The Boy Who Played with Fusion

by Tom Clynes

  After Taylor’s stump-remover bomb, big bangs became an almost-nightly part of life on Northern Hills Drive. “You could divide the neighbors into two camps,” Taylor says. “The ones who freaked out and pulled their kids inside and closed the blinds, and the ones who came over to watch. But the surprising thing was, no one ever called the police.”

  Ever since the Chinese started messing around with gunpowder-filled bamboo tubes more than a thousand years ago, the line between fireworks and rockets has been a thin one. For his part, Taylor loved rockets, and he loved explosions; it was only a matter of time before he would combine them.

  As Taylor’s command of pyrotechnics progressed, he began putting on increasingly extensive fireworks shows. Starting with store-bought rockets, he progressed to making his own, mixing batches of propellants in five-gallon buckets and packing the fuels into his homemade rockets and aerial shells. He figured out which elements would produce the best colors when they went up and exploded: strontium for red, arsenic for yellow, lithium for red and blue, copper and barium for green. Lying in bed at night, Taylor would dream up new combinations to experiment with the next day. “I’d throw in a little extra of this or that to slow the burn rate and get those long sparkling streamers or colored smoke trails.”

  Taylor spent the entire two weeks before one Independence Day working on his show. “There was a lot of anticipation that night,” Kenneth says. “We had five families over, and Taylor had a big pile of stuff ready.”

  Taylor plucked a rocket out of the pile and brought it over to the plywood launch pad. With a fire extinguisher ready and his face shield flipped down, he flicked his lighter, lit the fuse, and backed away.

  “There must have been an air pocket inside the fuel,” Taylor says. The rocket came off the pad, sputtered and tipped over, then reignited. It shot sideways, first toward the woods, then straight at Taylor’s stack of fireworks.

  “It landed right in the middle of ’em,” Taylor says. “We all knew exactly what was about to happen.”

  “You’ve never seen such a scattering,” Kenneth remembers. “Things flying in every direction, people running everywhere, getting chased by rockets. We were all diving behind anything we could find.”

  “It was sheer luck no one got hurt,” Taylor says. “It makes me think of something they said when we visited Cape Canaveral, about how the NASA engineers learn more from their failures than their successes.”

  Unlike NASA’s, though, the goals of Taylor’s rocketry program morphed from seeing how high he could fly his creations to seeing how artfully he could destroy them. The quest for altitude became passé—his rockets needed only to clear the treetops so the entire neighborhood could see them explode into multicolored bursts. His Fourth of July shows got more popular and more sophisticated; with electronic ignition, Taylor could set up synchronized chain reactions that lasted up to twenty minutes.

  “After the grand finale,” says Taylor, “you’d hear all the neighbors out all around, clapping and hooting.”

  It was the same sort of adulation he’d gotten from singing, which continued to fund his science hobbies. Taylor loved being the center of attention; he loved the applause and the awed and admiring faces. With his voice changing from a delicate soprano to a harder-to-control tenor, Taylor began to realize that he could use chemistry—especially the more volatile reactions—to catalyze the same kind of responses he’d gotten from his vocal performances.

  It’s tempting to interpret Taylor’s grade-school transformation from a timid, shrinking kindergartner to a charismatic showman of song and science as a rather extreme overcompensation for deep-rooted insecurities. And some psychologists would argue that Taylor the teenager is still trying to meet the needs of his much younger self by seeking adulation through his high-profile overachievements.

  “I don’t think that’s it,” says Taylor’s childhood friend Ellen Orr. “No one who went to St. James school had to do that. Taylor was always accepted and no one ever picked on him; we loved his eccentricities. There were fifteen of us who grew up together and we were all very social and expressive. We helped each other learn, we grew up in an environment that fostered confidence.”

  Taylor, for his part, doesn’t remember ever being shy. “I think all the singing helped make me a good public speaker,” he says. “But honestly, I can’t think of a moment of my life when I’ve been shy or afraid of what people would think,” he would tell me in 2012 just before giving his first TED talk. “Confidence has just never been an issue. I love speaking and performing and I love telling people what I’m doing.”

