True Genius: The Life and Science of John Bardeen: The Only Winner of Two Nobel Prizes in Physics (2002)

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2 Roots T en-year-old John Bardeen teetered breathlessly before crashing down from the pantry shelf. Just before falling, his attention had been focused on having another piece of the delicious cake his mother had stowed away after lunch on the top shelf. He heard a crack as he landed and knew he was in trouble. His right arm was broken. His parents soothed him and took care of his throbbing arm, but they also used the accident as an example for all four of their children. “He did it right after luncheon on a full stomach of cake, which was inexcusable,” wrote John’s mother Althea. “It has had a splendid moral effect on the entire family.” The normally diffident lad had not intended to be disobedient. It was just that he focused with single-minded intensity on what- ever captured his interest. Althea remarked on John’s determina- tion in her frequent letters to his grandfather. “John just hangs on and won’t let go.” That unwavering attachment to ideas and prob- lems would be a hallmark of Bardeen’s later scientific work and one of the reasons for his success. The Bardeen heritage had been built on hard work and high expec- tations. The American roots of the family trace back to Plymouth Colony, where a young Englishman named William Barden immi- grated in 1638, probably from Yorkshire. Barden began his life in 8 

Roots 9 the New World as an indentured servant bound for seven years to Thomas Boardman, from whom he was to learn the carpenter trade. Seven months later, however, before he had done so, Barden was transferred to John Barker, a proprietor in the town of Marshfield, some 10 miles north of Plymouth. From Barker, Barden learned how to lay bricks and run a ferry service across the Jones River. Eventually Barden married Barker’s daughter, Deborah, who was much younger than he. They built a house in Middleboro, Massa- chusetts, which still stands, and had 13 children. Their descen- dants scattered across the continent. John Bardeen was a tenth-generation son of the Barden-Bardeen clan. His early years were molded by three features of the land- scape of his youth: the American progressive movement, which swept the nation at the turn of the twentieth century; the rise of the American industrial laboratory between 1900 and 1920; and the maturation of American physics in the 1920s and 1930s. Bardeen’s involvement with industrial research and physics is dis- cussed later, but the progressive ideals of his family shaped his val- ues. They need to be briefly examined here. Had the ideals of Bardeen’s family not impressed John, it would still have been al- most impossible for him not to absorb progressive ideas simply by growing up in Madison, as the city was then the Midwestern cen- ter of the progressive movement. Exactly what constituted the progressive movement, in the years from roughly 1890 to 1920, or indeed whether progressivism was coherent enough to be called a movement at all, is a subject on which historians disagree. But there is a consensus that the closing years of the nineteenth century and the opening years of the twentieth fostered the growth of certain American attitudes about what ought to be the relationship of the individual to society and of the citizen to government. Reformers of the era felt that the turmoil and distress of the new industrial economy should be addressed, somehow, by govern- ment or private institutions. There were almost as many programs and agendas for doing so as there were people who considered them- selves progressives. Activists formed countless national, state, and local organizations devoted to bringing about change of one kind or another: the National Association of Manufacturers, the Ameri- can Federation of Labor, the National Child Labor Committee, the American Society of Civil Engineers, the National Conservation 

10 TRUE GENIUS Association, the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, and hun- dreds more. These organizations looked to experts for help in solv- ing social problems. One result was a wave of professionalization in fields such as engineering, medicine, and law. The groups orga- nized themselves to define standards for training, performance, and ethics. A new scientific and bureaucratic elite stood ready to direct change aimed at the betterment of American society. The University of Wisconsin, founded in 1848, had been built in Madison, the state’s capital, at one end of State Street, the cen- tral avenue running along the half-mile-long isthmus between two prominent lakes of the region, Lake Mendota and Lake Monona. The campus expanded to hug the southern shore of the larger Lake Mendota. By the 1880s the rapidly growing university had become a center for the expression of a philosophy sometimes called the “Wisconsin Idea.” Never clearly defined or formalized, this philosophy called for the application of professional research to the political, economic, and social problems of the day. John Bascom, who became president of the University of Wisconsin in 1874, drew up one of the first versions of the Wiscon- sin Idea. He proposed applying university talents and resources toward the social good. For example, he promoted the application of research to solving everyday problems in state government and civil service. A student of Bascom’s, Robert M. La Follette popularized the ideas of his mentor. After 1900, when La Follette became governor and later a United States senator, “Fighting Bob” La Follette gained national fame for the flamboyant oratory with which he and his followers in the progressive wing of the local Republican Party battled powerful monopolies and government corruption in an attempt to overhaul the political system and improve social welfare programs in Wisconsin and throughout the nation. Another student influenced by Bascom’s ideas about education and government was Charles Van Hise. A geologist by training, Van Hise focused his research on mining engineering. In 1903 with the support of La Follette, Van Hise became president of the Uni- versity of Wisconsin. It was Van Hise who brought John Bardeen’s father, Charles Russell Bardeen, to the University of Wisconsin. Van Hise worked to make the academic offerings at the univer- sity reflect the interests and needs of citizens who believed in political democracy and the sharing of public wealth. His motto 

