Books and Literature & Movies & Science Posted by James Killus, 24 Sep 2007 06:35 am

Rocket Boys Meet the Radioactive Boy Scout

Until I began to build and launch rockets, I didn’t know that my hometown was at war with itself over its children, and that my parents were locked in a kind of bloodless combat over how my brother and I would live our lives. I didn’t know that if a girl broke your heart, another girl, virtuous at least in spirit, cold mend it on the same night. And I didn’t know that the enthalpy decrease in a converging passage could be transformed into jet kinetic energy if a divergent passage was added. The other boys discovered their own truths when we built our rockets, but those were mine.

– Rocket Boys by Homer Hickam

Rocket Boys was made into a movie, “October Sky,” the title being an anagram of Rocket Boys, and I’m still charmed by it. I’ve found that the film is much beloved in some quarters, but I found it to be a disappointment, as so many such films are, because the book had the texture of truth, while the film had the texture of Hollywood. Relationships were generified, characters were stereotyped, you know the drill.

There have been a number of historical paths whereby the bright kid gets out and up in the world. Rocket Boys is a description of a new path: Rocket Scientist, exemplified by Hickam himself, but also, to my reading, the more important character, Quentin, the hard scrabble kid who uses his brain and big words to protect himself from his circumstances, and who decides that Hickam, the son of the mine superintendent, has access to the resources they would need to start a rocketry club.

In 1957, the town of Coalwood, in West Virginia, is cut off from the world in ways that are simply unfathomable today. For example, a major point in the book is when their science teacher, through considerable effort, manages to procure for them a book on rocketry. One. Single. Book. Is it possible to picture such a time today, when Amazon.com and Abebooks.com are universally available? I’ve lived in towns nearly as removed as Coalwood, but I have to work very hard at imagining (or remembering) what it was like. It’s simply another world.

One running joke through Rocket Boys are the crazy ideas that Quentin gets, like when he and the rest of the club are talking about making out with girls, considering the wonders of the female undergarment, and Quentin begins to speculate that it might be an efficient thing to combine stockings with panties into a single garment. Or when he’s considering orange juice and instant coffee and wondering if it would be possible to produce some product like instant orange juice.

In the epilog that follows where the rocketry club boys wound up, a goodly number of them became engineers. One can only speculate how many of them became science fiction fans.

The dark side of the teenage geek can be seen in the story of the Radioactive Boy Scout, the story of David Hahn, who, as a teenager in suburban Detroit, managed to accumulate a large collection of radioactive materials, plus build a homemade neutron source that he used to irradiate thorium and uranium, in hopes of building a breeder reactor. What he got was a decontamination team from the NRC, who hauled away the shed in which he’d kept his material and a tour in the Navy, where he wasn’t allowed to work near nuclear reactors, because he’d already substantially surpassed the allowed lifetime exposure to radiation.

The book is based on an article from Harper’s magazine.

I’ll note this warning about the book, which often speaks of how “advanced” was David’s knowledge of radiation chemistry. In reality, Hahn’s knowledge was pretty spotty, which is what you’d expect from an autodidact. At one point he’s shown to be baffled as to why he doesn’t get a Geiger counter reading from polonium (it’s a pure alpha emitter and alpha radiation cannot penetrate the counting tube). He seems to have only the vaguest understanding about neutron moderation and implications on fissile fuel breeding, and, needless to say, the concept of radiation health safety is pretty much beyond him.

To be fair, I don’t know how much of this ignorance is Hahn’s and how much of it is the author’s, or, more specifically, how much of the author’s obvious ignorance is also the case for Hahn.

I’m given to muse a bit on both the upside and the downside of the geek effect. Is the difference in outcome between Rocket Boys, and The Radioactive Boy Scout merely one of luck? After all, the rockets were far from safe, and did nearly cause damage a time or two (though it must be observed that the fatalities in Coalwood were invariably from the coal mine, not the rockets). More importantly, I think, comes the observation that, if you’re going to go off into the wild blue yonder, figuratively or literally, it helps to have some friends in it with you, just to keep you grounded.

