The Mansion of Happiness (38 page)

47.
The Game of Life (East Longmeadow, MA: Hasbro, 1994). In the possession of the author. Hasbro Games Division, interviews with author, February 5, 2007.

48.
The Game of Life: Twists and Turns (Pawtucket, RI: Hasbro, 2007). In the possession of the author.

49.
Amy Johannes, “Child Advocates Call New Hasbro/Visa Deal ‘Sleazy,’ ”
Promo
, March 9, 2007,
http://promomagazine.com/news/
child_advocates_hasbro_visa_deal_030907/
.

50.
George Burtch, interview with the author, February 5, 2007.

51.
Thoreau,
Walden
, 36.

52.
See
www.secondlife.com
.

53.
Before he left his games business to more ambitious men, Bradley had another big hit, just after the Civil War, with croquet, whose rules he patented and whose equipment manufacture he perfected while a fever for the game swept the nation, on the merits of the claim that croquet was just like life. E.g., “Croquet is the game of life, you see,” says a
character in a Harriet Beecher Stowe novel in 1871 (“My Wife and I,”
Christian Union
, August 9, 1871; the reference is to chapter 32).

54.
On this subject, see Scott Sandage,
Born Losers: A History of Failure in America
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005).

55.
Henry George,
Progress and Poverty: An Inquiry into the Cause of Industrial Depressions, and of Increase of Want with Increase of Wealth
(San Francisco: 1879; London, 1884), 5. Edward Wiebé,
The Paradise of Childhood
(Springfield, MA: Bradley, 1887). See also Jennifer L. Snyder, “A Critical Examination of Milton Bradley’s
Contributions to Kindergarten and Art Education in the Context of His Time,” EdD diss., Florida State University, 2005.

56.
Shea,
It’s All in the Game
, especially chapter 9; quote from 180.

1.
“Drama of Life Before Birth,”
Life
, April 30, 1965. Readings of these photographs include Meredith W. Michaels, “Fetal Galaxies: Some Questions About What We See,” in
Fetal Subjects, Feminist Positions
, ed. Lynn M. Morgan and Meredith W.
Michaels (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999),
113–32; Barbara Duden,
Disembodying Women: Perspectives on Pregnancy and the Unborn
, trans. Lee Hoinacki (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), chapter 2; and Valerie Hartouni,
Cultural Conceptions: On Reproductive Technologies and the Remaking of Life
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), chapter 3. For a broader and influential analysis of related images, see Ludmilla Jordanova,
Sexual Visions: Images of Gender in Science and
Medicine Between the Eighteenth and Twentieth Centuries
(London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1989). Related readings include Susan Merrill Squier,
Babies in Bottles: Twentieth-Century Visions of Reproductive Technologies
(New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1994). Nilsson’s photographs were not actually unprecedented, as the editorial department at
Life
acknowledged, at least in internal memos, when readers wrote in to
remark on this fact. See, e.g., Mabel Foust to Editorial Reference, memo, May 18, 1965,
Lennart Nilsson file, Time Inc. Archives, New York.

2.
The editors at
Life
considered this feature the latest in a series of exposés about human reproduction, beginning with the publication of still shots from
The Birth of a Baby
in 1938, and which I discuss in chapter 3. J. McQuiston to
Life
index, “Human Reproduction,” memo, May 10, 1965, “Birth of a Baby” file,
Time Inc. Archives. Lennart Nilsson,
A Child Is Born: The Drama of Life Before Birth in Unprecedented Photographs
(New York: Delacorte Press, 1965), with text by Axel Ingelman-Sunderg and Claes Wirsén. Display ad,
New York Times
, May 2, 1966.

3.
The fetus on the cover, the editors wrote, “was photographed just after it had to be surgically removed from its mother’s womb at the age of 4½ months. Though scientists hope some day to be able to keep such early babies alive, this one did not survive.” “Drama of Life Before Birth,”
Life
, April 30, 1965.

4.
“The Unborn Plaintiff,”
Time
, April 30, 1965.

