QUESTION: What has tea bags, teddy bears, baby gangsters, and spectacular technology (but no young scientists) in it? ANSWER: The year 1903.

   That year, 1903—when the tea bag, the teddy bear, the ice-cream cone, the coat hanger, Brad’s Drink (the original name of Pepsi Cola), and all kinds of other things were invented or patented: that was the year when Mankind said to the horse, “Thanks for all the centuries, but now we don’t need you anymore.” To replace the power of horses, the world now had horsepower, and (please fasten your seat belt, Dear Reader) all this happened in that single 12-month period: the Golden Age of Motorcycling began, and the Age of the Automobile began, and the Age of Flight began, and the Space Age began.

   The Space Age began in 1903 when a Russian secondary-school mathematics teacher named Konstantin Tsiolkovsky published The Exploration of Cosmic Space by Means of Reaction Devices, the world’s first serious scientific work on space travel. Thanks to that paper, only 23 years later Robert Goddard launched the world’s first liquid-fueled rocket.

   The Age of Flight began that year, 1903, when the Wright brothers flew at Kitty Hawk (North Carolina, USA). Their fragile, flimsy aircraft chugged along through the air at 10.9 kph/6.8 mph. Thanks to that flight, only 24 years later Charles Lindbergh flew across the Atlantic, and just four years after Lucky Lindy’s 1927 flight, the air speed record was 655.8 kph/407.5 mph.

   The Age of the Automobile began with the founding of the Ford Motor Company in 1903. Prior to Ford, the automobile had been a plaything for the wealthy; because of Ford, it became a necessity for everyone; and because of the mass production of cars, people worldwide started demanding paved roads. The first modern road across America, the Lincoln Highway, opened just 10 years later (1913).

   Motorcycling? Just 7 years before 1903, inventor Sylvester Roper, who was 73, stunned the world by riding his steam-powered motorcycle at the astonishing speed of 48 kph/30mph (which so exhilarated him that he had a heart attack and died then and there); only 3 years after 1903, Scientific American magazine was hailing Glenn Curtiss as “the Fastest Man in the World” for his new motorcycle speed record: 219 kph/136.6 mph.

   These three things that happened in 1903 ushered in the Golden Age of Motorcycling: the invention of the JAP engine in England; the launch of the “weapons factory” motorcycle in Sweden; and the founding of the Harley-Davidson Motorcycle Company in America.

   Husqvarna is Swedish for “weapons factory,” and the Husqvarna Vapenfabrik had been manufacturing guns and cannons since 1689; but in 1903, after 214 years as an arms dealer, they retooled and began producing one of the world’s finest motorcycles, the Husqvarna. But the finest one was made in England, and its power plant was the JAP.

   That year in Tottenham, Middlesex, John Alfred Prestwich began building what quickly would become the world’s finest motorcycle engine, the JAP engine. JA Prestwich Industries Ltd. supplied the engines for the Broughs, the “the Rolls Royce of motorcycles” made by William F. Brough (pronounced bruff) and his son George. The ultimate in motorcycle luxury and craftsmanship, each one was custom-made to order. One of the Broughs’ best customers would be T.E. Lawrence of Arabia fame.

   In 1903, he, T.E., was roughly your age (15), and he didn’t buy his first Brough until 1922. He named that one Boa, not for the snake but for the wonderfully throaty sound of the JAP engine—“Boa,” short for the name Jesus gave his two most impetuous disciples, John and James: Boanerges, “Sons of Thunder.” Lawrence was riding his eighth Brough in 1935 when, to avoid two teenagers on bicycles, he ran off the road, killing himself.

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   So 1903 was the year for transportation technology. But all kinds of science things were also going on. That year, Marie Curie won both the Nobel Prize for Physics and the Davy Medal, awarded by the Royal Society of London for “an outstandingly important recent discovery in any branch of chemistry.” Speaking of chemistry, 1903 was also the year Coca-Cola stopped using cocaine in their secret formula.

   The drink had been invented in 1885 and named “Pemberton’s French Wine Coca.” A newspaper article that year quoted John Stith Pemberton as saying that his new drink was “especially beneficial to scientists, scholars, poets, divines, lawyers, physicians, and others devoted to extreme mental exertion.” The new name—“Coca,” from the source of cocaine, the coca plant, and “Cola,” from the kola nut, which is rich in caffeine, was adopted the following year, 1886.

   Lots of other science and technology things happened that year. Invented or patented in 1903: the color photograph; laminated glass; the gas turbine, the electric vacuum cleaner, the electric washing machine, and the windshield wiper (invented by a woman, Mary Anderson); Crayola crayons; Kraft cheese, and espresso.

