McGraw Hill/Public Domain
The popular American children's author and illustrator Maurice Sendak probably needs no introduction. His 1963 book, Where the wild things liveis a timeless classic of the film genre that has delighted generations of children. The film has sold over 19 million copies worldwide, won countless awards, and inspired a children's opera and a critically acclaimed 2009 feature film adaptation. It was also featured in an episode of The Simpsons.
But it might surprise (as it does us) to learn that Sendak, as a teenager, published his first professional illustrations in 1947 in a popular science book on nuclear physics, co-authored with his high school physics teacher: Atomics for millions. Science historian Ryan Dahn came across a copy in the Niels Bohr Library & Archives of the American Institute of Physics in College Park, Maryland, and wrote a short online article about the book for Physics Today, complete with scans of Sendak's most striking illustrations.
Born in Brooklyn to Polish-Jewish parents, Sendak admitted that his childhood was sad, overshadowed by the loss of many distant family members during the Holocaust. This, combined with health problems that kept him bedridden, forced the young Sendak to find solace in books. When Sendak was 12, he saw Walt Disney's fantasywhich inspired him to become an illustrator.
Sendak was known as a talented artist in high school, so perhaps it's not surprising that his physics teacher, Hyman Ruchlis, asked the 18-year-old Sendak to illustrate the book on nuclear physics he was writing with a chemistry professor at Queens College named Leigh Eidinoff. The intention, according to Dahn, was to “demystify nuclear science for laypeople after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.” Sendak agreed to do so in exchange for a $100 advance and a small share (about 1 percent) of the royalties—and (supposedly) a passing grade in his physics course. It was Sendak's first credited work, and the book has since become a rare collector's item.
McGraw-Hill/Public Domain
Dahn highlights several examples of Sendak's illustrations for the book. In one of these, young women depict sodium atoms meeting on the dance floor with young men as chlorine atoms, creating couples representing sodium chloride molecules. In a chapter titled “Modern Alchemy,” Sendak illustrated the discussion of nuclear transmutation by showing Albert Einstein pondering an alchemical scale, with matter on one arm and energy on the other. Nuclear chain reactions are depicted as a flood of chain letters burying a “harried postal worker.” And rows of radium atoms holding hands, gradually decreasing in number over time, illustrate the concept of radioactive half-life.
“A perfectionist, Sendak later apparently expressed disappointment with his illustrations for the book,” Dahn wrote in his article. “But one can clearly see evidence of the artist's burgeoning talent in the whimsical drawings, cartoons and diagrams he produced. The art not only explains concepts from atomic physics, but also supports the more general claim made by Ruchlis and Eidinoff in the book: once the atomic genie was out of the bottle, humanity had to choose between a peaceful future with nuclear energy and a devastating nuclear war.”
Physics Today, 2024. DOI: 10.1063/pt.auyt.nfrf (About DOIs).