FeatureClassic 1950s Science Textbooks Get a 21st-Century Update
Cover of Exploring the Moon by Roy A. Gallant, Illustrated by Lowell Hess. Doubleday & Company, Inc. Click for full-size image.
Map of the moon from Exploring the Moon by Roy A. Gallant, Illustrated by Lowell Hess. Doubleday & Company, Inc. Click for full-size image.
Polar caps from Exploring Mars by Roy A. Gallant, Illustrated by Lowell Hess. Garden City Books.
Click for full-size image.
Orbits of Earth and Mars from Exploring Mars by Roy A. Gallant, Illustrated by Lowell Hess. Garden City Books. Click for full-size image.
Roy Gallant has taken millions of readers to the outer limits of our unmapped edges, from the farthest reaches of space, where gamma rays send interstellar signals back to planet Earth, to the remote ocean bottom, where mysterious creatures slither along lightless landscapes. He has spent decades tackling topics that even adults have trouble getting their head around — quarks, black holes, quantum mechanics — and written about them in an engaging and enlightening prose that has drawn readers of all ages into the mysteries of science.
Like many other men of his era, Gallant began his career as a warrior, serving in World War II and the Korean conflict, first as an Army Air Force navigator and then as a psychological warfare officer in Tokyo. When he returned to civilian life, he embarked on a publishing career in New York, working as a staff writer for Boys' Life magazine. "That was a real, large-format magazine," insists Gallant, his 85-year-old voice inflected with a Maine accent. "It wasn't this little Mickey Mouse Reader's Digest type thing."
And although the shooting was over, the United States was in the thick of the Cold War. "The Russians had launched Sputnik, and the United States government panicked and started pouring money into libraries to buy science books," Gallant explains. "The first article on astronomy I wrote was for Boys' Life. I wrote an article about the origin of the moon. [Boys' Life] received hundreds of letters of interests. That started me seriously thinking about science writing as a career."
That career would span 50 years and 96 titles, introducing three generations of young readers to the curious world of science. His first book, Exploring the Moon, was published by Doubleday in 1955 and introduced the baby boom generation to the then-distant, unknowable orb. It sold 100,000 copies and led to an entire series of Exploring titles, covering planets, weather, chemistry, and more. For Generation X, raised on moonwalks and Star Wars, Gallant brought the outer reaches of space into focus with Our Universe. Published in 1980, it sold more than 2.5 million copies and is still in print. The book was a staple of the young science geek's bookshelf and Gallant's favorite. By the 1990s, while he was running the University of Southern Maine's Southworth Planetarium, Gallant was captivating Millennials with titles like The Day the Sky Split Apart and Geysers: When Earth Roars. Gallant's latest book, Meteorite Hunter, was published in 2001, and it chronicles his expeditions across the Russian wildernesses of Siberia by train, horse, and foot as he studied the Tunguska event, an explosion that happened one night in 1908; it was 1,000 times the size of Hiroshima and to this day is not completely understood.
Of course, the problem with spending a lifetime publishing books about science — and astronomy in particular — is that the understanding of the universe is constantly evolving. "It seems that every time I wrote an astronomy book there would be something new to include in it and corrections to be made for earlier books," he says, chuckling. "There was an article I wrote for Boys' Life called “40 Billion Suns,” because at that time the population of the galaxy was thought to be 40 billion suns. Today it corresponds to 300 or 400 or 500 billion."
Gallant isn't in the publishing business anymore. He's retired now and says he has no plans for another book — although he is still organizing and documenting his notebooks from his time in Siberia. But over the feature Classic 1950s Science Textbooks Get a 21st-Century Update, we introduce you to some of his work, and where necessary, update it for a more modern take on the curious and often violent outer limits of our knowledge and imagination.