Roots 11 was “the boundaries of the University are the boundaries of the state.” Research conducted at the university brought improved methods of dairy farming and agriculture, as well as a program to conserve the natural resources of the state. Van Hise may have exaggerated the power of the university to influence government, but the relationships he advocated were real enough to become clichéd in phrases such as “the expert on tap, not on top,” “the service university,” “applying the scientific method to legislation,” and “the democratization of knowledge.” Among Van Hise’s plans for the University of Wisconsin was to establish a medical school. In 1903, almost immediately upon becoming president, he traveled to the East Coast to identify the proper man to lead this task. He found Charles Russell Bardeen at Johns Hopkins. A thirty-two-year-old associate professor of anatomy, Bardeen already had a solid reputation based on his research in anatomy and his teaching at Hopkins. The promise of spreading his influence beyond his scientific community appealed to the young doctor. Bardeen’s father, Charles William Bardeen—whom later gen- erations of Bardeens would refer to as C. W.—was a progressive educator who considered social service the highest ideal to which a man could aspire. Born in Massachusetts in 1847 to an abolitionist family, C. W. had left school at the age of fourteen to enlist in the Civil War, where he signed up as a drummer boy. He was a poor drummer, however, and therefore spent the war as a fifer. He then returned to school and eventually graduated from Yale University. Afterwards he devoted his career to improving the American edu- cation system. In 1874 C. W. established his own publishing company, School Bulletin Publications. The School Bulletin maga- zine, which he edited and published for fifty years, became a forum for expressing his strong views on the importance of high-quality education. He also took positions of national leadership in the National Education Association and the Educational Press Asso- ciation of America. His reputation for scholarship in education brought invitations for membership in the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Geographical Society, and the American Social Science Association. In later years, the Charleses, father and son, frequently exchanged letters in which they discussed values and philosophical issues about education, work, or life in general. In a letter written on 

12 TRUE GENIUS Charles Russell’s forty-fifth birthday, C. W. reflected, “It is the use- less life that grows old.” The “highest happiness,” he wrote, was having “just a little more than one could do of the kind of work one wants to do. So long as that holds out, I don’t see why a man should feel old.” He described love and work as the building blocks of a good life, and “you and I are both unusually fortunate in both.” The values of education, hard work, and a purposeful life were major themes during the childhood of Charles Russell, who was born in 1871 in Kalamazoo, Michigan. Charles spent most of his youth in Syracuse, New York, where C. W. had moved the family in 1874. All C. W.’s children, including Charles, were sent to Europe to study for a year at the Teichmann School in Leipzig, Germany, after completing their course work at Syracuse High School. By the time Charles entered the Teichmann School, he had passed Harvard’s examinations in Latin, advanced Greek, and geometry, and he expected, while in Leipzig, to finish studies for additional requirements. As a teenager, he described himself as “a fair scholar, being able to reason better than memorize, and I have a slight mechanical bend [sic].” He also prided himself on his athletic abil- ity. While at Leipzig, Charles wrote to his father: “It seems to me that the only real happiness of existence is derived from working for those one loves and with those one loves toward a common purpose.” In 1893, the year after he graduated from Harvard, Charles entered the first class of the new medical school at Johns Hopkins University. The facilities were inadequate and the instruction so casual that half the members of that first class transferred to another school. Charles remained and in 1897, because his surname began with the letters “Ba,” became the first person to graduate from the Hopkins medical program. He decided to stay on at Hopkins, where he rose quickly to the rank of associate professor while teaching and carrying out postdoctoral research. He wrote to his father C. W., that his goal was to “live an effective life” and put “to useful account the education which you so generously gave me.” It must therefore have been easy for him to accept Van Hise’s offer to create a new medical school in Madison. On a wintry day early in 1904, Charles boarded a train to Madison to take up his position as professor of anatomy. A fellow alumnus of the Johns Hopkins Medical School met him at the Northwestern Railroad Station. The two doctors rode the trolley to the end of State Street 

