The Genius Factory Read Online Free PDF

Safe to Wear Glasses.” He also became incredibly rich. During Armorlite’s lean years, Graham took his salary in stock; by the time Armorlite struck gold, he controlled nearly the entire company. Graham risked all on Armorlite and made it back thousands of times over.
    But Graham was dissatisfied. His personal life was messy. Graham had divorced his first wife after she had borne him three children, then played the field with a sportsman’s relish. He was an incorrigible flirt, and his sharp good looks, dapper dress, and impeccable manners helped his cause. He remarried, unhappily, to a woman his brother Tom described as an “alcoholic showgirl.” That miserable union produced two more children, but it was headed toward divorce when his wife swallowed an overdose of sleeping pills and died. He wiped this second wife from his history books, too. (Graham possessed the great American gift of amnesia. He forgot nasty parts of his past as if he were erasing a chalkboard.) With a lack of awareness that would be funny if it weren’t sad, he described the second marriage in his memoir with a single sentence: “I had recently concluded an embittering marriage and swore never to put my neck into that noose again.” He fathered another child—out of wedlock, according to his brother—and then found wife number three in 1960. Marta Ve Everton, an ophthalmologist twenty-one years his junior, was whip smart, elegant, religious, and altruistic. She was the great love of Graham’s life. She bore him two children, bringing his total to eight.
    Graham had an ambivalent relationship with his brood. He liked the idea of family in theory but bungled it in practice. Like his own father, he was emotionally distant with his kids. His three daughters thrived, especially Marta Ve’s two girls. But three of his boys found serious trouble. One apparently killed himself. Another suffered a traumatic head injury as a boy, never quite recovered, and died in middle age after a difficult life. A third moved to the Pacific Northwest and cut his ties with the family. Graham seemed ashamed of some of his sons; he would sometimes avoid introducing them to his friends.
    Graham’s success in a too-narrow field, his huge, almost-but-not-quite-happy family, his fascination with the rich and famous: in the late 1950s, all these helped inspire the passion that would define the rest of his life. Graham came to believe—more strongly than he believed anything—that society was doomed unless smart people had more children. He vowed to help them do it.
    Graham’s obsession began with a mistake. Graham’s childhood idol had been an inventor named Ephraim Shay. Shay had designed the “Shay locomotive”—a powerfully geared steam train that could climb steep hills. Mining and logging firms bought Shay trains by the hundreds. He made a fortune and retired to Harbor Springs in the late nineteenth century. He was the town’s most celebrated resident, famed for his fertile mind and generous heart. He engineered Harbor Springs’ water supply. He built experimental boats that he docked in the town harbor. In winter, he hammered together hundreds of sleds for the town’s children, including young Robert Graham. When Shay died in 1916, it hit ten-year-old Robert hard. He believed that Shay had died childless. The inventor’s barrenness lodged in Graham’s head and eventually goaded him to act. As an adult, Graham would write, “God had planted some of His best seed in our town, but it had died out. They still name streets and schools for Ephraim Shay. The great bronze tablet which recounts his accomplishments still stands. But the genes which determined his extraordinary nature have died out. Ever since, the extinction of exceptionally valuable human genes has been a concern of mine.”
    In fact, Graham was wrong about Shay. The inventor’s “seed” was alive and well and spreading all over America. Shay had fathered a son before moving to Harbor