by Ann Hulbert
“I tried at one time”: Wiener, Ex-Prodigy, p. 139.
he went to the gym every day: “Harvard’s Four Child Students.”
“greasy grind”: Karabel, The Chosen, p. 21.
“Parents Declare Others”: “Harvard’s Four Child Students.”
“up to the human race”: H. Addington Bruce, “Bending the Twig: The Education of the Eleven Year Old Boy Who Lectured Before the Harvard Professors on the Fourth Dimension,” American Magazine, no. 69 (1910): 690.
“Philistine and Genius”: His speech was later published, first as a short book in 1911 and then in a revised edition in 1919.
“could be overwhelming”: Weiner, Ex-Prodigy, p. 18.
“with thin necks”: Isaac Babel, The Collected Stories, ed. Nathalie Babel, trans. Peter Constantine (New York: W. W. Norton, 2002), p. 61.
“lightning calculators”: H. Addington Bruce, “Lightning Calculators: A Study in the Psychology of Harnessing the Subconscious,” McClure’s Magazine, September 1912, p. 590.
“perform vast sums”: “The Boy Prodigy of Harvard,” in Edward J. Wheeler, ed., Current Literature (New York: Current Literature, 1910), p. 291.
“Mere ‘reckoning machines’ ”: Bruce, “Lightning Calculators,” p. 593.
“liberal-minded citizen”: B. Sidis, Philistine and Genius. In The Prodigy, p. 104, Wallace cites Sarah Sidis’s memoirs, in which she quotes Boris saying, “We set our poor little musical prodigies to practice six hours a day so they may delight roomfuls of people. We don’t seem to care that we make them educated boobs.”
suffer a depressive crisis: Bruce L. Kinzer, J. S. Mill Revisited: Biographical and Political Explorations (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), pp. 28–39.
“willing to give the necessary trouble”: John Stuart Mill, Autobiography of John Stuart Mill (New York: Columbia University Press, 1924), p. 24.
“children’s needs of the concrete”: Tom A. Williams, “Intellectual Precocity: Comparison Between John Stuart Mill and the Son of Dr. Boris Sidis,” Pedagogical Seminary 18 (1911): 91.
“minds are built with use”: Wallace, The Prodigy, p. 20. In Philistine and Genius, Sidis wrote that “the beginning of education is between the second and third year. It is at that time that the child begins to form his interests. It is at that critical period that we have to seize the opportunity to guide the child’s formative energies in the right channels.”
“the psychology of suggestion”: Bruce, “Bending the Twig,” pp. 690, 694.
“reserve energy”: B. Sidis, Philistine and Genius.
“That is the key”: Bruce, “Bending the Twig,” p. 695.
“learn by [rote]”: “The Most Remarkable Boy in the World,” New York World Magazine, October 7, 1906, p. 3.
“the child who thinks best”: “The Secret of Precocity,” Literary Digest, July 15, 1911, p. 101.
“one of the absurdities”: A. A. Berle, The School in the Home: Talks with Parents and Teachers on Intensive Child Training (New York: Moffat, Yard, 1915), pp. 18–19.
“the impossibility of man’s being certain”: Norbert Wiener, “The Theory of General Ignorance,” p. 1, notebook in Norbert Wiener Papers (hereafter NWP), MC 22, Box 26C, Folder 421, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Institute Archives and Special Collections, Cambridge, Mass.
“element of élan”: Wiener, Ex-Prodigy, p. 74.
“house of learning”: Ibid., p. 62.
“shaggy unconformity”: Ibid., p. 27.
“a greater challenge”: Ibid., p. 66.
“a poet at heart”: Ibid., p. 74.
“the blessedness of blundering”: “Harvard’s Four Child Students.”
Making children “work out problems”: H. Addington Bruce, “New Ideas in Child Training: Remarkable Results Obtained in the Education of Children Through New Methods of Some American Parents,” American Magazine, no. 72 (1911): 292.
H. “Addlehead” Bruce: Norbert Wiener to Bertha Wiener, November 10, 1914, NWP, MC 22, Box 1, Folder 9.
“No casual interest”: Norbert Wiener, I Am a Mathematician: The Later Life of a Prodigy (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1956), p. 18.
“He would begin the discussion”: Wiener, Ex-Prodigy, p. 67.
“often ended in a family scene”: Ibid., p. 68.
“I relearned the world”: Conway and Siegelman, Dark Hero of the Information Age, p. 14.
“unorthodox experiment”: Wiener, Ex-Prodigy, p. 92.
“brains and conscience”: Ibid., p. 93.
“schoolroom behavior”: Ibid., p. 94.
“a sense of roots and security”: Ibid., p. 99.
“calf love”: Ibid., p. 101.
an upbeat send-off for a prodigy: “The Most Remarkable Boy.”