Roots 13 and trudged up Bascom Hill to meet with President Van Hise. Dur- ing the next several years Charles taught anatomy while working with Van Hise to convince the board of regents and the state legis- lature to fund Wisconsin’s new two-year medical program. Before the end of Charles’s first year in Madison, a new interest came into his life. He began to court an independent career woman who lived in Chicago. Just under thirty, Althea Harmer had classic features and long, dark hair that she sometimes pulled back into an elegant French twist. Photographs reveal a slender body comple- mented by a melancholy face atop a long, graceful neck. Her deli- cate appearance concealed an adventurous spirit, high intelligence, and an iron will. Charles was utterly taken with her. Althea had broken relations with her conservative, eastern Pennsylvania family to strike out on her own and study art, first at the Pratt Institute in New York and then in Chicago. Her mother had died young of tuberculosis. Her father opposed her pursuit of a career. A relative in California, Alexander Francis Harmer, may have served as an inspiration for Althea; he too had left home at an early age to pursue an art career. Althea had been supporting herself by teaching home econom- ics at the progressive experimental school established by John Dewey, who the historian Scott Montgomery described as “among the greatest reformers of sensibility in American history.” Two teachers, Katherine Mayhew and Anna Edwards, later published a history of this Laboratory School of the University of Chicago. The school’s purpose, they wrote, was “to work out with children an educational experience more creative than that provided by even the best of the current systems.” Dewey’s Laboratory School recruited faculty from the Univer- sity of Chicago, including Dewey himself, who at that time served as head of the departments of philosophy, psychology, and peda- gogy. In his introduction to Mayhew and Edwards’s book, Dewey remarked: The school whose work is reported in this volume was animated by a desire to discover in administration, selection of subject-matter, methods of learning, teaching, and discipline, how a school could become a cooperative community while developing in individuals their own capacities and satisfying their own needs. Dewey’s ideas on the teaching of science probably influenced Althea Harmer. Opposed to the rote learning of facts, ideas, and 

14 TRUE GENIUS structures, he believed that creative scientific thinking was inher- ently joined with inspiration. It followed that an important goal of science education at the Dewey School was to enhance motivation. The actual building of scientific knowledge in the child, Dewey argued, should be based on “explorations where the child learns to solve problems he or she develops.” He also stressed learning by the “cooperate” approach. He felt that working in groups to de- velop scientific thinking was not only effective but excellent train- ing for a life of productive and responsible work. By educating children to work cooperatively on solving problems by the scien- tific method, he hoped to create a generation of adults ready to collaborate in applying such principles to social problems. Accord- ing to the school’s literature, “the essence of its philosophy of social welfare was its development of social individuals who could carry on intelligent social action.” Althea encouraged her students to define their own problems and to seek creative answers. She emphasized problem solving in real, concrete situations. In a course segment on the development of the textile industry, she designed a hands-on, practical experi- ment in which the children analyzed various fibers and learned to use simple cards, spindles, and other implements of early textile manufacture. Based on their own practical experience with these materials, they were expected to come to their own conclusions about the qualities and uses of various materials and tools. In her words: Again this method involves the exercise of judgment. The ability to think and the method of thinking are part and parcel of all the rein- venting and the rediscovering. Thinking does not occur for its own sake; it is not an end in itself. It arises from the need of meeting some difficulty, in reflecting upon the best way of overcoming it, and thus leads to planning, to projecting mentally the end to be reached, and deciding upon the steps necessary. The tool and method of going to work are always seen to be dependent upon the material on the one side and the result to be attained on the other. These being given, to find the third term is the problem, surely as logical an exercise as any in geometry. It has the added advantage of being concrete and of calling the constructive imagination into play. Decades after the end of Althea’s tenure at the Dewey School, her son John would become internationally known for solving prob- lems using a cooperative experiment-based approach built on over- 

Roots 15 coming specific difficulties, setting concrete goals, visualizing their achievement, and “calling the constructive imagination into play.” In 1904, two years after the Dewey School merged with the Chicago Institute (under the direction of the University of Chicago’s School of Education), Dewey had a falling out with the president of the university. In the heat of the administrative con- flicts, “Dewey-ites” came to feel unwelcome at the school. When Dewey left that year for Columbia University, Althea was out of a job. She then embarked on an unusual venture for a single woman of this period. She began a small interior decorating business. Strug- gling in a world dominated by men, especially in her efforts to collect payment from her clients, Althea nevertheless finished her first year as a businesswoman “just about even,” as Charles proudly reported to his father. “She had no capital to start with and it was slow getting started because her work is so highly original that it had to create its own market. Another year and she would have made a great financial success.” According to one Bardeen family story, Althea and Charles met in the context of her decorating business. She found herself work- ing with him on the decor of the University of Wisconsin faculty club. During the spring of 1905 he came to Chicago to see her as often as possible. “The more I see of Althea the more I believe I have won a prize,” Charles wrote to C. W. after she had given in to his courting. They were married in a civil ceremony in Chicago on August 6, 1905. Afterwards, they traveled by train to Madison for a quiet time of settling in together. There is no evidence that Althea made any attempt to con- tinue her business in Madison. With Charles’s full support, she bent her skills toward creating an elegant home for the two of them. She decorated their first small apartment with Oriental rugs and other rich furnishings. Charles told his father that their aim was “to have an exceptionally beautiful home, not furnished with many things, but with each and every thing beautiful.” Althea did, however, re- sume art lessons. She became active in Madison’s art world, help- ing to organize exhibits and occasionally giving lectures. Having specialized in Japanese art in her earlier studies, she particularly enjoyed the opportunity to organize an exhibit and deliver a lecture on Japanese block printing at Madison’s State Historical Library. Charles continued his activities at the university, following the 

