While Szilard as a boy pondered the fate of mankind, he seemed less able to care about the individuals around him, and his mother worried about his becoming lonely and aloof. This aloofness was tempered somewhat by his cousins, the Scheiber boys. He especially admired Imre, the eldest, a gifted painter and musician who was given early to philosophical thoughts. But Leo’s relationship with Otto Scheiber, whom he nicknamed “Molci,” was more intense. The second-oldest Scheiber boy, Otto became Leo’s first real and loving buddy and perhaps the most intimate and trusted friend he would ever have. The two cousins spent hours together, talking and reading to each other, but after little more than a year, Leo became restless with Otto and one day ended their steady companionship abruptly. This tie set a pattern for Szilard as an adolescent and as an adult: intense friendships that later faded quickly as he lost interest.
Louis and Tekla Szilard gave constant attention to their children, and when several childhood diseases spread through the capital city, they vowed to protect them. At the time, diseases such as whooping cough, measles, diphtheria, and scarlet fever were widespread, and since it was many years before the introduction of antibiotics and specific vaccinations, a child contracting an illness faced a high risk of death. The Szilards hired a private tutor to come to the villa daily. First Leo, then Bela and Rose, received instruction at home covering the four years of elementary school (for ages six to nine). Then they took the year-end “private students examinations” at public school. This opportunity allowed Leo to study at a pace that suited his quick mind and, more importantly, gave him the freedom to pursue ideas as long and as thoroughly as he wished.
The tutor hired for the Szilard children was Mr. Abranyi, an earnest, soft-spoken retired teacher with brown hair and a beard. His three pupils quickly grew to love him. Eager to satisfy him with their achievements, Leo, Bela, and Rose studied hard and learned their lessons well. Each weekday, Abranyi would meet with the children in the dining room, assign readings and tasks, quiz them orally, then bid them good-bye. In theory, all three children expected Abranyi’s attention, but Leo, acknowledged by siblings and cousins alike as “the brainiest among us,” always seemed eager to jump ahead of the assignment, his mind never focusing on a topic for longer than it took him to understand it. The Scheiber cousins called Leo “number headed,” and his intense cleverness at times disrupted even the patient Mr. Abranyi’s formal presentations.
“A mother of four goes to buy shoes for all her children, for two korona a pair,” Leo was told when studying for the year-end examination at age nine. “When it comes time to pay, she finds that she has no smaller denomination than a ten-korona bill, which she gives to the storekeeper. What happens?” Ignoring the computation of change expected of him, Leo answered: “The woman needs one more child!” Later, Szilard was handed a closed, complicated, hollow glass contraption in which a purple liquid was sealed. When the bulb was placed in his palm, the liquid boiled rapidly. The exam question: If water boils at 100 degrees centigrade, but your body temperature is about 37 degrees centigrade, why is the liquid boiling? “Either you have invented a liquid which boils at my body temperature,” Szilard answered, “or you may have stolen the air out of this device, thereby reducing the air pressure and letting that purple water boil at a reduced temperature.”
Szilard was just as unconventional when he did not know an answer. By the age of eight he had adopted a standard reply for teachers and adults who asked him to solve a problem above his capabilities. “Nem tudom kikaparni a hasamból,” he declared. “I can’t scrape an answer out of my belly.”8
While Szilard excelled at math, he also enjoyed literature. By age six he read children’s stories in German, and within another two years he was fluent in the language, which all the adults in the villa spoke well. When nine, Szilard began to speak and read French, taught him by a governess; and he read French stories by his tenth birthday. But in literature Szilard discovered frustration as well as fantasy. He enjoyed hearing and reading fairy tales but became annoyed by certain details. He complained repeatedly that Hans Christian Andersen’s story “The Snow Queen” was “illogical.” In the tale, the Snow Queen gives Kay as a present “half the world and a pair of skates.” This, Leo said, was absurd. “Since half the world must already contain at least a million pair of skates, it is ridiculous to add one more pair.” Leo annoyed the other children by making this point every time he heard the story.
