The Thicket's Prodigy: The Extraordinary Life of an Improbable Genius

The 3:15 train left Polk County on September 2, 1930, carrying a most extraordinary passenger. Eugene H “Gene” Brock, a genius of the type about whom astounding stories are told, was leaving East Texas – one of the country’s most backward impoverished areas.

His destination – Texas Technological College.

What Gene didn’t know was one day he would achieve a unique status, one attained by only a most select few – as an internationally acknowledge expert in two of science’s newest fields: nuclear energy relating to fission and the bomb that ended World War II, and high-powered computer systems – the likes of which put a man on the Moon.

Gene’s story is brought to life by his son, Ronald, and has humble beginnings in Texas’ “Big Thicket.” It follows the young Gene, born a fifth-generation progeny of East Texas subsistence farmers, and the hardships he endured through the Great Depression which kept him homeless for much of the time he was earning his degree in mathematics and physics.

A burning desire to master new challenges led Gene to Los Alamos and a pivotal role in redesigning the Manhattan Project’s atomic bomb. But one scientific challenge wasn’t enough. Gene became an acknowledged expert when computers evolved into another scientific discovery of significant importance.

Once again sought after by the federal government, Gene received a congressional appointment to serve as Director of Computation and Analysis in NASA’s manned spaceflight project – the project that enabled Neil Armstrong’s walk on the Moon.

As a fitting epilogue to his father’s extraordinary story, the author tells of his own key role in another scientific adaptation when the technology of the World Wide Web was introduced and became known across the globe as the Internet. And the term “startup company” became the scientific phenomenon of the 1990s.