   In England that year, the Johnston Laboratories for biochemistry, medical research and pathology opened at the University of Liverpool. Far to the west, in California, the world’s first marine biological laboratory opened in 1903, the Marine Biological Association of San Diego. Speaking of the ocean, an amazing deep-sea creature was discovered in 1903: Vampyroteuthis infernalis, which means “vampire squid from Hell.”

 * * *

   In many respects, the world of 1903 would be utterly alien to us. For one thing, all the great American gangsters were still infants or little boys—John Dillinger was still in diapers that year, Al Capone was 4 years old, Machine-Gun Kelly was 6, and Legs Diamond and Lucky Luciano both were 7. People like Alvin “Creepy” Karpis, Meyer Lansky, Baby Face Nelson, and both Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow, hadn’t been born yet.

   All entertainment in that partially-alien-to-us world was live—to see it, you had to be there in person, as radio, television and movies were all still in the future. Although Hollywood was incorporated in 1903, the first feature film wouldn’t be shot there until 1911. (The first-ever cowboy movie, or “Western,” was filmed in 1903—The Great Train Robbery, set in the Old West, but shot in the wilds of New Jersey.)

   The telephone had been around since 1876; but in 1903, all calls still had to go through manual switchboard exchanges; in the US, the first transcontinental call (New York to San Francisco) wouldn’t be made until 1915; and until the 1920s all telephones were still the “candlestick” type that needed both hands, the receiver on its own cord held up to your ear, the transmitter held in front of your mouth.

   But the single greatest difference between then and now is this: in 1903 Science—the whole field, all the disciplines—still rigidly excluded nonscientists, and was strictly off-limits to all young people.

   That changed, dramatically and for all time, because of a chance meeting that occurred in 1903. From that chance meeting—between a former farmer who didn’t start high school until he was 20 and a newspaper publisher who smoked 50 cigars a day—came everything that is significant to young scientists today, up to and including ISEF, the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair, the modern world’s largest research event for young scientists.

   The amazing story of how William Ritter met Edward Scripps, and all that happened then, is told in Chapter 1 of The Science Club. Here’s an excerpt:

   “The phenomenal popularity of the Tom Swift books made it crystal-clear to everyone that there was tremendous teen interest in technology. But the world’s scientists still firmly resisted the idea that there was any room for teenagers in Science. Again there were exceptions. In New York the same year Tom Swift and His Motor Cycle was published, the National Audubon Society created the very first Audubon Junior Club. But essentially Science remained aloof and smug in its own formidable centuries-old castle, until a former farmer brought the walls tumbling down. 

“The Farmer Who Popularized Science

   “For the first two decades of his life, William Emerson Ritter was a farmer, in Wisconsin. Then, at age 20, he started high school. Determined to learn and a voracious reader, he quickly fell in love with Geology and Zoology, which explained so many things about the natural world he had known on the farm. But he was fascinated by all the sciences, and he became convinced that Science was the key to a better, saner world. He’d seen enough insanity and suffering, having memories of the Civil War (he was 9 years old when Abraham Lincoln was assassinated). So to help make the world a better place, he decided to become a scientist.  

   “He was a good student. He ended up getting a PhD in Zoology at Harvard. When the University of California Berkeley created a new Zoology Department in 1891, Ritter was appointed as its first chairperson, at age 35. His most famous book, The California Woodpecker and I, was published by the University of California Press in 1936, when he was 80. By then, though, he was less famous as a zoologist than he was as the man who had popularized Science for the whole world.

   “That happened because William Emerson Ritter had two ideas that seemed commonsensical to him but that to the majority of the scientists of the day seemed ridiculous. His first idea was that the best place to study nature was in nature. Nonsense, said other scientists, since for centuries all serious scientific work had been conducted in laboratories, where all variables could be precisely controlled—and where the public could be excluded. His second common-sense idea was that if Science was to make a better world for everyone, then Science should be accessible to anyone.

   “So Ritter, teaching at UC Berkeley in the early 1890s, wanted to create a ‘marine biological laboratory,’ where his students could study ocean life literally in the ocean, rather than in campus classrooms. Made sense! Not to his fellow scientists. He spent 11 long years lobbying for the idea and trying to find the money to buy a site and build the facility. But at last, in 1903 (the year the Wright brothers flew at Kitty Hawk), Ritter met a San Diego businessman who thought scientists were ridiculous.

