Fifty Years with Tom Swift
NYE, RUSSEL B.
Fifty Years with Tom Swift by RUSSEL B. NYE One of the things that almost slipped by in 1960 was the fiftieth anniversary of Tom Swift. To almost any American male over forty that name rings a...
...Most of all, there was not much left for Tom to invent...
...Tom Swift was a normal boy who talked like one, in contrast to the incredibly stilted young prigs of Alger...
...Dick, as Merriwell fans may recall, threw a "jump ball" that rose a full foot when it reached the batter, while Frank's "double shoot" curved twice before it got to the plate...
...According to some estimates, Stratemeyer wrote about one hundred and sixty books under other names, fifty or so under his own, and devised the plots for about eight hundred others which were farmed out to hired hacks...
...The most persistent villain of all, however, is Andy Foger, a boy of Tom's age, described with magnificent terseness as "a red-haired, squint-eyed bully," who is always out to steal Tom's inventions, sabotage his submarine, beat him in the big balloon race, or trap him in the caves of ice —never by fair means...
...Clarence Young" (the Motor Boys), "Frank V. Webster," "Lester Chadwick," "May Hollis Barton," "Captain Ralph Bonehill," "Roy Rockwood" (the Dave Dashaway series), "Laura Lee Hope" (the Bobbsey Twins), "Jim Bowie," "Carolyn Keen" (the Nancy Drew Mysteries), and a number of others, including "Victor Appleton," the author of Tom Swift, were all syndicate pseudonyms...
...Swift, 'He's stolen my plans!' and Tom quickly ran off in pursuit of the stranger whose curious actions had aroused their suspicions...
...Andy invents too, but his racers tend to strip their gears on the tenth lap, and his balloons always deflate at the last moment, giving Tom the opportunity to show his sportsmanship by rescuing his enemy...
...Tom Junior moves with cold efficiency in a world of thermocoupled audio-philes, non-absorptive space filters, and interstellar drives...
...His inventions were so simple and so clearly explained (except for a little fuzzi-ness about essentials) that his readers could feel well-informed and even a trifle authoritative about contemporary science...
...Damon, or Ned, and now and then setting the place on fire...
...Since Stratemeyer knew his business, the Swift books follow the classic formula of a race, a chase, a capture, and an escape...
...Stratemeyer always made sure that the first page of each Swift book contained no more than fifteen to eighteen lines, to catch the reader's eye and carry him to page two immediately...
...But even Tom Swift could not go on forever...
...Arthur Winfield," who wrote the Rovers, was Stratemeyer himself...
...His anniversary should not go unnoticed...
...He won races on land, air, sea, and under the sea, and he found adventure in caves, tunnels, jungles, and at the bottom of the ocean...
...Few of Tom's readers ever forgot Mr...
...Alger's characters amassed riches by pluck and luck, but, products of the Gilded Age as they were, to them material success seemed to be an end in itself...
...The Happy Harry gang, described vaguely as "a number of bad men," lurks about the Swift laboratories, occasionally kidnaping Mary, Mr...
...It was not Rockefeller and Carnegie, nor Christy Mathewson and Three-fingered Brown, who were the implicit heroes of the Swift books, but the Wright brothers, the Fords, Edisons, and Steinmetzes who were pushing back the frontiers of knowledge and invention...
...A few years later he created the Motor Boys series, and by 1908 he had formed a syndicate to turn out boys' books on a mass production basis...
...True to formula, the Swift books have plenty of villains...
...Worst of all, he married Mary Nestor after thirty years of courtship and sealed his own fate...
...Stratemeyer adapted his formula for juvenile fiction from Alger (whom he admired tremendously), the old dime novel, and his own shrewd observations of boys...
...She is every boy's dream of what his sister is not—sweet, admiring, pliable, a perfect audience for his spectacular achievements—and a long-suffering subject for kidnaping by various villains...
...Watson to Tom's genius...
...There were enough villains, too, so that one set could be operating while the first was serving what was called, in the ripe prose of the period, "a brief but richly-deserved punishment for their dastardly designs...
...Tom and Ned and Mr...
...It wouldn't work, of course, but it sounded so authentic that any boy who read the book could impress his friends with casual mention of nickel oxide and lithium hydrate until they read the book too...
...Stratemeyer (who deserves a book by himself) even wrote a dozen or so Alger books under Horatio's name before he began his own amazing career in 1899 with the first three Rover Boys books...
...This paragon of young scientists first burst on the juvenile scene in 1910 in Torn Swift and His Motorcycle...
...Tom's revolutionary storage battery, for example, which drove his electric runabout at thirty miles per hour, used oxide of nickel, steel, and iron oxide electrodes in a solution of lithium hydrate...
...Tom invents—electric rifles, motorcycles, steamships, dirigibles, guns, cameras, television (1914), talking pictures (1927), and many, many more...
...The books were filled, in their naive way, with much of the excitement of the contemporary conquest of matter and space...
...or "Bless my shoelaces...
...But to those who knew his father, there is something lacking that Tom and Ned and their cohorts had—a directness, perhaps, a comprehensibility and boyishness that made them the reader's friends and contemporaries...
...He had $100,000 in the bank as early as 1920...
...The Rover Boys and the Motor Boys and the others sold well, but Tom, done with the help of Howard Garis ("Uncle Wiggly") outdid them all...
...In the Swift series, Stratemeyer caught admirably the spirit of the new age of science...
...It is a much more complicated world than the one Tom and we knew, and a little frightening in its vastness and intricacy...