  Taylor also loved the process of figuring things out. This is a trait he shares with his brother, who showed an early flair for math. But in terms of revealing their discoveries to the world, Taylor and Joey were on opposite ends of the spectrum. As Taylor increasingly sought the spotlight, Joey became more introverted, preferring to spend time by himself or with a couple of close friends.

  “Joey doesn’t want everyone to know what he’s doing,” says Tiffany. “He likes to keep his talents to himself.” When his teachers encouraged him to enter mathematics competitions and science fairs, Joey wasn’t interested. Tiffany says on several occasions she has come into the bathroom after Joey’s been in the shower and found the glass door filled with calculus equations drawn in the steam.

  “I think Taylor sometimes embarrasses Joey,” Tiffany tells me.

  “I wouldn’t say he embarrasses me,” Joey says. “But growing up with him was hard. He can be loud, always yelling or playing music. I like it better when things are quieter. There’s so much drama when Taylor’s around. He makes things happen, but he takes up a lot of space and energy.”

  For Taylor’s tenth birthday, his grandmother Nell took him to a nearby Books-A-Million store and invited him to pick out anything he wanted. Taylor made a beeline for the science section, of course. The book that caught his eye was The Radioactive Boy Scout, by Ken Silverstein. “My mom bought it for him,” Tiffany says. “And she regretted it until the day she died.”

  The book tells the disquieting tale of David Hahn, a teenager in suburban Detroit who in the mid-1990s attempted to build a nuclear breeder reactor in a backyard shed, with nearly disastrous results.

  Taylor was so excited by the story that he read much of it aloud to his family. They heard about the seventeen-year-old Hahn raiding smoke detectors for radioactive americium, the neutron gun he built to irradiate materials, the breeder reactor he cobbled together in an attempt to generate fissionable material, the eerie blue glow emanating from Hahn’s makeshift laboratory late at night, the terrified neighbors watching as a Superfund cleanup team in hazmat suits hauled away the family’s contaminated belongings. Kenneth and Tiffany saw Hahn’s story as a cautionary tale. But Taylor, who had recently taken a particular interest in the heavy, unstable elements near the bottom of the periodic table, read it as a challenge.

  “Know what?” he told his parents. “The things that kid was trying to do, I’m pretty sure I could actually do them.”

  Those were not comforting words for Kenneth and Tiffany. “I grew up during the Cold War,” Kenneth says. “I lived through the Bay of Pigs and the embargo, and I was scared of nuclear stuff.” Tiffany’s knowledge of nukes was limited to newspaper and TV stories about Chernobyl and Three Mile Island—and, closer to home, the so-called Damascus Accident, among the most harrowing near-misses in the history of U.S. nuclear weapons. In 1980, at a ballistic missile launch complex in central Arkansas, a socket dropped from a wrench punched a hole in a Titan II missile’s fuel tank. Nine hours later, the complex exploded, ejecting what was then the most powerful thermonuclear weapon in the U.S. arsenal up and through the 740-ton launch door. The W-53 warhead, built to create a blast six hundred times more powerful than the one that leveled Hiroshima, landed in a nearby field. Its safety mechanisms worked as designed, failing to detect the intentional sequence of events that would have armed the bomb and enabled a nuclear detonation. />
  David Hahn, like Taylor, had gotten into chemistry in grade school, in his case after his step-grandfather gave him The Golden Book of Chemistry Experiments. David’s father, Ken, was an engineer at General Motors, as was his second wife, Kathy Missig. Ken Hahn, an emotionally distant man, was at first pleased when he found his college chemistry textbooks relocated to his twelve-year-old son’s bedroom, where David had set up a small laboratory.

  David’s parents had divorced when he was a toddler, and the chaotic aftermath of remarriages and shuttling between households had affected David deeply. Shy, gangly, and unpopular as he entered his teen years, he immersed himself in chemistry. “It was an escape,” he told me, “and even though the science teachers at school liked me, the experiments at school were too simple; I could do cooler stuff at home.”