On his own, Szilard read eagerly from age four. After the fairy tales, he soon switched to adventures. An early delight was the work of Karl May, a German writer who created utterly fantastic tales—unrealistic accounts of the Far East, the American West, and other distant places—without ever leaving his German hometown. Then Szilard relished dramatic accounts of the troubles German engineers had in constructing large projects. (As a civil engineer, his father expanded Leo’s readings with exciting tales of his own.) Leo’s early developed technical interests led him soon to read avidly Der Gute Kamerad, a monthly from Germany written for adolescents. He usually ignored the mildly patriotic stories and turned right to the instructions and drawings for do-it-yourself household gadgets. With his clumsy hands, Leo seldom actually built these items; that was Bela’s duty. More often Leo treated the plans as topics for intriguing daydreams. Like Karl May, Leo let one thought run to another, creating landscapes of gadgets in his busy mind.
Tinkering became an important part of Szilard’s education, and as he and Bela matured, they devised and actually built some fanciful contraptions. From an uncle who traveled regularly to London, the Szilard brothers collected hundreds of pieces for a Meccano Set, the English forerunner of the Erector Set. Leo began by proposing a grand scheme, which he expected Bela to build, and when they had too few pieces for the design, Leo posed alternatives but all the while refused to raise a finger to help with the construction.
Leo supervised work on a camera that Bela made with the lens from their mother’s opera glasses. They found an old oilcloth table cover and snipped it into the shape of a bellows, which allowed the lens to focus by moving back and forth in front of a glass negative plate. This camera had no shutter but operated when the boys uncovered the lens for a few seconds. Their favorite subject was the children’s English teacher, Miss Cochrane, who posed several times while demonstrating to Rose how to form her lips to pronounce “what,” “which,” and “while.” Leo also tinkered with an electric teakettle that he and Bela designed for their mother’s aunt Ilka. After days of wiring, cutting, and soldering, the boys produced a handsome silver pot atop a heating element. Their contraption resembled a skinny samovar and worked for more than twenty years.9
In 1912, at age fifty-one, Louis Szilard retired early from his business as a building contractor in order to devote all his time to his family and particularly to his sons’ education. He expected Leo and Bela to become engineers but in this conviction seldom pressed the point. He checked their daily homework and practiced algebra and other mathematics with all three children, trying to give Rose as much help as he gave to the boys. This was made easier because Leo seldom needed his work corrected.
Louis and Tekla Szilard seldom disagreed, but when they did, it was usually over how to rear their children. In fact, the children so dominated their conversations that Tekla became impatient to read books. But Louis thought this would distract her from Leo, Bela, and Rose. Only years later did she complain, in her writings, that Louis “once he got home was totally absorbed in the worship of his children. He never talked to me about anything else except their care and feeding,”10
Especially their feeding. Louis Szilard savored rich foods, and Tekla, despite her plainer palate, easily acquiesced to serve lavish dinners at the villa for their friends from the Masonic lodge. With Tekla helping their cook, the Szilards served meals that often began with soup in elegant china cups. Favorite appetizers included jellied fatted goose liver, jellied herring fillets, or hot beef tongue. Three or four main courses usually followed, an
d the guests frequently sampled them all. Main dishes included a freshwater fish; a fish, such as carp or sturgeon, with tartar sauce; a roast ham, sliced dramatically from one piece by Louis and served with gobs of fresh horseradish sauce; and sometimes even a small piglet roasted on a spit in the family’s huge coal- and wood-fired range. Vegetables included cauliflower polonais with butter and bread crumbs; peas; white asparagus tips, also served polonais; potatoes, either home fried in goose fat or boiled and served with butter on the side; and pommes frites fried in goose fat. Desserts included a choice of rich home-baked cake; palacsinta, a very thin crepe fried in pork fat and filled with chocolate sauce, lemon and granulated sugar, nuts, or various preserves; assorted cheeses and breads; small, hard rolls; and a special pumpernickel just for cheeses. The meal ended with café au lait and strong Turkish coffee.
