The Technologists (67 page)

“Freighted with treasure thoughts, friendships and hopes, thou didst launch us on Destiny’s sea …”
The lyrics melted away as all eyes rested on the powerfully swirling water beneath them, under which something solid seemed to slowly take shape.

“If I didn’t know better …” started one of the Harvard six.

“Don’t!” Blaikie barked at him, not wanting to hear a word about Charley, the sea monster they’d often alluded to as a means of frightening strangers or freshes.

From beneath them, a shiny ridge thrust the boat into the air, sending the team tumbling up and out in all directions. As they flailed about, they watched the back of a bright white beast, which looked much like a whale—though shinier than any whale spied by man—as it sprayed a torrent of water into their faces. It then sped away faster than any Harvard six had ever rowed.

“Is that a propeller on its back?” Blaikie demanded. “What was that? Newy! What are you smiling at? I’m speaking to you—what in the deuce was that?”

“Hurrah to the nineteenth century!” proclaimed Tilden, who could not help but enjoy the spectacle. “I’m smiling, Captain, at the future!”

O
N
M
AY
25, 1868,
the following special act was passed by the legislature of the commonwealth of Massachusetts:

Section 2 may read like legal boilerplate, but it was important. It meant MIT’s degree power was granted just weeks before its first graduation, despite the fact that this was seven years after founder William Barton Rogers had incorporated the college. It sparked my interest to think what was behind this timing: the resistance to the college’s fight for legitimacy at a time when the concept of technology and scientific education was considered unorthodox, even dangerous.

The initial image that came to me for the novel was a scene in which MIT students rowing the Charles River are pushed aside by a polished Harvard crew team. I’m not sure why this materialized before other moments, but I think for me it captured the daunting race with our futures we begin when we are young adults. The first “Tech” boys really had the weight of the world on their shoulders. Their futures depended
on a radical new school that couldn’t promise them degrees, and that school’s longevity hinged on these students’ uncertain futures.

Besides transporting me into some of my favorite parts of nineteenth-century Boston, this novel also gave me a chance to build on my own modest ties to the world of science and the history of technology. My great-grandfather Louis Pearl was an inventor and manufacturer in Brooklyn, New York; another relative, Professor Richard Pearl, was once one of the country’s leading geologists and an expert in meteorites; and another relative, Harold Howard Hirsch, was a powder metallurgist at Los Alamos when he witnessed the first test of the atomic bomb, remarking later that he believed it would lead to the cessation of all wars. During my years at Harvard College, my roommates (a group that included mathematicians and a physicist—a somewhat unusual crowd for an English major) and I lived in Eliot House, named after Charles Eliot, one of the original chemistry professors at MIT. One of my wife’s ancestors, a Bostonian named Edward Tobey, was a chief fund-raiser for MIT, and he appears in this novel advising the faculty (she also happened to attend the John D. Runkle elementary school in Brookline, Massachusetts, named after MIT’s original mathematics professor).

The “picked-up lot” of MIT’s inaugural Class of 1868 offered me a colorful cast from which to select my main characters. Robert Hallowell Richards and William Edwin Hoyt were real students. Bryant Tilden’s disciplinary scrapes remain on record in the MIT archives, as do Albert Hall’s immaculate class notes, which allowed me to “enroll” in the original curriculum. Marcus Mansfield and Chauncy Hammond, Jr. (“Hammie”), are fictional, but in them can be seen composites of other Tech boys I researched. Marcus’s closest counterparts in history are Charles Augustus Smith, a son of a sailor who commuted every day from Newburyport to MIT and worked as a railroad leveler and assistant engineer to earn money for college expenses; Civil War veteran Channing Whitaker, who worked in a machine shop before going to MIT and ended up as a professor there for many years; and John Ripley Freeman, who came to MIT from a farm and traveled each day to and from Lawrence, except during busy periods of study, when he, like Marcus, boarded in Boston.

Hammie is partially derived from Frank Firth, probably the most aloof member of the first group of MIT students; Hammie’s plan for a “steam man” comes from an invention patented in 1868 by a young mechanic in Newark, New Jersey. Ellen Swallow was a few classes behind the ’68 boys, sequestered in her own lab and not permitted to attend classes. She would later teach at MIT, where she was a renowned pioneer in women’s education and in environmental and nutritional sciences, working alongside her husband, Professor Bob Richards (who indeed proposed to her in one of the MIT laboratories). Daniel Chester French, appearing in this novel in his freshman year before he failed out of MIT, later became a celebrated artist, responsible for the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., and chosen (over all Harvard alumni) to create the statue of John Harvard. Whenever possible, the experiences, language, and spirit of those people on whom my characters are based have been incorporated, especially those who left behind records of their time at MIT.

