The technological history of the 20th Century started with tinkerers and mechanics building new machines, and progressed to more complex machines backed by scientific theory and advanced math. And all of it was embodied in one person: Tom Swift, the teenage genius inventor and hero of more than 100 books.
Tom appeared in 1910 in his first book Tom Swift and his Motorcycle. A motorcycle doesn’t sound like much of an invention, but in 1910 most people had never seen or even heard of one. Tom, though, got his hands on a broken one somehow (there must have been at least a few in Shopton, NY, where he lived with his father Barton Swift), and fixed it himself. He then hopped on and rode off to some sort of adventure — and judging by the way practically all of the books went, he would have either encountered a mystery to solve, someone to rescue, or bad guys who wanted to steal something — usually one of his inventions.
He hadn’t really started inventing yet, though. In his next book, he fixed up a motorboat and cruised off to another adventure. It was pretty exotic, most small boats in 1910 didn’t have motors yet.
Tom’s next adventure was based on something he built from scratch. It was just a few years after the Wright Brothers first airplane flight, and an airplane might have been a bit much for a teenager — even a self-taught genius like Tom — so he built a balloon.
Practically all of Tom’s books were written by “Victor Appleton,” who had a tin ear for dialog. The books were full of lines like: “‘All right, Dad. Go ahead and laugh. I don’t mind,’ said Tom, good-naturedly.” “’Folks laughed at Bell, when he said he could send a human voice over a copper string …’” In reality though, there was no Victor Appleton; the Tom Swift books were written by an assortment of writers (if you read the April 25 birthday piece, you know most of the early ones were by Howard Garis).
Throughout his career — which spanned the entire century, and is still progressing (there were two new Tom Swift books published just last year) — Tom had a strange relationship with time. He never aged from one book to another, but there were several instances where it caught up with him all at once. He went from 1910 to 1953 as a teenage inventor, then in 1954 he suddenly aged out and turned the whole inventing/adventuring franchise over to his son, Tom Swift Jr., who was more of a theorist, scientist, and mathematician than his dad.
That went on for nearly 30 years, when Tom Jr. suddenly grew up and turned the series over to his son, Tom Swift III. At some point the author did the same thing, and the new Tom Swift books were written by “Victor Appleton II”. The younger Appleton had a much different style; the dialog was finally more believable — but the stories, not so much. Tom III spent his time exploring the universe in his faster-than-light starship, and didn’t actually do much inventing. Kids these days, right?
After that things started to get really strange for Tom. In 1991 Tom turned back into a “Jr,” even though he wasn’t the same Tom Swift Jr. that appeared in 1954. Tom’s inventions didn’t always turn out well, either, and the side effects were sometimes disastrous. Those disappointments probably drove Tom into hiding for more than a decade. He resurfaced in 2006, and was back in Shopton, NY where his ancestor — or — well anyway, he was back to the scene of the first book. His inventions weren’t disastrous any more, but they weren’t very innovative either; they were just variations on existing gadgets.
Probably out of embarrassment — after all, the guy who had invented the Polar-Ray Dynasphere and the Tri-Phibian Atomicar had been reduced to building minor variations on cell phones — Tom disappeared for another decade. He’s, though, in “The Drone Pursuit” and “The Sonic Breach,” and this time he’s started a whole academy for inventors. Quite an accomplishment for somebody who never, as far as we know, ever went to school at all.
