work for a living. At the proverbial drop of a hat, however, five or six of them are able to take off to some exotic part of the world so they can work for the United States Secret Service. Frequently baffled by one international crisis or another, government officials called on the Bear and Wolf Patrols for help, and, as might be expected of ultra-patriotic young men, the country was saved over and over again, thanks to the bravery and ingenuity of the Boy Scouts of America. The natural leader of the Ralphson-invented Boy Scouts was Ned Nestor, "a sturdy lad, tall and heavy for his [seventeen] years, with brown hair and eyes and a complexion like that of a young girl" (Beyond the Arctic Circle 4). All the other boys looked up to Ned, but then so did everyone else in the nation because, besides being a Boy Scout, Ned was also America's premier detective. Ned was joined in his adventures by a group of boys so untypical of the youth of the early twentieth century that it is hard to understand how most of the volumes' readers could have related to any of them. Ned's sidekick and best friend was the irrepressible Jimmie McGraw, a former Bowery [End Page 178] newsboy in the best Horatio Alger tradition...