“The Businessman Who Made It All Happen

   “Hearing Bill Ritter’s proposal that he sponsor a marine biological laboratory, Edward Willis Scripps turned it down. He was a no-nonsense businessman, and scientists, in his experience, were not only un-businesslike but, worse, they weren’t even in touch with real life. But then ‘E.W.,’ as his friends called him, heard Ritter’s views about how Science should communicate clearly to the general public, and he promptly changed his mind—and changed the world. That, after all, was his expertise, communicating clearly to the general public, because E.W. was a newspaper publisher.  

   “The marine lab came into being right away, Ritter and Scripps founding the Marine Biological Association of San Diego that same year, 1903. Later renamed the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, it moved to its present location, in La Jolla, in 1907. The two friends’ much greater project, opening Science to everyone on Earth—popularizing it—took a bit longer.

   “E.W. came from a family of newspaper innovators. His sister Ellen, for example, invented the feature story. His brother James launched a newspaper for working-class people, The Detroit News, that pioneered the use of plain English for clear communication—stories written ‘like people talk,’ which traditional journalists ridiculed but subscribers loved. E.W. himself created the first chain of newspapers in the United States, and he founded the United Press news service. So it was the most natural thing in the world for him to create the ‘Science Service,’ to communicate Science news to the general public clearly, accurately, and without sensationalism.

   “The first director of the Science Service was the former farmer, William Emerson Ritter.

“The Science Service

   “Proudly publicized for decades as ‘the institution for the popularization of science,’ the Science Service went far beyond simply spreading Science news. In fact, no organization in the world did—and has continued to do—more to encourage young scientists than the Science Service, which in 2008 changed its name to The Society for Science & the Public (SSP).

   “Kits. The Science Service launched the Things of Science program, through which each month tens of thousands of young subscribers were mailed a science kit in a blue box. Each kit contained a booklet of experiments, and everything you needed to perform them. This program continued for nearly half a century, from 1940 until 1989.

   “Talent. The Science Service created the Science Talent Search, America’s first science contest for high-school seniors, in 1942. Originally sponsored by Westinghouse and today by Intel, the Science Talent Search is now the world’s most prestigious science research competition for high-school seniors.

   “Fairs and Competitions: The Science Service created the National Science Fair. The first one was held in 1950 in Philadelphia (hometown of Mr. Reeves). Today called the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair, it is the largest pre-college scientific research event in the world, more than 1,500 students from 52 nations competing for $4 million in prizes each May. In 2003 the Science Service partnered with Discovery Communications Inc. to create the annual Discovery Channel Young Scientist Challenge, for girls and boys in grades 5 through 8 (the grand prize: a $20,000 scholarship).

   “Science Clubs: The Science Service sponsored the Science Clubs of America. Within about a decade, there were more than 13,000 high-school Science clubs in every state of the union, as well as in Canada, the British West Indies, the Philippines, and Portugal. By 1949, more than 600 Science clubs in other countries were affiliated with the Science Clubs of America.

   “Radio. The Science Clubs of America had a regular weekly broadcast, from station WRUL in Boston. Each Monday evening, ‘Anyone having a shortwave receiver is invited to listen.’ In 1926, the Science Service had begun writing scripts about science discoveries and happenings for other stations to broadcast on a program called Radio News of the Week. Note that this was only 6 years after the first radio news program of any kind was ever broadcast (by station 8MK in Detroit, Michigan, on 31 August 1920). The Science Service also broadcast Adventures in Science, 37 national weekly programs on CBS radio 1942 to 1958 that profiled high-school students’ achievements in science talent searches, clubs and fairs.

   “News Service and Magazine. The Science Service was originally a news syndication service, feeding daily feature articles, short news items, and a weekly science page to newspapers and magazines around the country. This was long before general publications had in-house science writers, much less science staffs. The first Science Bulletin was published on 2 April 1921. The following year, starting 13 March 1922, it was renamed the Science News-Letter. Four years later (1926) it was reformatted as a magazine. On 12 March 1966 (one month before this book’s authors, in high school in Bangkok, published their first SSS Bulletin), the Science News-Letter was renamed Science News. In 1982, by then 60 years old, Science News had subscribers in 100 countries—and a Chinese-language edition in the People’s Republic of China. Today with more than 1 million weekly readers, it also has an online edition that was launched in 1996. Today, Audible.com distributes audio editions of Science News.

   "Cyberspace. The Science Service launched Science News for Kids in 1999, an online journal for young scientists aged 9 to 14 (some 12,000 of whom visit the website every 24 hours).”