16 TRUE GENIUS family tradition of working in the public interest. With character- istic self-discipline he applied himself to his research and to estab- lishing the medical school. The University of Wisconsin School of Medicine opened in 1907. He was named dean. He then created a small local university hospital, where medi- cal students could complete their clinical requirements without having to transfer to another school. Not until 1925 did Charles succeed in establishing a full teaching hospital. The politics required constantly pushing the sluggish Wisconsin legislature for support. In early 1906 Charles wrote to C. W. that politics had “made it impossible to get the city to do what it should,” namely, to fund a new building for the city hospital. He was forced to solicit funds “at a time when the rich fear the poor are going to tax them too far and the poor have nothing to give.” Charles thought constantly about how to enhance American health care and education while trying to improve his own school of medicine. He lectured on the primacy of the patient in hospitals and stressed the importance of using hospitals as a forum for the education of doctors, nurses, and other health care professionals. Emphasizing the value of clinical care and public health initiatives in preventing and curing disease, he decried the crass commerciali- zation of medicine as being against the interests of patients. As a professor, Charles’s students and colleagues found him stubborn, reserved, and unusually even tempered. Paul Clark later wrote in his history of the Wisconsin Medical School that Charles “may have been boiling inside, but outwardly he remained calm, marshalling his facts and gathering advocates for his cause.” He was not generally regarded as a good teacher. Most of his students relied on the teaching assistants and had little contact with Charles until examination time. But one close associate in the Anatomy Department insisted that “in his informal, often blundering way, in lectures and laboratory, he succeeded in directing students to the understanding of essentials and I am sure stimulated them by his obvious interest in the subject.” He added that Bardeen’s habit of “treating students as adults and allowing them to manage their own affairs” encouraged them to become “better students and I am sure better men in later life than they would have become under a more regimented system.” Althea and Charles appeared reserved with one another, at least in public. In one letter to C. W., Althea mentioned that her sister- 

Roots 17 in-law Betty “didn’t consider us a very loving pair, but thought that Charles meant well and that perhaps it agreed with my tempera- ment.” They do appear to have had a happy marriage, with a strong bond of shared values and goals. A few months after they were wed, Charles wrote his father, “Althea is unusually affectionate, devoted and unselfish. She is strong and intelligent and I believe few women are so well fitted to be real helpmates as well as wives.” Women in the Bardeen clan were expected to contribute to the family both through service and by nurturing children. Charles wrote to his father with regard to one of his unmarried sisters that, “while it is unnatural for a healthy woman not to have children to look after and protect, present social conditions seem to make their number constantly greater. I suppose so long as these conditions last many women will have to make an unselfish philosophy do for love. There is always the opportunity to adopt children.” One job that Althea gradually took over from her husband was writing to C. W. Having been an only child and separated from her own family, she was pleased to now be part of a large and close-knit family. In one of her early letters to C. W. she wrote that Charles had told her that “you were his best friend.” She told him that she, too, hoped “to become a friend of yours and I cannot consider that I have fully entered into this new life until I really become a part of Charles’ family.” In April 1906, Althea gave birth prematurely to twins—a tiny boy they named William, after Charles’s grandfather, and a still- born boy they called Prince. They grieved for the lost infant and turned their love and energy to William, who was sickly and under- weight. Doctors advised Althea to feed him every hour for the first few weeks. She was exhausted for months after his birth. They tried without success to find temporary nurses and housemaids. Charles gave up “what spare time I could to staying at home while Althea goes out for fresh air and exercise.” He wrote his father, “A girl is at a disadvantage if she has no old friends or relatives in town when a baby comes. She has to stick close to the baby until he gets old enough to trust to a maid and she hasn’t advice in times of colic and the little ills the experienced mother knows so well how to handle.” With the new addition, the Bardeens’ apartment seemed too small. In May 1907 the family moved into a small house set idylli- cally on Mendota Court, a few doors down from Lake Mendota. 