“prim and quaint”: Ibid.
“The most important thing”: S. Sidis, “The Sidis Story.”
Sarah Mandelbaum herself: On Sarah Mandelbaum Sidis’s education, see ibid. and Wallace, The Prodigy, pp. 9–13.
“like all normal little fellows”: S. Sidis, “The Sidis Story.”
At home, Billy at five months: Sarah Sidis, “Book of Methods,” eighteen-page unpublished manuscript, University of Miami Archives, accessed on sidis.net. See also S. Sidis, “The Sidis Story.”
Boris supplied Billy with calendars: “The Boy Prodigy of Harvard,” in Wheeler, ed., Current Literature, p. 291.
Sarah watched bemused: S. Sidis, “The Sidis Story.”
Sports held no interest: Ibid.
At breakfast: “An Infant Prodigy,” North American Review, no. 184, April 14, 1907.
“Aha, you forgot”: S. Sidis, “The Sidis Story.”
“expounding the nebular hypothesis”: E. H. C., “A Phenomenon in Kilts,” Boston Transcript, November 16, 1906.
he balked at math: Bruce, “Bending the Twig,” pp. 692, 694.
a new logarithmic table: “Harvard’s Quartet of Child Prodigies: Unique Problem for Psychologists in Education of Young Sidis and His Three Companions,” New York Times, January 16, 1910.
“He soon told me”: S. Sidis, “The Sidis Story.”
“skipping and dancing”: E. H. C., “A Phenomenon in Kilts.”
pick up the pace: Kathleen Montour, “William James Sidis, The Broken Twig,” American Psychologist, April 1977, p. 268.
“Our undisciplinables”: Ronald Steel, Walter Lippmann and the American Century (Boston: Little, Brown, 1980), p. 13.
“wisdom, even any common sense”: Montour, “William James Sidis,” p. 273.
“I was certainly no model”: Wiener, Ex-Prodigy, p. 132.
“utterly without self-conceit”: Magazine of the Boston Sunday Herald, November 7, 1909.
One informed listener: Wiener, Ex-Prodigy, pp. 131–32.
“Is that any plainer now?”: Wallace, The Prodigy, p. 59.
“such a mind should find”: Ibid., pp. 55–56.
“Marvelous Griffith”: “Farmer a Rival to Harvard Prodigy,” New York Times, February 19, 1910.
“weakened recently by overstudy”: “Sidis, Boy Prodigy, Ill,” New York Times, January 27, 1910.
“new and better system”: “Topics of the Times: Young Sidis Suffers a Breakdown,” New York Times, January 27, 1910.
“though not cruel”: Montour, “William James Sidis,” p. 273.
“nervous patients”: Wallace, The Prodigy, p. 85.
“persons who are hobby ridden”: “Dr. Sidis to Cure Hobbies,” New York Times, January 17, 1910.
twirling his hat: Katherine E. Dolbear, “Precocious Children,” Pedagogical Seminary 19, no. 4 (December 1912): 465.
“drift into national degeneracy”: These quotations from the 1911 edition of Philistine and Genius can be found in Doug Renselle, “A Review of Boris Sidis’ Philistine and Genius,” http://www.quantonics.com/Boris_Sidis_Philistine_and_Genius_Review.html#TOC. See chaps. 5 and 15.
“bent on repelling, offending”: “Philistine and Genius,” New York Times, June 25, 1911.
“pulled dow
n upon his stout head”: S. Sidis, “The Sidis Story.”
He graduated cum laude: “Harvard A.B. at 16,” New York Times, June 14, 1914.
“mentally…regarded by wise men”: “Harvard’s Boy Prodigy Vows Never to Marry,” Boston Herald, n.d. All the quotations from Sidis in the rest of this section are from this article.
“manufactured man”: Mill, Autobiography of John Stuart Mill, p. 109.
“freak of nature”: Wiener, Ex-Prodigy, p. 119.
“nearly completely a man”: Ibid., p. 106.
“severely lacerated self-esteem”: Ibid., p. 76.
“doubt as to whether”: Ibid., p. 116.
“prodigy comes to realize”: Ibid., p. 117.
“a gentlemanly indifference”: Ibid., p. 140.
“black year of my life”: Ibid., p. 151.
“consciousness of belonging”: Ibid., p. 145.
“confused mass of feelings”: Ibid., p. 152.
“My only want is”: Norbert Wiener to Bertha Wiener, c. October 1910, NWP, MC 22, Box 1, Folder 4.
honing rabbinic learnedness: Wiener, Ex-Prodigy, p. 133.
“What is the Egyptian word”: Norbert Wiener to Leo Wiener, c. January 1911, NWP, MC 22, Box 1, Folder 4.
“Give it to him!”: Norbert Wiener to Leo Wiener, c. February 1911, NWP, MC 22, Box 1, Folder 4.