The disasters that plague Boston in my novel are my creation; however, each one has a basis in real technologies developed at the time (often at MIT), and my research binders are thick with articles about train wrecks, destructive boiler explosions, early divers and submarines (including the
Alligator
and the
Intelligent Whale
of the 1860s, on which Hammie’s
White Whale
is based) and compass-related shipwrecks that allowed me to craft the relevant scenes in context. In addition, the fear and anxiety about the strange concept (and the strange word, at the time) of
technology
, and by extension the Institute, are grounded in fact; even the statement the Rogers character makes that the Institute of Technology, being such a vague concept, is seen by some as a front for some kind of brothel, comes out of the historical record. Edwin’s list of “unsolvable” scientific problems is derived from a contest promoted by a contemporary scientific journal.

The MIT building on Boylston Street in Back Bay was for many years called the Rogers Building, though modesty would never have allowed Rogers to condone that in his lifetime. I’ve attempted to re-create the original building’s details by studying photographs, drawings, elevations filed with the municipal records, and student accounts. In
1938, twenty-two years after MIT moved to Cambridge, the remarkable Boylston Street building was demolished to make way for an insurance office building, which stands there today.

Rogers returned to MIT to deliver the commencement address to the Class of 1882. Midway through his speech, he paused, leaned forward, and collapsed. Here were some of Rogers’s last words, delivered to the new graduates and their families:

As always, incredible people inside and outside publishing deserve thanks for making this novel possible and making it better. Suzanne Gluck, Raffaella De Angelis, Tracy Fisher, Alicia Gordon, Cathryn Summerhayes, Eugenie Furniss, Michelle Feehan, Erin Malone, Sarah Ceglarski, Caroline Donofrio, Liz Tingue, Mina Shaghaghi, Eve Attermann and their fantastic colleagues at William Morris Endeavor Entertainment; Jennifer Hershey, Tracy Devine, Gina Centrello, Tom Perry, Jane von Mehren, Erika Greber, Amy Edelman, Vincent La Scala, Richard Elman, Courtney Moran, Jessica Waters, and the dedicated team at Random House, as well as Stuart Williams and his colleagues at Harvill Secker; my secret society of readers/brainstormers Eric Bennett, Kevin Birmingham, Benjamin Cavell, Joseph Gangemi, Julie Park Haubner, Marcus Padow, Cynthia Posillico, and Scott Weinger, as well as tireless supporters Marsha Helmstadter, Susan Pearl, Warren Pearl, and Ian Pearl.

My research assistant Gabriella Gage once again used her exemplary skills to help me uncover layer upon layer of great historical material. Gail Lippincott, Joyce Miles, and Pam Swallow were among the scholars who lent aid in searching out rare material on Ellen Swallow Richards. Nora Murphy at the MIT archives, Frank Conahan at the MIT Museum General Collections, Peter Bebergal at the MIT Technology Licensing Office, and David Kaiser of the MIT Program in Science, Technology and Society each were helpful and generous with their time and expertise. The early history of MIT was first recorded thoroughly by Samuel Prescott in
When MIT Was Boston Tech
, later enriched by Julius Stratton and Loretta H. Mannix in
Mind and Hand: The Birth of MIT
and in a recent volume of essays Professor Kaiser edited called
Becoming MIT
. Along with Robert Hallowell Richards’s
memoir,
His Mark
, these sources proved to be among the most valuable.

Finally, my wife and son provided inspiration and perspective on a daily basis and gave me a reason to come back from the nineteenth century.

A
LSO BY
M
ATTHEW
P
EARL

The Last Dickens
The Poe Shadow
The Dante Club

M
ATTHEW
P
EARL
is the
New York Times
bestselling author of
The Dante Club, The Poe Shadow
, and
The Last Dickens
, and the editor of the Modern Library editions of Dante’s
Inferno
(translated by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow), Edgar Allan Poe’s
The Murders in the Rue Morgue: The Dupin Tales
, and Charles Dickens’s
The Mystery of Edwin Drood
. His novels have been published in more than thirty languages and forty countries around the world.