18 TRUE GENIUS From the fraternity house docks along the irregular shore it was easy to spot Picnic Point to the west, past the campus. Charles’s office on campus was a short walk away. On May 23, 1908, barely two years after William’s arrival, Althea and Charles had a second child, a ten-pound boy, they named John. He soon became the focus of the entire household; Charles developed a special attachment to him. Charles wrote his father that John was “far less of a care” than his brother William had been. “Charles’ devotion to John is most touching to see,” Althea wrote. She worried that Charles was spoiling the child. Wil- liam cheerfully accepted his new brother as a companion and play- mate. “William has a very generous nature and has never at any time shown the slightest jealousy,” Althea wrote her father-in-law. “Considering the attention John gets, it is rather remarkable, but [William] always has the same delight in anything John does and will call our attention to any new thing he does.” Charles felt him- self “blessed” in a family that was “proving dearer to [him] every day.” Althea often mentioned John in her letters to C. W. When he was a toddler, she wrote how “fearfully knowing” the boy was. She described how quickly he caught on to the idea of opening Christmas gifts, showing each present to everyone before going on to the next. By the spring of 1910 the Bardeens had again outgrown their home. They bought the stucco next door at 23 Mendota Court, with a living room, dining room, kitchen, large study downstairs, and five bedrooms upstairs. Its glassed-in sunporch and the grape arbor out front were lovely places to sit and read in the summer months. The library was large enough to serve as an occasional space for Dean Bardeen to hold seminars. No one lacked privacy. Even the housemaids had their space in the attic. When a live-in maid was no longer needed, Charles converted the attic into a play- room for himself and the children, complete with woodworking tools, a weight-lifting bench, and a suspended golf ball for practic- ing strokes. After John the Bardeens had two more children in fairly rapid succession: Helen on October 13, 1910, then Thomas on April 10, 1912. The pregnancies and births became increasingly difficult for Althea and her health suffered. She stayed in the hospital for over a week after Helen was born, but she maintained an optimistic spirit, 

Roots 19 writing to C. W. that, although she had been “very ill the first five days,” her condition was much improved. “After a necessary operation—I have been recovering by leaps and bounds. I have been sitting up a little more each day, and am beginning to walk a little.” After Thomas’s birth, “I was obliged to stay in the operating [room] nearly 24 hours before I could be moved,” she wrote C. W., “and your letter was better than a tonic, for it made me realize that it was all for a high purpose. I didn’t realize up to that time that I had a new child.” While Althea was recuperating in the hospital, Charles was learning the art of raising children. He found that John, then al- most four, could be a handful. Althea was entertained by Charles’s consternation with John, who until then had been the apple of his father’s eye. She remarked in a letter to C. W. that Charles had “always indulged John,” and she was “much amused to discover that Charles was obliged to spank John morning and evening before he could be made to obey.” She confided to C. W. that she was “glad it happened as I feared he would spoil John’s real sweetness of disposition by indulgence.” Charles was not a “huggy-kissy” father, but he was loving and always treated the children with respect. He often invited one of them along on an evening walk to enjoy the outdoors. He was not without humor in dealing with the children. One day the Bardeen boys were helping neighborhood friends annoy the workmen who were laying concrete sidewalks in the Mendota Court neighbor- hood. Charles appeared and sternly reprimanded the mischievous youngsters. A nearby mother remarked, “Why Dr. Bardeen, I thought you liked children.” He quickly retorted, “I like ’em in the abstract, but not in the concrete.” Althea’s letters to C. W. suggest that from the day John entered school he stood out in most subjects, demonstrating his “concen- trated essence of brain.” By age nine, he had been skipped enough to catch up with his two-years-older brother William, who also worked well ahead of his age group. Moving up undoubtedly offered John greater challenges, but he later remarked quizzically that he “just didn’t learn to spell.” Before John was five, Charles wrote C. W. that the boy was “showing talent with figures.” Through Althea’s intervention, John advanced considerably in his mathematics education. Finishing third-grade math when he was eight, he flew through the lessons 

20 TRUE GENIUS for fourth and fifth grades the following summer, then mastered the sixth-, seventh-, and eighth-grade material in the fall. In the summer of his eleventh year, he took two mathematics courses in overlapping time periods, “so that he has only half the normal time for each.” But as his father wrote to C. W., “He is getting away with them.” Charles bragged that John figured out shortcuts for prob- lems that would be difficult for an adult. Althea wrote C. W. that “John has undoubtedly a genius for mathematics.” John’s relative youth was a social handicap at school. Although he preferred the advanced course work, he suffered when class- mates four and five years older considered him too young for their games. But, he told an interviewer, this left him more time for his studies. After school and on weekends, he found playmates of his own age among the neighborhood children. One of his earlier friends recalled happy times collecting stamps, drawing a map of Lake Mendota, and playing evening games of Run, Sheep, Run and Sardines. John and Bill were both avid stamp collectors and formed their own stamp trading “business,” the Four Lakes Stamp Com- pany. In playing with his younger brother and sister, John some- times used his drawing skills to make paper dolls and furniture for their dollhouse. Althea thought that John’s behavior was mature for his age, prompting her to observe that “socially he is reserved, but meets people in a balanced, pleasant way, much like an adult.” John joined his siblings and other neighborhood children in their fascination with science and technology. At about thirteen, he became interested in chemistry through reading a book, Creative Chemistry, which described how American organic chemists had learned to create artificial dyes when the German supply of dyes was cut off during World War I. Eager to encourage his son’s scien- tific interest, Charles bought small quantities of organic dyes and other chemicals from the National Stain and Reagent Company in Ohio for John to experiment with in his basement laboratory. With a sheepish grin, John told an interviewer, “I dyed materials, did some experiments injecting dyes in eggs. I was interested in seeing how you get colored chickens.” During the 1920s John and many of his friends were captivated by the magic of radio. They spent countless hours outside listening to the sounds carried by the strange electromagnetic waves detected by their crystal sets. John built his own crystal set and receiver “from dime store wires, oatmeal boxes, little straw suitcases and 