Louis Szilard lavished his attention on these feasts, and Tekla remembered, with some regret, how he applied the same “supreme importance” to his children’s diets. “Our children were blessed with moderate appetites, and what with the emphasis their father put on the offering of food and the constant persuasion to eat, eat, the children began to conceive of eating as a big task,” she wrote. “The poorer the appetite of the children, the more their daddy insisted that I give them delicacies to eat and the more he tried to arouse my interest in such earthly delights.” This tension took a dramatic turn once, when Louis said:
“It’s a lovely evening, Tekla. Why don’t you walk over to Andrássy Avenue,” a broad shopping boulevard. “I saw some splendid geese there at Brief’s. Have one cut open, and if it has a really fine liver, you may pay more than the usual price.” As Tekla and the cook stood before Brief’s window, Tekla thought the force-fed geese were too expensive but never stepped inside because just next door she spotted—in a used-book shop’s window—luxury editions of works by Goethe, Schiller, Heine, and Boerne “at a ridiculously low price, the price of a fatted goose.” When Tekla returned home, Louis was amazed at the size of the package with the foie gras, his own favorite delicacy. But when Tekla untied the string and he saw the books, he had to laugh at his grand expectations. From then on, however, Louis did all the shopping for fowl.11
Leo grew to love both Goethe and goose liver, but of the two, he clearly preferred the goose liver. He also loved chocolate and all other confections, developing as he matured an unmanageable sweet tooth. His love of sweets once led to a scene when the Szilards and Scheibers joined relatives for supper at an aunt’s summer cottage on Margaret Island. On a long table on the front porch were spread ham, sliced salami, black bread, butter, and a lettuce salad. Leo and Bela sat at the foot of the table, where they could snitch unlimited amounts of their favorite delicacies unnoticed. On that evening, Leo ignored the rich meats and reached instead for a large lettuce leaf. Stealthily, he maneuvered a tiny sugar bowl to his elbow, spooned the white powder into the leaf, and carefully folded the lettuce around it, rolling the handful like a fat green cigar. Expectantly, he bit the crunchy delight, then coughed, choked, and sputtered, alerting all the relatives to his secret doings. That little bowl wasn’t full of sugar, he discovered, but salt.
Besides sweets, Leo craved most other rich foods and delicacies. He liked the large, fat livers of Hungarian geese that were force-fed with sweet corn kernels. He enjoyed heavily smoked “English bacon,” which he ate cold in thick slices as a breakfast treat. Some Sundays, in pleasant weather, Leo’s father passed up breakfast at home and went, instead, to Weingruber’s (later Gundel’s), a fancy restaurant in City Park with a terrace. There Louis Szilard always feasted on coffee, croissants with butter, and two boiled eggs. Whenever Leo came along, his father took care to open the egg and let him dip some of the croissant into the yolk.
Leo also enjoyed eating “home bread,” which was prepared by the family’s cook at the villa but taken to a nearby bakery to be baked overnight. Usually the maid carried the two large, unbaked loaves in baskets. Leo was the only youngster in the villa permitted to go along, because while not the oldest he was the most responsible and the maid had no hand free for a smaller child. He went not to be helpful with the dough but simply to savor the marvelous bakery smells. And to nibble. Even before the unbaked bread was placed in the baskets, Leo twisted off a piece of the dough from the bottom of the loaf, where it wouldn’t show. He flattened the dough into a pancake, then had the cook salt and fry it in goose fat. This delight, called langos, Leo ate sizzling hot as it came from the pan.
The rich appetite that Szilard developed as a child was at times laughable, at times perverse, for it marked him as a person who could be fiercely rational in most situations but also ruled by impulsive cravings. Stronger still, and ultimately more dominant in his life, was Szilard’s voracious appetite for fresh ideas, and he became impulsive and impatient for these as well—both his own ideas and those of others. He found ideas every bit as tempting and irresistible as sweets. They were intoxicating. Satisfying. And, unlike the food he so often craved, ideas always seemed delicious. To enjoy ideas any time of the day or night, Szilard had discovered by an early age, all he had to do was sit and think.