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Responses to “Rocket Boys Meet the Radioactive Boy Scout”

  1. on 24 Sep 2007 at 6:55 am 1. Bill Benzon said …

    I’m reminded of Tom Wolf’s observation that the jet pilot is just the right combination of jock and geek to be a new kind of hero. Of course, when the space program got ahold of this new kind of hero, they converted him (and eventually her) into spam in a can. Though that’s not how it was sold to the public, especially not when they managed to cook a few cans.

  2. on 24 Sep 2007 at 7:52 am 2. JP Stormcrow said …

    It is interesting to note that there is a natural tension between curiousity and boldness in pursuing it, and just sticking with the norms. Different circumstances reward different choices.

    For an extreme case, I was struck by an interview of a survivor of the 1960 tsunami which hit Hilo that I once heard. The lesson he learned was “curiousity is bad” - in his narrative all of the “curious” people ran down to the shorefront to see what was going on when the water initially pulled back. Bad plan, as many if not most of these people died. You can dispute the general lesson, but that is how it played out that day in Hilo at least. (Although of course it was really “ignorant curiousity is bad”, but to play on the Spinal Tap line: It’s a fine line between “boldly curious” and “stupidly curious”.

  3. on 24 Sep 2007 at 10:26 am 3. Kiera PSI said …

    And people are still “stupidly curious” about tsunamis. During Hurricane Iwa in the early 80’s the Civil Air Patrol flew up and down the shoreline of Waikiki Beach and environs telling people over loudspeakers to get off the beach. After many futile passes, they finally did one final fly-by and yelled over the microphone “GET OFF THE FUCKING BEACH OR YOU WILL DIE!”

  4. on 24 Sep 2007 at 10:40 am 4. Oaktown Girl said …

    but to play on the Spinal Tap line: It’s a fine line between “boldly curious” and “stupidly curious”.

    How especially appropriate the post-9/11 BushCo era: asking questions is a bold thing to do. Sadly, it also can be considered stupid. The definition of patriotism has completely reversed itself to now mean never question authority.

  5. on 24 Sep 2007 at 11:09 am 5. JP Stormcrow said …

    I enjoyed both the book and the movie (never put together the anagram, however), but they have blended in my mind. I do agree that the latter was heavy on some of the standard Hollywood tropes. (In the book as I recall, he never worked in the mine himself plus the machinist who was relegated to the mine and died there after helping the boys was an egregious bit of Hollywood saccharine.)

  6. on 24 Sep 2007 at 1:33 pm 6. James Killus said …

    Actually, the machinist was in the book, so that wasn’t Hollywood, just bitter truth.

    I was annoyed that they made Quentin so unattractive. As nearly as I could tell from the “where are they now?” footage, he was not like that. But the trope is that geeks have to be geeky looking. His problem in the book was that he was shabby, from being dirt poor.

    But the real issue from the book that they chopped out was the sibling rivalry.

    I’m swamped with work today, BTW, so sorry if I can’t participate more freely.

  7. on 24 Sep 2007 at 1:59 pm 7. spyder said …

    I suppose if i had been more of geek i would have taken the road betwixt the two, as i was absolutely fascinated by both areas when i was a ‘ute. My dad as rocket scientist helped, but i would have enjoyed it all the same. Maybe it was the proximity to large shrieking blasts, and the noxious fumes that pushed me away? Or that having some pieces of rocks in little boxes that made the Geiger counter squeal and rhythmically chant, offered too much suspicion about my safety???

    But gawd, i love to blow shit up, and could always evoke the GNF in my visions as solution to all manner of issues, both social and political. And the accidental detonation of chemicals (sixth grade year) that blew out the lunch-box storage locker in the cafeteria (fortunately at the time early enough in the mid-morning when no one was around) was not just my fault (KR where are you?), but served a pronounced warning notice that being that geeky was going to cause me too much trouble. Let others do that. And they did. And let others write about it; thanks James

  8. on 24 Sep 2007 at 3:38 pm 8. Bill Benzon said …

    And the accidental detonation of chemicals (sixth grade year) that blew out the lunch-box storage locker in the cafeteria . . .

    Awesome, dude!

  9. on 24 Sep 2007 at 3:44 pm 9. Oaktown Girl said …

    Ah…6th grade explosions. Well, actually, 5th grade in my case. One day a boy in my class came to school with fire crackers and other assorted explosives. Anyway, at the time, bringing fire crackers to school was a greater crime than bringing drugs due to the damage they could do to the school (esp. the plumbing) and the potential for immediate and very serious injury and the like (”You could blow somebody’s eye out with those things!”)