5.
Nilsson himself kept his distance from the
abortion debate, including in 1990, when another series of his photographs of embryos was published in
Life.
Asked when life begins, he said, “Look at the pictures. I am not the man who shall decide when human life started. I am a reporter. I am a photographer.” Ray Kerrison,
“Backdrop to Bush’s Court Selection,”
New York Post
, July 25, 1990.

6.
The classic account is Joseph Needham,
A History of Embryology
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1934; repr., New York: Arno Press, 1975). But see also John Farley,
Gametes & Spores: Ideas About Sexual Reproduction, 1750–1914
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982); Matthew Cobb,
Generation: The Seventeenth-Century
Scientists Who Unraveled the Secrets of Sex, Life and Growth
(London: Bloomsbury, 2006); Clara Correia,
The Ovary of Eve: Egg and Sperm and Preformation
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997); F. J. Cole,
Early Theories of Sexual Generation
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1930); Elizabeth Gasking,
Investigations into Generation, 1651–1828
(London: Hutchinson, 1967); Angus McLaren,
Reproductive Rituals: The Perception of Fertility in
England from the Sixteenth to the Nineteenth Century
(London: Methuen, 1984); and, especially, Thomas Laqueur, “Orgasm, Generation, and the Politics of Reproductive Biology,” in
The Making of the Modern Body: Sexuality and Society in the Nineteenth Century
, ed. Catherine Gallagher and Thomas Laqueur (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 1–41.

7.
Page Smith and Charles Daniel,
The Chicken Book
(Boston: Little, Brown, 1975), 45, 169–70. For another take on philosophy and poultry, see Steven Shapin, “The Philosopher and the Chicken: On the Dietetics of Disembodied Knowledge,” in
Never Pure: Historical Studies of Science as if It Was Produced by People with Bodies,
Situated in Time, Space, Culture, and Society, and Struggling for Credibility and Authority
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010), 237–58.

8.
Needham,
History of Embryology
, 22, 25; and Smith and Daniel,
Chicken Book
, chapter 1.

9.
A short history of efforts at measurement, along with the sand illustration, can be found in Carl G. Hartman, “How Large Is the Mammalian Egg?, ”
Quarterly Review of Biology
4 (1929): 373–88.

10.
See Fabricius of Aquapendente,
The Embryological Treatises of Hieronymus Fabricius of Aquapendente:
The Formation of the Egg and of the Chick, The Formed Fetus
, a facsimile edition edited and with an introduction, a translation, and a commentary by Howard B. Adelmann (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1942).

11.
Philip Barbour,
The Complete Works of Captain John Smith
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986), 1:276, 128–29, xlv, 232–33.
Captain John Smith
, ed. James Horn (New York: Library of America, 2006), 1101. See also Jill Lepore, “Our Town,”
New Yorker
, April 2, 2007.

12.
The best biography of Harvey remains Geoffrey Keynes,
The Life of William Harvey
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966). But see also Emerson Thomas McMullen,
William Harvey and the Use of Purpose in the Scientific Revolution
(Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1998), and Walter Pagel,
William Harvey’s Biological Ideas
(New York: S. Karger,
1967). Especially useful is John Aubrey,
Brief Lives
(1669–96), ed. Andrew Clark (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1898), 1:297–301. For a gendered reading of the politics of Harvey’s theory of generation, see Carolyn Merchant,
The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution
(New York: Harper & Row, 1980), 155–63, and Eve Keller, “Making Up for Losses: The Workings of Gender in William Harvey’s
De
Generatione animalium
,” in
Inventing Maternity: Politics, Science, and Literature, 1650–1865
, ed. Susan C. Greenfield and Carol Barash (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1999), 34–56.

13.
William Harvey,
The Generation of Living Creatures
(London, 1653), especially “The Epistle Dedicatory”; Martin Lluelyn, “To the Incomparable Dr. Harvey,” prefatory poem to
De Generatione animalium.
On the language of wonder, see Stephen Greenblatt,
Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World
(Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1991).