  Like Taylor, Hahn became interested in the more volatile chemical combinations; by his freshman year in high school, he was making his own nitroglycerin. But after several chemical spills and explosions at the house, Kathy and Ken forced David to move his laboratory to the basement and forbade all pyrotechnic experiments. Kathy began making regular raids on his bedroom.

  “She was a little crazy and obsessed,” David said. “I’d hide sodium metal and phosphorus, and she’d find it and throw it away.”

  After an explosion of pyrophoric red phosphorus sent David to the hospital and almost blinded him, Kathy and Ken laid down the law: No more hands-on chemistry of any kind in the house. David began spending more time at his mother’s house in Commerce Township, where Patty Hahn lived with her boyfriend, Michael Polasek, a retired General Motors forklift operator. David set up a lab in his mother’s potting shed and began working on a new project—one that would take him well beyond the realm of conventional chemistry.

  Patty and Michael thought it strange that David spent so much time in the shed and that he would sometimes wear a gas mask and discard his clothing after coming out. When they asked what he was up to, David provided explanations that, as Michael said, “went right over my head.” One thing Michael remembered, though, was that David said his experiments had something to do with “creating energy.”

  The very idea of Taylor keeping a secret about anything he’s passionate about is inconceivable to anyone who knows him. The ten-year-old Taylor threw himself into the study of atomic energy with characteristic intensity and talked nonstop about his new passion. He maxed out the local library’s thin collection of books on nuclear physics and history, which presented nuclear science as a rarefied world inhabited by PhDs and Nobel laureates whose brainstorms were made possible by multibillion-dollar machines and laboratories. Hahn’s story gave Taylor a glimpse into a world where hands-on nuclear physics was something that an individual—a kid, even—could try.

  “The nuclear spark really hit me when I read that book,” Taylor says. But Taylor didn’t want to copy David Hahn. In fact, he could see exactly where Hahn had gone wrong. Taylor questioned whether Hahn could create a neutron source with the methods he’d used and the quantities of materials he was able to collect. And he didn’t think Hahn came close to breeding uranium-233—“although,” says Taylor, “he did a pretty good job contaminating the place.”

  What was most intriguing to Taylor was that an amateur had gotten involved in atomic science: “I thought, assuming I do it smarter than him, I could actually play with this stuff. I could do what he was trying to do—but I could be the responsible radioactive Boy Scout.”

  The upcoming fifth-grade science fair gave Taylor an opportunity to ease into hands-on nuclear science. “I knew my parents wouldn’t be gung-ho to get into radioactive stuff to begin with,” he says. And so he proposed to assemble a relatively benign “survey of everyday radioactive materials” for the fair.

  Natural radioactive decay, as Taylor would tell the parents, teachers, and students who stopped by his display, is the spontaneous emission of high-energy particles from radioactive materials. Radioactive elements spend their lives destroying themselves, their atoms releasing energy from their nuclei as they decay.

  All matter is made of combinations of elements—substances that can’t be further broken down or transformed into other substances by chemical means. Taylor had, by this time, studied the periodic table well enough to know which elements were radioactive. The periodic table has been chemistry’s primary map since the mid-1800s. Frequently expanded, refined, and debated, it classifies elements according to chemical properties, electron configurations, and atomic numbers—the last referring to the number of protons found in the nucleus of an individual atom.

  An atom is the smallest particle of an element that still has that element’s distinctive chemical properties. The word atom—from the Greek word atomos, “indivisible”—means “that which cannot be divided further into separate parts,” though scientists now know that atoms themselves are made up of even smaller particles. At the center of every atom is the nucleus, a tight, positively charged ball of protons and neutrons that is surrounded by negatively charged electrons.

  Atoms of so-called light elements, such as hydrogen or helium, have few protons and neutrons in their nuclei. These atoms, which were created during the first moments of the universe, are stable and even-tempered, capable of crisscrossing the cosmos intact or hunkering down in the middle of a buried rock while civilizations rise and fall and stars spark to life and die. But heavier atoms—those with a surfeit of protons and neutrons in their nuclei—are more jittery; they spend their lives throwing off unwanted energetic particles as they seek stability. The emission of those particles is called radiation.

