RETARDED LEARNER
Unlike many theoretical physicists I have asked (but like Bell),
Wheeler does not have any special early mathematical memories.
He does recall that when he was about four years old, being
bathed by his mother, he asked her, ‘‘What happens when you
get to the end of things?’’ I asked Wheeler if he had numbers in
mind. ‘‘No,’’ he said, ‘‘space.’’
What early scientific memories Wheeler does have, have to do
with making things—comptometers, ‘‘guns’’ that operated with
a light socket (you put something in the socket, turned on the
switch, and the object popped out), and a railway signal. These
activities culminated at the age of thirteen, when Wheeler and
his friend Verdet Moke founded what they called the ‘‘Wheeler-
Moke Safe and Gun Company.’’ It produced wooden combina-
tion locks with, Wheeler told me, ‘‘little wheels, whittled of
wood, with a little notch on each end with a pin connecting each
to the next, so you could set the combination. I do remember
making a little machine which would solve algebraic equations of
the form ax + by = c and dx + ey = f. There were wooden sticks on
a board, and where they crossed would give the solution.’’
By the time Wheeler was a senior in high school, the family
had moved again, this time to Baltimore, where Wheeler’s father
became the director of that city’s public library. Wheeler at-
tended a high school that was known as the Baltimore City Col-
lege. His abilities must have been evident, since he recalls that
one of his teachers at the City College, Lydia Baldwin, ‘‘went
around to see my father—to say he ought to do something about
me—to push me ahead. Though my parents thought I was
asleep, I overheard them discussing what they were going to do
about my education.’’ As it happened, Wheeler had already
skipped a few classes when, at age ten, his father had taken a year
off from library work to try (unsuccessfully) to make a go of a
family farm in Vermont. Wheeler had attended a one-room
schoolhouse in rural Vermont, and he had been skipped ahead.
During that year he had also managed to blow off a small piece
of one of his fingers with a dynamite cap. ‘‘My father,’’ he told
me, ‘‘had gotten together with the neighbors to put up the poles
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