14.
Aubrey,
Brief Lives
, 1:299. On his wife and the parrot, see Keynes,
Life of Harvey
, vii. Harvey thought the parrot was a cock, but when it died and he dissected it, he found an egg inside. McMullen,
William Harvey and the Use of Purpose
, 42.

15.
Thomas Reynalde,
The Birth of Mankind: Otherwise Named, The Woman’s Book
, edited by Elaine Hobby (1550; repr., Surrey, UK: Ashgate, 2009), 186, 191. This form of diagnosis remained popular a century on; see Jane Sharp,
The Midwives Book
(1671; repr., New York: Garland, 1985), 164.

16.
Harvey,
Generation of Living Creatures
, 2, 21, 25, 383, 390.

17.
Keynes,
Life of Harvey
, 387–89.

18.
Harvey,
Generation of Living Creatures
, 390, 391, 397, 430–31, 532. But see also Needham,
History of Embryology
, 133–34. On Harvey and James I and Charles I, see Christopher Hill, “William Harvey and the Idea of Monarchy,”
Past & Present
27 (1964): 54–72.

19.
Harvey,
Generation of Living Creatures
, 25, 390.

20.
For an invaluable account of what later came to be called the “scientific revolution,” see Steve Shapin,
The Scientific Revolution
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997).

21.
Aubrey,
Brief Lives
, 1:300.

22.
Keller, “Making Up for Losses,” 43.

23.
Keynes,
Life of Harvey
, 344, 348, 368–70, 462.

24.
Lluelyn, “To the Incomparable Dr. Harvey.”

25.
See Laqueur, “Orgasm,” and also Mary E. Fissell,
Vernacular Bodies: The Politics of Reproduction in Early Modern England
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), and Frederick B. Churchill, “The History of Embryology as Intellectual History,”
Journal of the History of Biology
3 (1970): 155–81.

26.
Thomas Hobbes,
Leviathan
(London, 1651), “Introduction.”

27.
Edward G. Ruestow, “Images and Ideas: Leeuwenhoek’s Perception of the Spermatozoa,”
Journal of the History of Biology
16 (1983): 185–224, especially 194. See also Farley,
Gametes & Spores
, 17.

28.
Aubrey,
Brief Lives
, 1:301.

29.
Although both this motto and a misquotation of it, “
Omne vivum ex ovo
” (Everything living comes out of an egg), are often attributed to Harvey, they are not his. He did, however, apparently approve the text of the engraving (Keynes,
Life of Harvey
,334).

30.
Ruestow, “Images and Ideas,” 194–96. De Graaf quoted in Farley,
Gametes & Spores
, 16.
The Collected Letters of Antoni van Leeuwenhoek
, edited, illustrated, and annotated by a Committee of Dutch Scientists (Amsterdam: Swets & Zeitlinger, 1939), 1:29–35.

31.
Ruestow, “Images and Ideas,” 198–200. Leeuwenhoek to Christopher Wren, January 22, 1683,
Letters of Leeuwenhoek
, 4:11–13.

32.
Ruestow, “Images and Ideas,” 188.

33.
Letters of Leeuwenhoek
, 1:67, 111, 119, 127.

34.
Ruestow, “Images and Ideas,” 188–89.

35.
For a curious account of the transmission of these ideas to New England, see Ava Chamberlain, “The Immaculate Ovum: Jonathan Edwards and the Construction of the Female Body,”
William and Mary Quarterly
57 (2000): 289–322.

36.
Laqueur, “Orgasm,” 3, 18–19. See also Carole Pateman,
The Sexual Contract
(Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1998).

37.
Quoted in Laqueur, “Orgasm,” 20.

38.
Lluelyn, “To the Incomparable Dr. Harvey.”

39.
Aldous Huxley,
Brave New World
(1931).

40.
Von Baer is quoted in C. R. Austin,
The Mammalian Egg
(Oxford: Blackwell, 1961), 4. But for a fuller account, see K. E. von Baer and George Sarton, “The Discovery of the Mammalian Egg and the Foundation of Modern Embryology,”
Isis
16 (1931): 315–30,
and the accompanying reprint of K. E. von Baer,
De Ovi
Mammalium et Hominis Genesi
, 331–77.

