Profile · Sheboygan, Wisconsin
Edward Elmer “Doc” Smith
Sheboygan-born food chemist and space-opera pioneer (Skylark, Lensman); raised in Idaho after leaving Wisconsin as an infant
$850
Edward Elmer Smith was born in Sheboygan on May 2, 1890, to a sailor and a teacher, and left Wisconsin that same winter for Spokane before he could walk. Idaho farms and logging camps did the raising. Sheboygan keeps the birth certificate of the food chemist who helped invent space opera. He took chemical engineering at the University of Idaho, earned a Ph.D. at George Washington University on what nitrogen oxides do to wheat flour (the dissertation appeared in 1919), and spent his working years in cereal chemistry at Dawn Doughnut in Jackson, Michigan, and related pastry-mix labs, the unglamorous science of making batter behave. At night, with neighbor Lee Hawkins Garby coaching the dialogue, he wrote The Skylark of Space, serialized in Amazing Stories in 1928. Hugo Gernsback stuck "Ph.D." on the byline; readers shortened it to Doc. The Lensman novels built a universe of Lenses, Galactic Patrols, and villains named Boskone. He died in Seaside, Oregon, on August 31, 1965, while the magazine If was still serializing the last Skylark (June through October). First Fandom inducted him into its Hall of Fame in 1963; the Science Fiction Hall of Fame followed posthumously in 2004. The Wisconsin tie is the Sheboygan birth; the story is the cereal lab and the galactic patrols.