Roots 21 the crystals.” Carefully winding copper wire around an oatmeal box, he made a tuning coil. The whole set, which included a pair of earphones, was stored in an old suitcase, which he would bring out at night hoping to hear voices or music from Chicago. The exercise demanded much patience, for only after a good deal of poking with a wire on his galena crystal would he occasionally hit a “hot spot” and pick up a weak signal. “Some boys even got as far as putting vacuum tubes in their amplifiers, but I never got that far,” he recounted. John Bardeen and his friend John Hames won first place in a Boy Scout semaphore-signaling contest. The two boys were so pro- ficient they were asked to give a demonstration to the Future Farmers of America in Madison. They walked to the top of Univer- sity Hill and sent them the message, “We are here; come on up.” John’s extroverted older brother Bill, who was also present, demonstrated “wig-wag” signaling, which used flags to represent the dots and dashes of Morse code. John would remain close to Bill. The two fell into a pattern in which tongue-tied John would some- times let Bill carry conversations for him. In later years, John would re-create this pattern with a few close friends and with his wife. John and Bill entered the combined seventh-eighth grade at “Uni High,” Wisconsin’s University High School, in the same year—John from third grade and William from fifth. Established in September 1911, the school had been conceived as a laboratory for training high school instructors and for testing progressive ideas in education. In its philosophy and organization, Uni resembled the Dewey School. The students were accelerated as much as possible to keep lessons challenging. One goal was to “introduce pupils to high school methods and subjects before they reached the 9th grade.” The fourth quarter, offered during the summer, allowed students who had missed work or had fallen behind to catch up. It also enabled the brightest students to com- plete senior high school in only three years. Althea did her best to arrange course schedules that would al- low each boy to pursue his own interests and avoid potentially adversarial competition. They took mathematics, English, and geography together, but she “selected different studies in their other classes to give William a sense of freedom from John.” Meanwhile, Charles William, the Bardeen patriarch, was filter- ing his experience and ideas down to his grandchildren. For John’s 

22 TRUE GENIUS tenth birthday, C. W. sent him A Little Fifer’s War Diary, an auto- biographical memoir about his boyhood experiences during the Civil War. Coming from a family of staunch abolitionists, C. W. had viewed the Civil War idealistically, as an opportunity to rectify the evil of slavery. But he also saw the war as a chance to enjoy an adventure. Against his mother’s wishes, he had left home at four- teen to join the Union army. The book included entries from the diary that C. W. had kept as a teenager during the Civil War. He mixed in commentaries added forty-five years later. Looking back, C. W. characterized him- self as given to stretching the truth and as “conceited, boastful, self-willed, disobedient, saucy, not lazy but always wanting to do something else than the duty of the moment.” This “wholly dis- agreeable” youngster was present at some of the Civil War’s bloodi- est battles, including Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, Gettysburg, Spottsylvania, and the Wilderness. But he survived unscathed and subsequently raised five children. In the front of the book, C. W. inscribed a reminder of the philosophy on which he had raised his children: My dear John, It is a delight to see you children from time to time and watch your development. Your boyhood is very different from mine, and your opportunities infinitely greater. Remember that the greatest opportunity of all is to serve. Years later John had copies of the book made for family mem- bers. He sent one to his niece in 1975, when she was the same age that Charles William had been when he left Fitchburg High School to enlist in the Union Army. His grandfather’s career, John told her, had “always been an inspiration.” He found his grandfather’s inscription even “more valid now than when he wrote it.” C. W. continued to be an adventurer in his later years. He some- times left his family home in Syracuse while he traveled alone in Europe or Africa. He later wrote of his experiences in his School Bulletin, describing the concerts and plays he attended, such as a Gilbert and Sullivan production at the Savoy Theater in London, or his bicycle tour around England and Germany. On a long trip to Tunisia, he took many interesting photographs of the local people. C. W. often visited the Bardeens in Madison, endearing himself to Althea and the children by bringing wonderful gifts, especially at Christmas. In a letter thanking him for the furs he had sent for her birthday, Althea wrote, “I have wanted them for years, in fact as long 

