Danny Dunn and the Heat Ray by Jay Williams and Raymond Abrashkin (1962)
The boy scientific genius is a constant meme in juvenile and young adult book series. Think Tom Swift or Rick Brant. For a boy scientific genius who is not really a genius, I would go with Jay Williams and Raymond Abrashkin's Danny Dunn. Danny is smart and curious, but he is not a genius. Unlike many other lead characters in such series, Danny is all too human. He can be petty, impulsive, stubborn, and unthinking -- all traits he must overcome on his road to adulthood.
Danny lives the town of Midston with his widowed mother who acts housekeeper for Professor Euclid Bulfinch, a renowned scientist associated with Miston University. Bulfinch, who looks on Danny as a son, admires the boy's curiosity and often allows him to view and sometimes takes part in his experiments, despite the fact that Danny sometimes gets into trouble without meaning to. Danny's best friend is Joe Pearson, a sometime comic foil who does not understand or appreciate technology. Joe loves food and wants to be a writer: he often composes amusing ppoems about their aventures and the people they meet. In the third book in the series, Irene Miller moved next door to Danny. Irene's father is an astronomer at Miston University and Irene has caught the scientific bug from him; Irene is especially intersted in physics. (This type of series is male-oriented, but it musyt be nore that Irene is an eaual partner here -- something quite unusual for books of this type.) For most of the series the three friends are in the sixth grade. Because a juvenile series always needs a villain, there's Eddie "Snitcher" Phillips, a bully who is jealous of Danny and his friends. (The kid villains in this type of series are seldom really evil; they're just stupid, lazy, and unthinking.) The location of the town of Miston is never spelled out, but hints in the series place it somewhere in Maine.
The books in the series vary from science fiction to pure adventure, but always with a healthy dose of science background. In Danny Dunn and the Heat Ray, the seventh in the series, Danny learns what holds an airplane up in flight and also about lasers -- a rather uncommon subject in 1962, and the "heat ray" of the title.
We start with Danny using a small unused weather balloon that Professor Bulfinch had given him. Danny had filled the balloon with helium and was using it to carry his books to school. This led to a conversation about airplanes when neither Danny or Irene admitted they did not know how airplanes actually worked. In science class, the teacher announced that they would take part in a state science fair and each sudent was to come up with a project for the fair. Danny and Irene (and Joe, somewhat unwillingly) decided to something on flight. Danny asked his mother to call her cousin Cahrles Matthews, a professional pilot and volunteer for the Civilian Air Patrol, to see if he would be willing to eplain the mechanics of flight to them. Matthews was due for a fire patrol flight the next monring for the CAP, and he invited Danny along. Fire season was starting and it was important to get es early a notice about brush and forest fires as soon as possible. While Matthews and Danny were flying over an isolated cow pasture, they saw a Rolls Royce in the middle of the pasture, with its driver frantically waving them down.
The driver of the Rolls was a short-tempered, gruff, and imperious industrialist named Glenway Pippit. Pippit had been on his way for an apppointment with the president of Miston University, and had become impatient with his directions and decided to take a short cut -- one that led him to the middle of a cow pasture, completely lost. He had flagged down the plane merely to get directions back to the university. Matthews and Danny were amazed at the gall of the testy man, but Danny agreed to ride with Pippit and show him the way. Pippit, it seems, was considering giving the university a one million dollar research grant.
Danny and Irene decided that they would buld a wind tunnel for the science fair to demonstrate how the design of an airplane wing helped a plane stay in the air. They wanted to use smoke blown into the tunnel to show the movement of air currents, so they went to Professor Bulfinch for ideas. Bulfinch was working on a new adaptation for lasers when they arrived. Shortly thereafter the unoversity president and Mr. Pippit arrived for a demonstation of Bulfinch's laser. Pippit asked what the value the laser had i the real world...cold it be used as a weapon of war? Bulfinch was shocked, saying that many other uses could be found for the invention, but warfare was not one that he condoned. Later, Pippit interviewed of the scientist at the university and was upset that none wanted their experiments to be used for military purposes.
Danny and Irene were afraid that Pippit might not give the university the much-needed grant money. Then Danny had an idea that might make a profitable use for Bullfinch's laser that Pippit could get behind -- he could use the laser to dry up bogs, leaving dry land available for development and construction. (Danny forgot that bogs were fed by underwater springs, making the scheme impossible.) Bulfinch was a meeting, but Danny did not want to wait. He and Joe dug a hole in the back yeard and filled it with water, crating a muddy mess. Irene got Pippit to come and see the experiment and the Professor's "heat ray" dried the mud in no time. Pippit told the trio that their idea would not work and why, but then he got an idea of his own. He aimed the heat ray at the hole, eventually exposing several rocks that now glowed with extreme heat. Pippit then began to consider the heat ray as a weapon of war, destroying the enemy and their supplies without impunity. He got so excited that he accidently stepped in front of the ray and caught his pants on fire. Luckily, Joe had two buckets of water on hand and he poured the water on Pippit. Unluckily, Joe's hand slipped and one of the buckets clocked to industrialist on the he head, knocking him into the mud. Pippit left in a fury.
Danny tried to call Pippit's hotel room the next day and discovered that he had left in a hurry.
Reports came in that a forest fire had started in the general direction of where Pippit was headed. Fearful that the pigheaded industrialist might be caught in the blaze, Professor Bulfinch hopped in his car to find him. The Professor and Pippit soon found themselves surrounded by the hungry flames, and Danny had a desperate idea on how to save the pair. Danny and Charles Matthews and Professor Bulfinch's heat ray soon took off in Matthews' tiny Piper Colt aircraft.
What was Danny's plan? We know it's going to work and leave us with a happy ending, but how?
Jay Williams (1914-1978) was the author of at least 79 books, including 39 children's novels, 11 picture books, 8 historical novels, 7 mystery novels, 4 nonfiction books, and a play. Perhaps best-known for his Danny Dunn series, his mystery novels in his "Case for Cannon" series written as by "Michael Delving" were quite popular, as were his historical novels The Wirches and Solomon and Sheba. Williams was noted for his rigorous research for his books. His co-author, Raymond Abrashkin (1911-1960) was a filmmaker. Abrashkin died at age 49 from ALS after co-writing the fifth book in the Danny Dunn series. Williams insisted that Abrashkin be listed as co-author on remaining books in the series because he had done so much to formulate the series as a whole.
I find the entire Danny Dunn series charming and wish I had started reading it when I was in the sixth or seventh grade.
The Danny Dunn series:
- Danny Dunn and the Anti-Gravity Paint (1956)
- Danny Dunn on a Desert Island (1957)
- Danny Dunn and the Homework Machine (1958)
- Danny Dunn and the Weather Machine (1959)
- Danny Dunn on the Ocean Floor (1960)
- Danny Dunn and the Fossil Cave (1961)
- Danny Dunn and the Heat Ray (1962)
- Danny Dunn, Time Traveler (1963)
- Danny Dunn and the Automated House (1965)
- Danny Dunn and the Voice from Space (1967)
- Danny Dunn and the Smallifying Machine (1969)
- Danny Dunn and the Swamp Monster (1971)
- Danny Dunn, Invisible Boy (1974)
- Danny Dunn, Scientific Detctive (1976)
- Danny Dunn and the Universal Glue (1977)
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