41.
Squier,
Babies in Bottles
, 29–35.

42.
Gregory Pincus,
The Eggs of Mammals
(New York: Macmillan, 1936), 8–9. On Pincus and the Pill, see James Reed,
From Private Vice to Public Virtue: The Birth Control Movement and American Society Since 1830
(New York: Basic Books, 1978), chapters 25–27.

43.
On the global travels of
Mus musculus
, see Clyde E. Keeler,
The Laboratory Mouse: Its Origin, Heredity, and Culture
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1931), 4–6; on mice and heredity, 7–18. The best study of mice research in the twentieth century is Karen A. Rader,
Making Mice: Standardizing Animals for American Biomedical
Research, 1900–1955
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004).

44.
Austin,
Mammalian Egg
, 4–6.

45.
Donald Pickens,
Eugenics and the Progressives
(Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1968), 49.

46.
J. A. Long and E. L. Mark,
The Maturation of the Egg of the Mouse
(Washington, DC: Carnegie Institution, 1911), 1–6.

47.
Rader,
Making Mice.
On chickens, see P. B. Siegel, J. B. Dodgson, and L. Andersson, “Progress from Chicken Genetics to the Chicken Genome,”
Poultry Science
85 (2006): 2050–60.

48.
Mall’s circular is reproduced in Lynn M. Morgan,
Icons of Life: A Cultural History of Human Embryos
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 71–72.

49.
Morgan,
Icons of Life
, 74–75, 82, 93, 105, 136–37, 141, 149.

50.
J.B.S. Haldane,
Daedalus; Or, Science and the Future
(New York: Dutton, 1924), 63–65. Haldane gave the lecture in Cambridge on February 4, 1923. Discussions of Haldane’s vision include Spier,
Babies in Bottles
, chapter 2.

51.
Reed,
From Private Vice to Public Virtue
, 321. “Rabbits Born in Glass: Haldane-Huxley Fantasy Made Real by Harvard Biologists,”
New York Times
, May 13, 1934.

52.
Telegram, March 24, 1965, Lennart Nilsson file, Time Inc. Archives. “Drama of Life Before Birth,”
Life
, April 30, 1965. Miles Ruben, “Life Before Birth,”
Saturday Evening Post
, May–June 1978, 68–69. Joelle Bentley, “Photographing the Miracle of Life,”
Technology Review
95
(November–December 1992): 58. Adrienne Gyongy, “Lennart Nilsson: Sweden’s Scientific Eye,”
Scandinavian Review
80 (Winter 1992): 51–55.

53.
A good source on the development of the film, from Clarke’s point of view, is Arthur C. Clarke,
The Lost Worlds of 2001
(Boston: Gregg Press, 1979). Interviews with Kubrick have been widely reprinted, most usefully in
Stanley Kubrick: Interviews
, ed. Gene D. Phillips (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2001). On Kubrick’s interest in
Childhood’s End
, see John Baxter,
Stanley Kubrick: A Biography
(New York: Carroll and Graf, 1997), chapter 12. See also Vincent LoBrutto,
Stanley Kubrick: A Biography
(New York: Donald I. Fine, 1997), 258–67. On the filming, see Piers Bizony,
2001: Filming the Future
, with a foreword by Arthur C. Clarke (London: Aurum Press, 2000), which includes a facsimile of MGM’s February 23, 1965, press release announcing
Kubrick’s collaboration with Clarke on
Journey Beyond the Stars
(10–11). And, for a compendium of material on Kubrick’s films, see Alison Castle, ed.,
The
Stanley Kubrick Archives
(Cologne: Taschen, 2005); a production calendar, compiled by Carolyn Geduld, is on pp. 373–75.