Roots 23 as I can remember, never having had any.” One Christmas when C. W. sent particularly charming toys for his grandchildren, Charles teased Althea for caring “more about them than the children do.” Such sweetness and generosity mingled with the family’s seri- ous values, including work service, social duty, and economy. Charles contributed monthly to the American Society for the Relief of French War Orphans, providing a model of social conscience that John would emulate in his adult life. His emerging sense of economy showed up early on. One day during the First World War, Althea wrote to C. W.: John opened his bank once and paid his father ten dollars on his war- bond and is nearly ready to open it again and pay him another ten, so that he has nearly paid half of his fifty dollar bond. He has the same sense of economy in his studies as he has in money. He would not fail in a class any more than he would lose fifty dollars. The Bardeens used money to motivate their children to do chores, offering them an allowance in exchange for fulfilling duties at home. At least for a while they also followed the custom of the choirmaster in “taking off five and ten cents for any shortcomings.” Althea suspected that a small monetary enticement offered by the choirmaster at the Episcopal church motivated John’s and Bill’s continued participation in the junior choir. She concluded that the system of monetary merits and demerits “kept John brave against all odds. The other day he offered with great earnestness and with the wisdom of many years’ experience, ‘I should think two meals a day would be plenty.’ And no one loves food more than John.” John and William took part in many sports, from church league ball teams to competitive swimming and diving. The proximity of the Bardeen home to Lake Mendota made it easy for all the chil- dren to learn to swim. In summer months they could be found laughing and swimming in the lake or perhaps diving off the pier down the street. John learned to dive from a twenty-foot-high plat- form before he was ten and was, as Althea wrote C. W., “doing stunts in fancy diving.” The summer of John’s first year, Charles bought, with the help of his father, a sailboat with a small motor. Boating jaunts on the lake became a source of great pleasure for him and the children. After a visit to Madison, Charles’s sister Bertha “was struck by [his] development as a father,” reporting that she did not see how he could be a better one. Cold weather in winter hardly slowed down outdoor activities. 

24 TRUE GENIUS Ice skating and iceboat sailing on the frozen lake occupied the Bardeen family throughout the winter months. In spring the young- sters dared each other to be first to jump in the icy lake. A frater- nity man in one of the houses that lined the lakefront awakened one spring morning to the sound of giggles outside his window. Looking out, he saw three teenagers, John, Helen, and Tom Bardeen, “in their knitted woolen bathing suits upon the cold boulders dar- ing each other to enter the icy water.” Eventually all three jumped in. “I shivered just watching them.” Althea played golf with Charles whenever possible. One summer, playing every day throughout the month of August, she succeeded in reducing her average score from 75 to 55. By the summer of 1910 Charles had developed the habit of playing a round of golf “nearly every afternoon.” It was for him a time to relax into his thoughts—sometimes with humorous results. A family story features Charles driving home from the golf course and stopping by a favorite drugstore to buy tobacco supplies. He then walked home. Later in the evening he could not find the car and called the police to report it stolen. They soon found the car where Charles had left it, in front of the drugstore. The couple passed their love of golf along to their children. From an early age John accompanied his parents to the golf course, caddying for his mother when he was still too young to play. He began to learn the game as soon as he was old enough to swing a club. In time John’s childhood interest in golf became an adult pas- sion, as it had been for both his father and his grandfather. John was nine when his father wrote C. W. that Althea had cancer. Charles slipped the news into a short paragraph in the middle of an otherwise casual letter. Falling back upon the physician’s trained objectivity, he reported matter-of-factly: We discovered a little growth in Althea’s breast during the winter and it finally seemed best to have what is called a radical operation, the complete removal of the breast and all surrounding tissue so as to prevent any spread of the tumor. The operation was performed by Dr. Jackson three weeks ago and Althea is now at home again and is as well as could be expected after so radical an operation. It will be some time before she can raise her right arm much, even to write letters. It’s hard luck but it’s a good thing to get a hold of in time if it must come. Althea recovered well from the radical surgery, performed in February 1918. But within less than a year the growths reappeared 