    Anyway, everybody (except the teachers) knew the boy had firecrackers that day. He had proudly (and stealthily) managed to show them to everyone in the class. Almost all the kids were highly impressed. Not me - having a healthy respect (fear) of fire and the like, plus an extreme aversion to loud and sharp noises as I did. I was tolerant of explosive in the contained, controlled environment of our back yard where explosive festivities (and BBQ) took place in for 4th of July, and year-round for my brother’s blowing-things-up-needs/pleasure of his previously carefully put-together model aircraft carriers, plane, cars, etc. Ka-blewie! OK fine. But boys running around on the schoolyard with firecrackers that they may light up anytime, anywhere, with me unprepared and unknowing? Not so happy about that. But what d’ya gonna do?

    It turns out while this boy was smart, he wasn’t too bright. He was carrying the fire crackers in a thin metal box which he kept in his front pants pocket. (You know where this is going). At lunch time, between the hot sun blaring down and his body heat from running around, sure enough, the fire crackers all started going off inside his pants pocket. I heard a shriek from across the schoolyard, turned around, and saw this boy frantically pulling down his pants right in front of God and the whole school. I don’t think any punishment the principal doled out would have been worse than what he’d already experienced with that.

  10. on 24 Sep 2007 at 3:49 pm 10. Bill Benzon said …

    Nothing like flaming balls and sharp reports!

  11. on 24 Sep 2007 at 4:09 pm 11. Seattle said …

    I’m reading the Lord of the Ring to my eight year old. We’re on book II of The Fellowship of the Ring. He’s watched all the movies a number of times, so he’s having a hard time with the differences between the book and the movies. I’ve told him a number of times that the movies are different because of time issues, though there were changes in the plot, especially in the second film that really made no sense except possibly that the director felt that it wasn’t enough to have pretty much everyone at war, they had to have the main characters yelling at each other too.

    Rule number 1: if you love the book, avoid the movie like the plague. Unless of course it’s a Harry Potter movie in which you will find no surprises.

    I ran across a rocket kit in a Michael’s Hobby store a few months ago. Thought about getting it for my son for his 8th birthday. Didn’t follow through on that thought for some reason….

  12. on 24 Sep 2007 at 6:18 pm 12. James Killus said …

    I may be the only person in the entire history of chemistry geekdom who never got a thrill out of explosives, never tried to make them, and found pyrotechnics and such downright boring. I’m also the science fiction geek who didn’t give a damn about rocketry.

    There was one episode where some friends of mine wanted to make some rockets; at the time the zinc-sulfur toy rocket engines could be purchased by mail, but they were impecunious. So we scrounged some flowers of sulfur (finely powdered), some zinc oxide from on of the guys toolshed (I think it was used in paint), and I had the idea of trying it mixed with aluminum to get a thermite type reaction from the Al and ZnO, then Zn plus S should equal go time.

    We tried it out as just a mixture of the zinc oxide and sulfur on aluminum foil (which I figured we could shred if it worked), and heated it on a hot plate. It just sat there until I prodded it with an old rusty nail, at which point it went off with a flash.

    That’s as far as we got. Those guys had no follow through, and like I say, I wasn’t particularly interested in making things fly or go boom. I was more the “blow out all the fuses by trying to extract aluminum from clay” guy.

  13. on 24 Sep 2007 at 6:28 pm 13. JP Stormcrow said …

    I was more the “blow out all the fuses by trying to extract aluminum from clay” guy.

    The Hall you were.

  14. on 24 Sep 2007 at 6:58 pm 14. JP Stormcrow said …

    Actually, the machinist was in the book, so that wasn’t Hollywood, just bitter truth.

    Yep, was able to find that searching the text at Amazon. Could have fooled me, clearly book and movioe are not distinct in my mind.

    I do think the Lord of the Rings movies are good examples of the “Hollywoodification” effect - in many ways they are really quite good, good choice of scenery etc., but they often seem to add that little bit of ooomph to many scenes that drives me nuts - like it is not enough that Frodo is grabbed by the slime outside of Moria, he has to be thrown around through the air - the insane number of Orcs in Moria etc, etc.
    Another example is The Princess Bride - a very good movie overlaying a great book. (If you buy a recent edition, skip his later additions and stick to just the original.)