...Boys will forgive many faults in their heroes, but domesticity is not one of them...
...Jet flight, atomic research, and the explorations of space were simply too much for him...
...But they also had machines, and therein lay their power...
...And who can forget those magnificent last sentences in each chapter...
...In fact, a good many of Tom's inventions were often only a year or so ahead of their real-life counterparts, though two of them— his diamond-making machine and his silencer for airplane motors—have not yet been duplicated...
...Yet even after a halfcentury there is still a call to the blood of this balding generation in those electric words, " 'Stop!' cried Ned...
...When Stratemeyer died in 1930, he had probably been read by more Americans than any other publisher in the Twentieth Century...
...Damon lived in a predictable, controllable world of honest motors that used plain gasoline and could be fixed with baling wire when they broke down during the big race...
...By 1920 his production line was the largest single source in the United States of juvenile books...
...My plans!' cried Mr...
...There was little violence in the books, about fifty jokes per volume, plenty of exclamation points, ten verbs of action per page, and no kisses...
...The books had villains, not so villainous as to be really dangerous, and capable of being routed with a bucket of whitewash or a manly display of doubled fists...
...What mattered was Tom's success at breaking through the barriers of the scientific unknown...
...Others had tried this before, but what Stratemeyer did with juveniles made even Henry Ford's assembly line look amateurish...
...These, however, were not the important things to his readers...
...The Swift books, true to their name, had speed to spare—motorcycles, submarines, gliders, balloons, airplanes (Tom actually invented eight), locomotives, racers of a dozen varieties, and so on...
...The books made research and discovery seem exciting and adventurous, so much so that they sold upwards of thirty million copies over the three decades of Tom's existence...
...The athletic Merriwells, who appeared at the opening of the great Golden Age of mass professional sport, had a powerful appeal for the adolescent muscle-cult that sent away for mail-order courses from Lionel Strongfort...
...Even today, chapter headings such as "A Vain Search!," or "The Suspicious Stranger," or "Off to the Big Race...
...It was the excitement of science, the thrill of discovery, that set Tom Swift apart from the Alger store-clerks, the hyperactive Merriwells, or even the redoubtable Rovers...
...After Stratemeyer's death there was an obvious falling-off in the quality of the series, and the last few were no more than weak science fiction...
...In the Swift series, Stratemeyer combined Alger, Jules Verne, Frank Merriwell, Young Tom Edison, the Rovers, and a few others, to make a mixture that would catch the interest of any red-blooded, alert American boy...
...But Tom Swift had everything...
...He endured, still inventing and still frustrating the evil machinations of the Happy Harry gang, until 1941...
...Mary Nestor, "whose acquaintance Tom had made after stopping a runaway horse," is Tom's eternal sweetheart...
...Damon...
...Tom Swift was one of the products of the fertile imagination of Edward Stratemeyer, who succeeded Horatio Alger as the king of juvenile fiction...
...The chapter titles had to be real come-ons, and each chapter had to end on a cliff-hanger...
...Furthermore, new heroes and new formulas appeared—Tarzan, Buck Rogers, Terry and the Pirates, and the dime-novel Western tradition, freshly laundered and made respectable by Roy Rogers, Gene Autry, and the Lone Ranger...
...It's the laboratory!' cried Ned, and he and Tom raced toward the flames...
...make the reader breathe a little faster, even if only in nostalgic memory of how they looked by flashlight under the bedclothes...
...Stratemeyer used at least thirteen different names (some say as many as twenty-five...
...Exactly how many books were produced by the Stratemeyer syndicate is hard to tell...
...a brave, not-too-imaginative boy, Ned serves as a sort of gee-whiz Dr...
...Eradicate Simpson, an elderly colored man who does odd jobs for the Swifts, provides more comedy...
...Our Tom's world is old hat, outmoded, dead...
...that detects fluorescence in space...
...What he invents is always almost plausible, just far enough around the corner to be excitingly visionary, not quite far enough to be absurd...
...As events proved, he calculated the mixture exactly right...
...Nobody ever got more excitement for his forty cents than a reader of Tom Swift...
...Damon's "Bless my gizzard...
...The Rovers had adventures and fun in every part of the globe from the Everglades to Africa...
...works in a bank...
...Ned Newton, Tom's "chum," (does anybody use the word any more...
...Tom Swift, you may remember, lives in Shipton, New York, with his widowed father, who is also an inventor...
...To almost any American male over forty that name rings a loud bell, for Tom, to a whole generation of boys, was as much a part of growing up as long pants and noticing girls...
...Wakefield Damon, "a wealthy, eccentric gentleman," continually blesses some portion of his anatomy, clothing, or object, thereby providing comic relief...
...What is that mysterious flashing red light?'" or " 'Look out,' snarled Andy Foger in a vicious tone of voice, 'or I'll run you down...
...Or, "Suddenly there was a loud explosion and a blinding flash...
...In 1954, Grossett and Dunlap, Stratemeyer's original publishers, started a Tom Swift Junior series...
...The youngster so far has invented, among other things, Tomasite plastic (to make casings for nuclear reactors), a Swift Spectograph that analyzes anything in an instant, and a Damon-scope (Bless Mr...
...A victim of technological unemployment, Tom ended his career in a house trailer (Tom Swift and His House on Wheels), in rather inglorious contrast to the speedy motorcycles and giant planes of his youth...
...There is another gang, led by one Addison Berg, a rival inventor who operates when Happy Harry and his men are occupied elsewhere...
Vol. 24 • December 1960 • No. 12