Roots 25 and she underwent a second surgery, followed by X-ray treatments. Having used X rays in his own research, Charles probably under- stood before anyone else that Althea was losing the battle for her life. X rays, discovered in 1895, were already in use by 1900 for diagnostic purposes. But it was much longer before medical researchers standardized radiotherapy as a cancer treatment. Charles pulled as many strings as he could in the medical commu- nity, but the discussions of his wife’s condition with colleagues only underscored the fact that, as yet, medicine could offer little in the way of treatment to cancer patients. The best medical exper- tise of the time amounted to little more than bold incisions to remove surface and breast cancers and the cautious use of X rays in treatment. Hormonal treatment, chemotherapy, mammograms, pap smears, and fiber optics did not yet exist. Nor did doctors have confidence in the use of radiation to cure common cancers. It was already known that radiation itself caused cancer in some instances. The years 1918 to 1920 were a roller coaster of hope and despair for the Bardeens. Every time Althea recovered from a surgery and the harsh effects of her X-ray treatments, new nodules would appear or she would become otherwise ill again. At a time when one in eight American women over 45 died of cancer, Althea’s chances for survival did not look good. In March 1919 most of the family became ill during one of the severe influenza epidemics that swept the nation after the First World War. The normally bustling household was unusually still after Althea, William, Helen, and Tom all ended up at the univer- sity infirmary. For the first time, John and Charles spent a consid- erable amount of time together alone. Charles wrote C. W. that he had “seen more of John than usual and finds him a very good com- panion. He amuses himself evenings, doing problems in algebra and arithmetic and seems to have real talent.” The orderly and predictable world of mathematics must have been a haven for John while the rest of the family was ravaged by illness. The family recovered from the flu, but Althea continued to decline. As the disease bore down more heavily upon her, she must have known she was losing ground. The side effects of the radia- tion therapy deepened her misery. Still, she gamely kept adding to her life, chairing a newly formed garden club in Madison less than a year before her death. 

26 TRUE GENIUS She began to spend a great deal of time away from home, either in Milwaukee near her primary physician or in Chicago for other treatments. In the hot summer of 1919, Althea’s friend Mary Morris visited her in a Milwaukee hospital. Morris wrote to Charles that Althea “did not look ill but very lovely and kept smiling her lovely pointed smile.” Mary professed never to have seen “such self con- trol and fortitude as Althea has displayed in this trying time. She filled us all with admiration.” In the last year of her life, Althea underwent an almost constant round of frightening and painful sur- geries and X-ray treatments. They left her exhausted and ill for weeks. Charles worried that her nausea might be caused by “hysteria and homesickness,” though one of her doctors in Chicago felt that it was more probably due to the “rather massive X-ray exposures.” Althea’s Milwaukee surgeon also denied that the nausea came from some psychological weakness, declaring that he “didn’t think she was that kind of a girl and didn’t believe it now.” With Althea ill and so often away, the Bardeen household became chaotic. Charles needed a housekeeper but could not find one willing and able to deal with his four children, large house, and invalid wife. The job required nerves of steel. On April 10, 1920, Althea came home from Chicago, where she had been undergoing radiation therapy. She wanted to be home on Mendota Court, with her family. The day before, Charles had written to his father that she likely had at most a year to live. He did not tell Althea this, nor did her doctors, “although doubtless at times she suspects it.” No one in the household could care for her properly. She was given a room at the university infirmary where Charles and the children could easily visit her. For John, the infir- mary was “on the way between my high school and home, so that I would stop and see her on the way home from school.” The treatments had not appreciably affected the cancer and had made Althea so ill that she could no longer hold down food. Her strength failed rapidly. C. W. sent her some wine that he had held back in anticipation of Prohibition. She managed to drink a sip. “She said it was delicious,” Charles wrote, “and she appreciated very much your sending it.” By this time the cancer had invaded her lungs. There was no hope of recovery. On the evening of April 19, John stopped by to see his mother. “I thought she looked well that day and cheerful,” he recalled. “I was shocked to hear the next day that she had passed away. I didn’t 

Roots 27 realize how seriously ill she was.” She was forty-seven. John was almost twelve. Charles wrote to his father a few days later, “She put up the bravest possible fight against the greatest possible odds. She had many unusual gifts of which not the least was a magnifi- cent courage that was with her to the end.” Althea’s obituary appeared in the Madison Democrat the next day, April 21, along with an anonymous tribute emphasizing “her intense feeling for her fellowmen, expressed on all occasions by an ever-ready sacrifice of time and labor to bring to others all that made her life joyous and rich.” The article focused on the role that art had played in her life. “She felt in all artistic expressions the pulsations of life and she felt also that the meanest one of us, the least fitted, might with proper guidance be led through expressions in one or the other of the art forms to a higher plane.” Charles found himself in a desperate situation. While mourning his wife he was suddenly overwhelmed with practical responsibili- ties. His active life as an administrator, teacher, and researcher had relied heavily on Althea to manage the household and raise the children. His work as dean and his continuing medical research had occupied most of his time. A year earlier, on his forty-eighth birthday, he wrote to his father that he had “put in twelve or fifteen hours” to finish a paper on “the proportions of the body to height and weight during growth.” Charles’s sister Bertha came to help with the children and household in the days immediately following Althea’s death. The visit was a temporary fix. When school let out for the summer, Charles sent the children to various relatives and friends—Tom and Helen to C. W. in Syracuse; John to his Uncle Norman, Charles’s brother, in Michigan. “So we got along through the summer that way.” Althea had been a source of love and stability for John. She had helped him navigate in a world that included much older school- mates and the high expectations of adults. He would have to man- age his teenage years without her.