    A discussion I have foisted on many friends and acquaintances is to name movies that are better than the books they are based on (after the fact novelizations don’t count). Among my top ones are:
    The Godfather
    Forrest Gump (so-so movie, terrible book)

    A couple of “ties” - rare enough:
    The Man Who Fell to Earth
    High Fidelity

  15. on 24 Sep 2007 at 7:11 pm 15. James Killus said …

    Warriors. Amazing movie, so-so book.

    I’d like to call everyone’s attention to the quote that begins this piece. It’s the opening of Rocket Boys and it hooked me from that first paragraphy. I find it amazing, an encapsulation of everything that is wonderful about being a particular age and outlook, when possibilities seem endless and the world large enough to hold all those possibilities and more. I won’t say, “Oh to be young again,” but I will say that it reminds me that being young is worthwhile, and not just a time to skip through as montage.

  16. on 24 Sep 2007 at 7:40 pm 16. JP Stormcrow said …

    I was a little more entranced (but not too much so by the standards of my peers) by the blowing up/burning of things. (A lot of firecrackers, abuse of magnifying lens, some flaming glue, rubbing alcohol, gasoline etc. - one need to lie to Mom when I burnt up my tennis shoes stomping out a fire in the woods that was either set by us blowing up model airplanes or a hoody kid smoking cigarettes nearby.)

    But my most dangerous fascination came after I made a “time delay missile” by dissolving Alka-Seltzer in water in a One-A-Day “stopper top” bottle (no threads). This eventually led to a “triumph” of a great dry ice bomb in a shampoo bottle in the shower at a synchronized swimming show that was using dry ice to create “smoke on the water”. The echoing boom when I impatiently threw it against a wall was one of about the 5 most satisfying moments of my life (with retroactive thanks years later that I didn’t shred my hand.) Nearly as priceless was the puzzlement of the policeman who came charging in expecting acrid olfactory evidence. I truly did not understand what I was messing with in this one. (They are apparently a felony in some states - California is one I believe - these days.)

  17. on 25 Sep 2007 at 9:55 am 17. spyder said …

    Now suppose a boy grew up who didn’t like rockets, didn’t like radioactive minerals, and didn’t like bombs; but he was a geek and loved the notion of ray guns. Well then you would have the probable principle scientist behind this lovely product. drumrolls ad nauseum
    Introducing Raytheon Company’s latest and greatest: SILENT GUARDIAN

    The Silent Guardian™ protection system is a revolutionary less-than-lethal directed energy application that employs millimeter wave technology to repel individuals or crowds without causing injury. The system provides a zone of protection that saves lives, protects assets and minimizes collateral damage. Silent Guardian produces precise effects at longer ranges than current less-than-lethal systems and provides real-time ability to establish intent and de-escalate aggression. Various commercial and military applications include law enforcement, checkpoint security, facility protection, force protection and peacekeeping missions. The system is available now and ready for action.

    (there is a video clip and the product pdf specifications for the geeky among us)

    As for my pyrotechnicamania, well i still have the passion, just a great deal smarter about it all. At least most of the time. I do understand James’ passion for being able to throw a switch and shut down his neighborhood’s power-grid, but i do greatly love the big loud G(non)NF.

  18. on 25 Sep 2007 at 10:39 am 18. JP Stormcrow said …

    OT, but the paper at this link is a great summary on the “Rule of Law” - related to my would be post here that instead turned into an angry rant. (And how quaint of me in that post, urging Senator Casey and Rep. Altmire to impeach when they can’t even seem to find it in them to just vote against Bushco on things like FISA.)

    But I do value the “Rule of Law” (even though the term has been mostly appropriated in the last 20 years by a-holes arguing for the Clinton impeachment and draconian intellectual property rights for 1st world corporations in 3rd world countries.) - that’s what keeps things like youthful dry ice bomb indiscretions from turning into problems in the present…

  19. on 25 Sep 2007 at 1:06 pm 19. spyder said …

    Okay, this is almost too good, and might even cause James to ponder the possibilities.

  20. on 25 Sep 2007 at 3:36 pm 20. christian h. said …

    James, let me just quickly say that now I actually managed to read the post, I tremendously enjoyed it. Thanks!