Man of the Hour

by Jennet Conant

  When it came time for him to enter preparatory school, his parents had intended to send him to nearby Milton Academy, a private school, where Esther, recently graduated from Smith College, was a teacher in the girl’s division. Their son, however, had other plans. His best friend Roger Twitchell’s older brother, Paul, was enrolled in the Roxbury Latin School, a part of the Boston public school system, and had boasted of its separate laboratories for chemistry and physics. From his parents’ perspective, it was a far less exclusive and considerably more distant inner city institution, and would require him to commute by trolley. But Conant was insistent. “It was agreed that I had the scientific ‘bug,’ ” he recalled. “My father and mother at least recognized an interest and wisely sought a school where it might be welcomed and encouraged.”

  Founded in 1645, Roxbury Latin was an old, prestigious academy and, in spite of its name, was indeed known for its strong science department. Under the direction of its science master George Fairfield Forbes, it was the first school to use a laboratory for teaching experimental physics, with special apparatus for demonstration and study he built himself, and would later be used as a model by other schools. All students were required to study both chemistry and physics in their last two years. Although money was not a consideration—tuition was free for Roxbury residents, and those living outside paid a modest fee—admission to its rigorous six-year program was competitive. That spring, ninety applicants sat for the three-hour entrance exams and thirty-five were accepted.

  Conant did not make the cut. He returned home in tears after being informed he had flunked the spelling section. His mother, a forceful woman when she wanted to be, went down to the school and had it out with the head, arguing that her son’s high scores in math and science more than compensated for a few misplaced e’s. In the end, she got her way, on the condition that as a trained teacher she would see to it that his spelling improved over the summer.

  * * *

  When eleven-year-old “Jim” Conant—for that was how he was known from then on—entered the sixth grade of Roxbury Latin in the fall of 1904, he did not immediately impress anyone as a scholar. His classmates were all hard strivers. They were the offspring of doctors, clerics, contractors, factory managers, and small business owners—the new middle class that was just coming into its own. For them, Conant recalled, “college was either for those who had a career in mind or for the rich who attended the private schools in Boston or the nearby boarding schools.” That first year, he had to scramble to catch up. His grades were acceptable but not extraordinary. Mathematics was his best subject, music his worst. His spelling was still weak, and his handwriting so poor the headmaster included a warning note in his report card: “Must do work in penmanship.” To his classmates and teachers, Conant appeared quiet, self-contained, and rather shy. Never one to make himself conspicuous or push to the head of the line, he generally faded into the background. At first glance, Newton Henry Black, his science teacher, dismissed the “towhead with a Dutch cut and broad collar” as both “undistinguished and unprecocious.”

  All that changed the following year, when he took Black’s elementary science course. It was immediately apparent that Conant showed an unusual level of aptitude, particularly in the final section on chemistry. “N. Henry,” as the boys called him when out of earshot, was a gifted young teacher with an infectious enthusiasm for his subject and that rare ability to transfix the most fidgety of pupils. His spirited lectures earned him a devoted following, though he was too exacting and impatient with stragglers to ever be called popular. Conant became one of Black’s disciples, joining the small clutch of boys that brought their sandwiches to his laboratory at lunchtime. Sometimes he would stay behind to get advice about some tricky piece of apparatus, once bringing in a homemade induction coil housed in an empty chalk box that was giving him trouble. Black could only smile as he looked over the crudely wound wire, attached to an old electric bell mechanism as a circuit breaker. “You don’t expect to make that work, do you?” he asked.

  “I’ve got to make it work,” Conant explained, “because my father said he’d buy me a real induction coil if I can get this one to go.”

  Black was impressed with the boy’s spirit and scientific bent. He had been rather ingenious in adapting basic materials to his purpose, and his early efforts showed “prompt signs of facility.” Moreover, he possessed the inherent curiosity about how things worked and were made that marked out the best scientific minds. Black was scarcely thinking in terms of the next Edison, but he took a special interest in young Conant.

  Black soon learned that Conant’s father had carefully nurtured the boy’s inventive turn of mind. Not only had James Scott built his son a new, large shop in the lean-to off the kitchen, he had gas—which was supposed to be used for purposes of illumination—piped in so that it was a proper chemical laboratory, complete with a Bunsen burner and stopcock. With the aid of a hot flame—as opposed to the meager output of an alcohol lamp—Conant could now make distilled water, evaporate solutions, and even prepare oxygen gas by heating red oxide of mercury. He befriended the pharmacist at the local drugstore and secured a ready source of chemicals. As an incentive to creativity, James Scott gave his son an allowance of $5 a month, and proposed that for every piece of apparatus he could rig up and make work, he would buy the comparable item. Conant, who liked to get his money’s worth, judiciously invested $2.50 in parts and managed to build a balance scale that cost his father $50 new.

  His performance at school improved, but while he excelled at chemistry, he was still compiling a number of Bs and Cs. In the academic year of 1905–6, he ranked just sixteenth in a class of thirty-two. Aware of his son’s inclinations, James Scott requested that Jim be allowed to keep on with his laboratory work at home, as chemistry would not be part of his curriculum the following year. Black was “skeptical,” but suggested a book, Arthur A. Noyes’s System of Qualitative Analysis, and offered to monitor his progress. It was a fairly daunting tome, however, and Black doubted the boy had the “backbone” to tackle it on his own.