  Taylor had become fascinated by the heavy elements residing in the neighborhoods near the bottom of the elemental map. Particularly beguiling to him were fifteen elements in the lowest row, a group known as the actinides. These metals are all extremely unstable. Uranium, which in its most common form has 238 protons and neutrons stuffed into its nucleus, is one of the heaviest naturally occurring elements. As it decays, striving to attain balance, it spits out chunks consisting of two protons and two neutrons, a combination known as an alpha particle. As it loses alpha particles, it transforms into different elements, eventually arriving, after 4.47 billion years, at the fourteenth and final stage of its decay chain, lead-206, at last achieving its long-sought stability.

  After Hahn’s father and stepmother forbade David’s scientific endeavors, the angry teenager pressed on in secret. Kenneth and Tiffany thought of steering their son toward more benign pursuits but they resisted the impulse, which couldn’t have been easy given that their child, who had a talent and fondness for blowing things up, was now proposing to dabble in nukes. Kenneth borrowed a Geiger counter from an acquaintance at Texarkana’s emergency-management agency and over the next few weekends, he and Tiffany shuttled their son around to nearby antiques stores, where Taylor pointed the clicking detector at old radium-dial alarm clocks, thorium lantern mantles, and orange uranium-glazed Fiesta plates.

  Tiffany and Kenneth have a picture of Taylor wearing glasses, braces, and his school shirt standing next to a poster titled “Radioactivity of Everyday Products.” The narratives under the subheadings—Problem, Hypothesis, Procedure, Applications, Materials, Data, Results, Conclusion—describe the experiments, which involved measuring the radioactivity of the plates (uranium oxide), clocks (radium), lantern mantles (thorium), and salt substitute (potassium-40).

  The science-fair project was a hit. But Taylor wasn’t content to collect a few radioactive plates. Drawn in by what he calls “the surprise properties” of radioactive materials, he needed to know more. Taylor’s knowledge of chemistry had allowed him to fuel his home-recipe propulsion program and grasp the underpinnings of his biology and genetics experiments. But both chemistry and biology are built on an understanding of the laws of physics. Taylor started to suspect that atoms, so small but so energetic—much like the young Taylor himself—could offer a lifetime of powerful secrets to unlock.

  With atomic physics,
Taylor had finally met something worthy of his restless intellect. He would continue to play his pyrotechnic parlor games each Fourth of July, but his giant rocket would go unfinished, and the biology experiments under way in his grandmother’s garage would remain half done. He became obsessed with nuclear energy, soaking up every particle of knowledge he could find. Just as he had taken apart his rockets to see what made them fly, he wanted to break down the basic units of matter, to understand how the universe works at its most fundamental level.

  After Kenneth returned the borrowed Geiger counter, Taylor used some of his singing earnings to purchase one of his own. In his grandmother’s garage, on tables already crowded with chemicals and microscopes and germicidal black lights, an expanding collection of radioactive objects began to appear: vacuum tubes, old glow-in-the-dark wristwatches and aircraft gauges, and an array of antique figurines, clocks, and gadgets. Taylor also bought a pig—a radiation-shielding container made of thick lead—to stash the most radioactive materials in.

  “I think the draw of nukes,” says Tiffany, “was that it was something more complex than anything he’d been doing; it was a big challenge.”

  There was also the forbidden-fruit aspect, as compelling to Taylor as it had been to David Hahn. But whereas Hahn had had to keep his experiments secret, Taylor was delighted to find that he became the center of attention whenever he talked about the “radioactive stuff” he was collecting and experimenting with. He had learned to catalyze awe and adulation first with his singing, then with his explosive chemistry. Nuclear energy offered an even bigger stage with the more substantial imagery of power, intrigue, creation, and destruction. Even in his linebacker-worshipping corner of the heartland, a kid who could wrap his head around the mind-blowing mysteries at the base of all matter could command attention and respect. He could also, potentially, put on one hell of a magic show.