It was “devastating”: Wiener, Ex-Prodigy, p. 159.
“How is your work?”: Norbert Wiener to Leo Wiener, c. May 1911, NWP, MC 22, Box 1, Folder 4.
drawings he sent as postscripts: See, e.g., Norbert Wiener to Leo Wiener, October 2, 1910, October 16, 1910, November 4, 1910, and November 30, 1910, NWP, MC 22, Box 1, Folder 4.
“filial servitude”: Wiener, Ex-Prodigy, p. 163.
“he is so young”: “Harvard Boy Ph.D. to Study Abroad, His Father Plans,” New York American, March 8, 1913.
“Just Missed Becoming”: “Just Missed Becoming a Great Merchant,” Boston Daily Globe, December 27, 1914.
he dropped out in his third year: Stephen Bates, “The Prodigy and the Press,” Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly 88, no. 2 (Summer 2011): 379.
he was “kidnapped”: William James Sidis, “Railroading in the Past,” accessed on sidis.net
in flight from his parents’ “protection”: He puts “protection” in quotes and describes himself as “scared of his own shadow.” Ibid.
William got good news: Roscoe Pound to William James Sidis, April 30, 1923, Roscoe Pound Papers, Harvard Law School Library. See also Bates, “The Prodigy and the Press,” p. 379.
“mentally abnormal”: “Commonwealth vs. William Sidis,” April 25, 1923, Roscoe Pound Papers, Harvard Law School Library.
“I just want to work”: Wallace, The Prodigy, p. 196.
his most ambitious endeavor: William James Sidis, The Animate and the Inanimate (Boston: Richard G. Badger, 1925). See also Wallace, The Prodigy, pp. 156–60, for a letter from Buckminster Fuller to Gerard Piel, February 27, 1979.
dragged back into the limelight: See Bates, “The Prodigy and the Press.”
It was written by James Thurber: Jared L. Manley, “Where Are They Now? April Fool!” New Yorker, August 14, 1937, pp. 22–26.
active in defense of pacifism: According to Wallace, he proposed using the term libertarian for the limited-government cause. Wallace, The Prodigy, p. 238.
“defeated—and honorably defeated”: Wiener, Ex-Prodigy, p. 134.
unable to overtly rebel: “Deprivation of the right to judge for myself and to stand the consequences of my own decision,” Norbert wrote, “stood me in ill stead for many years to come. It delayed my social and moral maturity, and represents a handicap I have only partly discarded in middle age.” Ibid., p. 140.
“physically strong”: Leo Wiener to Bertrand Russell, June 15, 1913, NWP, MC 22, Box 1, Folder 5.
“horrible fog”: Norbert Wiener to Leo Wiener, October 18, 1913, NWP, MC 22, Box 1, Folder 5.
“an iceberg”: Norbert Wiener to Leo Wiener, October 25, 1913, NWP, MC 22, Box 1, Folder 5.
“Do not work too hard”: Leo Wiener to Norbert Wiener, May 24, 1914, NWP, MC 22, Box 1, Folder 8.
“I have occasionally taken”: Norbert Wiener to his parents, April 1914, NWP, MC 22, Box 5, Folder 7.
“loafing”: Norbert Wiener to Bertha Wiener, June 17, 1914, NWP, MC 22, Box 1, Folder 8.
“fine, especially fine”: Leo Wiener to Norbert Wiener, May 24, 1914, NWP, MC 22, Box 1, Folder 8.
“It may seem a step down”: Wiener, Ex-Prodigy, p. 253.
“or control and communication”: Subtitle of Wiener’s Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1948).
Cybernetics laid crucial groundwork: Doug Hill, “The Eccentric Genius Whose Time May Have Finally Come (Again),” Atlantic.com, June 11, 2014.
“sired, inspired, or contributed to”: Conway and Siegelman, Dark Hero, p. xiii.
“the children’s machine”: Seymour Papert, The Children’s Machine: Rethinking School in the Age of the Computer (New York: Basic Books, 1993), p. vii.
“struggles in a half-understood world”: Wiener, Ex-Prodigy, p. 5.
“rigorous discipline and training”: Ibid., p. 290.
“chance to develop a reasonably thick skin”: Norbert Wiener, “Analysis of the Child Prodigy,” New York Times Magazine, June 2, 1957, p. 34.
Chapter 2. “A Very Free Child”
Where not otherwise indicated, biographical details are drawn from Michael Hicks, Henry Cowell: Bohemian (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002), and Joel Sachs, Henry Cowell: A Man Made of Music (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012).
“I noticed his eyes were staring”: Anna Strunsky Walling, “Henry Cowell, Fifty Years a Composer,” p. 4, Anna Strunsky Walling Papers, MS 1111, Box 34, Folder 406, Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library.