  Over the next few months, Conant regularly sought Black out during the noon periods at school, and their relationship evolved into an informal private tutorial. Every week or so, Black would give him a small bottle containing an unknown sample, and Conant would report back when he had managed to identify the contents: silver and tin, for example, but no copper or lead. This process of discovery was “an exciting business,” and Conant kept coming back for more “unknowns” to analyze. An avid experimenter, he loved the idea that nature was a puzzle that could be solved, and devoted hours of work after school to his solitary labors. He surprised Black by racing through Noyes’s text. He was soon back, asking for a second book. He was seldom defeated by a problem, and systematically worked through the high school laboratory manual on his own steam. It was then that his teacher began to note Conant’s “capacity for work,” especially for one so young, and extraordinary inner drive. Not only did he like to work alone, he worked fast, completing the equivalent of two years’ work in the space of one.

  For Conant, the new world of chemistry Black had opened for him captured his imagination. “The experiments were simple but spectacular,” Conant recalled. “The knowledge acquired about elements and compounds was so foreign to what was discussed in the daily papers or in general conversation that it seemed a passport into a strange and secret land.” His boyish zeal is almost palpable in a 1908 letter to his sister Marjorie, who was studying painting in Paris. Written on March 29, three days after his fifteenth birthday, he gushed about his new favorite teacher while unapologetically trying to finagle another present:

  By the way about the book that you said you were trying to find for me. If you are really going to get one I wish you would get one on Chemistry, rather Elementary, though most anyone would do, in either German, or French.

  Mr. Black is the instructor in Physics and Chemistry as you perhaps know and is quite a friend of mine. We had
him out for Super [sic] last Sunday night and I showed him my shop etc.

  While Conant’s ability was not in question, Black could not be certain how much he had really absorbed in the course of his solo studies. As it happened, that spring a group of his graduating seniors would be taking a practice college entrance exam in chemistry, and Black decided to take advantage of the timing to arrange a little experiment of his own. Corralling Conant one afternoon as he passed by the laboratory, Black gestured toward the blue books he had just passed around to the class and casually suggested to the sophomore, “Why don’t you try to see what you can do?” After a hesitant glance at the older boys, Conant rose to the challenge. An hour later, he handed back his blue book. Black quickly scanned the answers to the twelve questions. To his astonishment, Conant had aced the exam. Black did not need any more proof of his fifteen-year-old prodigy’s “unusual mental power.”

  It was an important turning point in Conant’s life. What had up to then been a youthful passion was now to be a fixed vocation: “My career was now clearly marked,” he recalled. “I was to be a chemist.”

  To give Conant a glimpse of what the future held, Black took him on a tour of Harvard’s laboratories, housed in a gleaming white building called Boylston Hall, and introduced him to the famous chemistry professor and department chairman, Theodore William Richards. The memorable day earned an excited mention in the youngster’s red-leather diary: “GREAT!!!” Conant knew it was his mentor’s deepest wish that he attend Harvard, where Black himself had earned a master’s degree in chemistry only a few years before, and it had become his wish, too. He was keenly aware of the competition among his peers, and kept a close eye on the class rankings. If it occurred to him that failure was a possibility, or if he felt in any way burdened by the pressure, the only sign of it was in his redoubled efforts. When he sat down to take the college entrance exam at the end of his junior year in the spring of 1909, the somber pledge he wrote out on the back of the grade card showed his resolve:

  “I, James Bryant Conant, on the eve of my Preliminary Exams, testify that, I have in my opinion, done as well as could be under conditions and having nothing to regret during last year’s work and I will not blame myself or anyone if I fail to pass.”

  Conant passed with flying colors. In October Black wrote to Richards at Harvard to plead his pupil’s case. Black made the rather audacious request that Conant not only be admitted, but as he had passed the college entrance exams at the end of his junior year of high school, be permitted to skip first-year chemistry and enroll immediately in classes usually reserved for upperclassmen. Before the month was out, Richards replied that the department had decided that Conant, “considering his extraordinary ability,” be allowed to take the final exam in Chemistry 1 the following June. If the results were satisfactory, he would be credited with the course. But Black’s plans for his prize student did not end there. After thanking Richards for the department’s indulgence regarding Chemistry 1, he proceeded to argue that Conant should also be allowed to dispense with Chemistry 3, and hoped the department would accept his word at the end of the year that his pupil had completed the necessary work in qualitative analysis.

  From then on, Black dedicated himself to preparing Conant for Harvard. The only hiccup was that there was no official transcript to prove that Conant had achieved a knowledge of physical chemistry, and an understanding of qualitative analysis, both far beyond the school syllabus. To redress this gap, Black designed a concentrated course of study in both chemistry and physics, culminating in stiff final exams. He also gave him access to his own private laboratory—and considerably superior equipment—and guided him through the course work required in Harvard’s freshman year.

