Tucker, Tom 1944–

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Tucker, Tom 1944–

PERSONAL: Born February 11, 1944, in St. Louis, MO; son of Buell (a claims adjuster) and Susie (a teacher) Tucker; married Diane Sherer (a choreographer), August 10, 1968; children: Matthew, Joseph, Bonnie. Ethnicity: "White." Education: Attended Harvard University; earned B.A. (magna cum laude); Washington University (St. Louis, MO), M.A.

ADDRESSES: Home—143 S. Ridgecrest St., Rutherfordton, NC 28139. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER: Writer. Worked as camera operator and special-effects technician, 1978–85; Casey & O'Connell, creative director and copywriter, 1985–89; Isothermal Community College, instructor in English and technical writing, 1989–, writer-in-residence, 2002–.

AWARDS, HONORS: Woodrow Wilson fellow; Blumenthal Reader Award, 1991; first prize, Gardner Webb Playwriting Contest, 1993; summer faculty fellow, National Aeronautics and Space Administration, 1998, 1999; Bakken fellow, 2000.

WRITINGS:

Brainstorm! The Stories of Twenty American Kid Inventors (juvenile), Farrar, Straus & Giroux (New York, NY), 1995, 2nd edition, 1998.

Touchdown: The Development of Propulsion Controlled Aircraft at NASA Dryden, National Aeronautics and Space Administration (Washington, DC), 1999.

The Eclipse Project, National Aeronautics and Space Administration (Washington, DC), 2000.

Bolt of Fate: Benjamin Franklin and His Electric Kite Hoax, Public Affairs Books (New York, NY), 2003.

Contributor of nine scripts for Golden Video series "Our Dwelling Place," and additional scripts for other videotapes, and plays. Contributor of technical articles, poetry, short fiction, and reviews to periodicals, including Sports Illustrated, Ploughshares, Screen, Filmmakers Newsletter, and Technical Photography.

SIDELIGHTS: Tom Tucker told CA: "Bolt of Fate: Benjamin Franklin and His Electric Kite Hoax began when I first noticed how much unraveled when you started looking at authentic eighteenth-century sources behind the story of Benjamin Franklin's electrical kite and his lightning rod. I was working on a space-launch history for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration out at their Mojave Desert site when the idea first glimmered. At the time, any chance of pursuing it seemed remote.

"When I finally started the project, I was in a rural part of North Carolina, far from archives. My research sometimes diminished to interlibrary loan requests and personal pleas by phone to archivists to photocopy crumbling eighteenth-century booklets. It moved at a snail's pace, financed on a shoestring. Often I depended on the remarkable generosity of scholars and other specialists contacted by phone who—even if they disagreed with my revisionist approach—were fascinated enough by my questions to offer their assistance. The resulting book was not intended as debunking; it uncovers the adventure and triumph of a self-taught tradesman wrestling for recognition from the silk-coat connoisseurs who ruled over international science in Franklin's era. And the immensely powerful tale of the kite, as the imaginative Franklin developed it, would later become crucial to the success of the American Revolution and the establishment of the Republic.

"All of my books concern the history of science and invention. All of them give a human context to the process of intellectual discovery. I have written some about baseball—and may do so again—but I am especially interested in the process of invention and discovery in a group context and the dramatic and sometimes melodramatic way that ideas transcend and develop beyond their individual creators."