“There was never a deviation”: Ibid., p. 3.
“He says, ‘Choo-choo say,’ ”: Clarissa Dixon Cowell, “Material for a Biography,” Henry Cowell Papers (hereafter HCP), JPB 00-03, Box 74, Folder 1, Music Division, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts.
“I find much in Henry”: Ibid.
“an artist of unusual talent”: Hicks, Henry Cowell, p. 56.
“Lad Shows Signs”: Anna Cora Winchell, “Lad Shows Signs of Real Genius,” San Francisco Chronicle, March 6, 1914, p. 5.
“Youthful Wonder Has Charm”: “Youthful Wonder Has Charm of Genius,” Daily Palo Alto Times, January 23, 1914.
A former brainy boy: Henry L. Minton, Lewis M. Terman: Pioneer in Psychological Testing (New York: New York University Press, 1988), pp. 3–9.
“especially prone to be puny”: Barbara Stoddard Burks, Dortha Williams Jensen, and Lewis M. Terman, Genetic Studies of Genius, vol. 3, The Promise of Youth: Follow-Up Studies of a Thousand Gifted Children (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1930), p. 474.
“mob spirit”: Boris Sidis, Philistine and Genius (Boston: Richard G. Badger, 1919), preface.
For his starter sample: On Terman’s own children, Fred and Helen, see Joel N. Shurkin, Terman’s Kids: The Groundbreaking Study of How the Gifted Grow Up (Boston: Little, Brown, 1992), p. 16.
“a very free child”: Hicks, Henry Cowell, p. 32.
“Both his father and I disapprove”: C. D. Cowell, “Material for a Biography.” Quotations in the following two paragraphs are from the same source.
“like a zither with a keyboard”: Henry Cowell, “Some Autobiographical Notes,” typescript in Adolf Meyer Papers, Alan Mason Chesney Medical Archives of the Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions.
“the development of initiative”: C. D. Cowell, “Material for a Biography.”
In her diary she marked: Ibid.
“not a single unpleasant sound”: Ibid.
“the long deferred literary life”: Harry Cowell to Clarissa Dixon Cowell, January 12, 1901, HCP, JPB 00-03, Box 3, Folder 16.
“I cannot pl
ay because”: C. D. Cowell, “Material for a Biography.”
“Henry showed no strong impulse”: Ibid.
“all the children I played with”: Sachs, Henry Cowell, pp. 25–26.
“crushing all children”: Hicks, Henry Cowell, pp. 20–21.
“at least enough of it”: C. D. Cowell, “Material for a Biography.”
“Groping Among Educational Methods”: Ibid.
“who feel no special voluntary interest”: Ibid.
an “impassioned” six weeks: On Clarissa as Henry’s teacher and their journey and arrival in Iowa, see ibid.
sent his father a song: Harry Cowell to Henry Cowell, September 9, 1907, HCP, JBP 00-03, Box 3, Folder 19.
“getting fitted into my own place”: Clarissa Dixon Cowell to Harry Cowell, quoted in Sidney Cowell memoir, HCP, JPB 00-03, Box 76, Folder 5.
a curious novel about: Clarissa’s novel was Janet and Her Dear Phebe (New York: Frederick A. Stokes & Co., 1909).
he was composing music: Henry Cowell to Harry Cowell, n.d., HCP, JPB 00-03, Box 18, Folder 5.
enjoying them “like a baby”: Henry Cowell to Harry Cowell, May 5, 1909, HCP, JPB 00-03, Box 18, Folder 6.
“He loves a land”: Clarissa Dixon Cowell to Harry Cowell, quoted in Sidney Cowell memoir, HCP, JPB 00-03, Box 76, Folder 5.
“I have had enough of New York”: Henry Cowell to Harry Cowell, May 5, 1909, HCP, JPB 00-03, Box 18, Folder 6.
“I wish that he had had”: Harry Cowell to Clarissa Dixon Cowell, May 12, 1909, HCP, JPB 00-03, Box 3, Folder 23.
“Sweet peas, phlox”: Henry Cowell to Harry Cowell, July 25, 1910, HCP, JPB 00-03, Box 76, Folder 5.
San Francisco streetcar transfers: Sachs, Henry Cowell, p. 32.
“The plant business was never worse”: Henry Cowell to Harry Cowell, July 29, 1911, HCP, JPB 00-03, Box 18, Folder 6.
having urged his father: Henry Cowell to Harry Cowell, January 23, 1911, HCP, JPB 00-03, Box 18, Folder 6.
“Hour by hour she listened carefully”: C. D. Cowell, “Material for a Biography.”
“She is a big soul”: Sachs, Henry Cowell, p. 85.
“As a boy of a dozen years”: Lewis M. Terman, Intelligence of School Children (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1919), pp. 248–49.