  By now, it was clear to Conant’s classmates that their science master was grooming his “boy chemist” for greatness. Black saw to it that Conant received a wide-ranging education in science, steered him into new fields, and exposed him to some of the great European thinkers. He also encouraged him to take three years of German—in addition to five years of both Latin and French—though Conant regarded these subjects, along with English and history, as “just so many hurdles one had to jump.” There were weekend excursions to Cambridge, either to stock up on chemicals or attend afternoon lectures at the Lowell Institute, the subjects ranging from astronomy to atomic weights. Black was a frequent visitor to the Ashmont house, as well as the shop off the kitchen, where teacher and student often disappeared after dinner for supervised practice in the art of glass blowing. Over the summer holidays, they often went sailing, the young captain honing his skill at the rudder of a new, faster boat while Black served as “ballast.” As Conant observed fondly in his memoir, “I doubt if any schoolteacher has ever had a greater influence on the intellectual development of a youth than Newton Henry Black had on mine.”

  Black more than reciprocated his pupil’s affection and admiration. As the letters of recommendation he wrote to the Harvard authorities in the spring of 1910 attest, he could not have been more proud of Conant than if he were his own son. The degree to which he had mapped out his protégé’s future, following very much in his own footsteps, is evident in his argument for a scholarship based more on merit than on need:

  In regard to Mr. James Bryant Conant, I may say that his class, and in Chemistry and Physics is the best student . . . He is looking forward to university teaching as a career. While his family could provide for his expenses at college for a year or two, when one considers the long course of study yet ahead of him, I feel certain that he is decidedly the kind of boy to be helped by a scholarship.

  Taking all things into consideration I consider him the most promising boy I have had in science during my ten years here in this school. He is bound to be heard from later as a scholar and a man.

  Although Conant recalled that he “practically lived in the library” his senior year, his classmates did not write him off as a grind. He found time for a variety of after-school activities, including serving as editor in chief of the school magazine, the Tripod. Like most schoolboys, he perceived that his achievements in the classroom did not count for half as much as those in the field of sports. He played football, though he was slight for a fullback, and rowed crew, eventually becoming good enough to make the second boat. Rowing came naturally to him. He liked the hard labor, and developed his stamina by forcing himself on through the pain and exhaustion of those oft-repeated races. The discipline appealed to his puritanical code, and he derived enormous satisfaction from pushing himself to his limits. The summer before his senior year, he discovered mountaineering, a sport that suited his self-sufficient nature. Hiking and climbing the snowcapped peaks of New England became an integral part of his life, combining his love of exercise with the need to test himself.

  His greater confidence also revealed itself on the stage his senior year. He had always taken bit parts in school plays, but in his final turn as Lucille, the heroine of the French romantic comedy Maître Corbeau, he stole the show. In the big finale, Conant, sporting a blond wig and frilly pink dress, was preparing to fall into the arms of the leading man—no less than the crew team captain, Charles Crombie—when Crombie accidentally trod on his toes, and instead of cooing, Conant/Lucille swore loudly: “God damn you, get off my foot!” The auditorium erupted. “Lucille certainly made a corking good fiancé,” raved the Tripod’s critic. “Can you imagine how shocked, mortified, astonished and overwhelmed the Observer was when he beheld his stern, implacable editor-in-chief parading around in skirts and petticoats.”

  Conant was immensely pleased with his performance, and wrote his sister Marjorie in Paris about his triumph. For someone who had never shone at anything outside of science, he had grown into an unlikely headliner, and he could not help wondering if his sister, who had been away almost three years, would even recognize him on her return. Her reply conveys her genuine pleasure in his success and also the extent to which the whole family was counting on him, not only to better himself but fi
nally pull the Conant name to the front. “Congratulations my very dear boy,” responded Marjorie. “I am so proud I can assure you. I feel now that it’s no use trying for laurels for one’s self when one has such a ‘coming’ brother. Rush in and win and cover us all with glory—and money. I really mean it—no fooling.”

  Further evidence of his metamorphosis could be found in the class yearbook. His senior portrait shows a poised young man, blond hair neatly parted to one side, gazing into the future with clear, confident eyes. As the editors noted with grudging admiration: “ ‘Jim’ has been with us from the sixth, but up to last year no one suspected him of owning more than his share of gray matter. When, last June, he walked off with 18 points in the ‘prelims,’ we sat up and took notice.” A year later, when it was announced that he was graduating at the top of his class, and was the recipient of one of five Harvard Club scholarships awarded to outstanding students from Boston schools, no one was surprised. He had done splendidly—first in chemistry, second in Latin, and third in German and history—and would be one of twelve boys “headed to Cambridge” in the fall. “We certainly hope he will not blow up the laboratory at Harvard,” the yearbook editors added. A late bloomer in a pack of smart, purposeful boys, he was still no one’s pick as a future leader. Crombie, the class jokester, predicted at graduation that Conant was most likely to become a druggist, “serving, as a premium on all sales over three cents, a guaranteed chemically-pure prussic acid ferrocyanide milkshake.”