CHAPTER 3
Schoolboy, Soldier, and Socialist
1913-1919
Even before his adolescence, Leo Szilard began leading a life of the mind: conversing more with adults than with other children, reading deeply and widely, and, on his own, thinking about questions both philosophical and practical. By his early teens, the playful tinkering and inventing he enjoyed with brother Bela had evolved from curiosity to purpose, from creating things for fun to creating things that worked to make life easier. Electricity was just replacing gas for lighting in Budapest’s middle-class homes, and the novelty of this power source intrigued the Szilard boys. Leo bought a thick gray handbook on Theory and Practical Applications of Electricity1 and read it eagerly, comprehending every point immediately. But he only showed Bela the simpler diagrams and explanations and insisted on directing all their experiments.
Their first project was an electric bell powered by a Leclanché cell battery they built themselves.2 When the Vidor Villa’s electrical supply was changed from direct to alternating current, the boys wired four empty Vin Bravais medicine bottles together to make a rectifier that restored the DC power source they needed for their experiments. Then they wired electrodes in a glass jar to make their own hydrogen and oxygen production plant. But once hydrogen and oxygen were bubbling up through the water, the boys realized they had no idea how to capture the gases separately and dropped the project. “That’s just as well,” Bela recalled, “because Leo’s next step was to explode the gases with a match to enjoy a ‘big bang.’” Leo also enjoyed watching Bela make long sparks by cranking a static-electricity generator called a Wimshurst’s machine. But what Leo really liked about this, Bela concluded, was inhaling the pungent ozone smell that the sparks produced.
A more peaceful project was the Szilard boys’ two-way crystal radio telegraph, intended for Morse code messages between the ends of the family’s huge apartment. Leo proposed the device to help Rose when she was sick in bed, but once it was built and tested, the radio telegraph sat unused because Leo refused to learn the Morse code. His own code had one buzz for “yes” and two for “no,” but this required a person to shout a question through the rooms, or deliver it by messenger, before the answer could be sent. More practical was the boys’ wind-up alarm clock powered by an electromagnet. At six each morning and evening, the villa’s calm was broken as sparks leapt from the clock’s hands and bits of metal clanked onto the magnet.
In 1908, the fall after he turned ten years old, Leo ended his home tutoring and entered an eight-year high school. In Hungary at the time, high schools offered two choices: Both taught basic skills in language and mathematics, but a Gymnasium also covered classical subjects, while a “real” (practical) school taught science and technology. Under pressure from his father, Leo planned to become an engineer. The Szilard boys walked the five bloc
ks from their villa to the Sixth District Realschool at Rippl-Rónai and Szondi streets by crossing busy Andrássy Avenue. The school building was new when the Szilard boys first attended and was noted for having the best scientific equipment in Hungary.
From the start, Leo was exalted in class for his studious ways. The year he entered school he scored perfectly in his report card, earning a “1” in every subject. This success led Leo to act aloof, and he never made close friends, although as time passed, he helped classmates with their math and science homework, and for that and his gentle manner he was widely admired.
At times, his teachers were unsure about his intellectual skills, and one teacher, when pressed by Leo’s parents to describe their son’s abilities in school, could only say that he was “unique.” Although Leo usually earned a 1 in every subject, there were three years—at ages twelve, sixteen, and seventeen—when his perfect scores slipped. He earned a 2 in calligraphy, freehand drawing, gymnastics, and religion; and, once, a 3 in calligraphy.3 Leo’s freehand drawings were so sloppy that the instructor nicknamed him “Salami” instead of Szilard. Leo’s writing and sketches were impulsive, and his mechanical drawing assignments often required redoing by Bela to pass. Despite his clumsiness, Leo’s gym teachers gave him high grades in order to boost his average.
One of the few sports Leo enjoyed—at least for a while—was fencing, a discipline that tied his generation to the fading traditions of Hungarian nobility and was considered part of any middle-class education. Leo took lessons at a studio across Andrássy Avenue from Budapest’s opera house. Every time Leo arrived, the fencing master teased him about not bringing a gold watch as a present, and during classes he poked Leo in the stomach with a foil just for fun. Leo mastered the sport’s movements quickly and seemed to enjoy outscoring Bela in matches with the teacher. But one day, after the master urged his pupils to be much more aggressive, Leo became upset, then stubborn. Driven by his intense fear of physical violence, Leo listened, thought a moment, and reacted abruptly. He threw his foil and mask into a corner, bowed stiffly to the teacher, and walked from the room without saying a word.
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