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Edward Elmer Smith (May 2, 1890 – August 31, 1965) was an American food engineer (specializing in doughnut and pastry mixes) and science-fiction author, best known for the Lensman and Skylark series. He is sometimes called the father of space opera.

Biography

Family and education

Edward Elmer Smith was born in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, on May 2, 1890, to Fred Jay Smith and Caroline Mills Smith, both staunch Presbyterians of British ancestry. His mother was a teacher born in Michigan in February 1855; his father was a sailor, born in Maine in January 1855 to an English father. They moved to Spokane, Washington, the winter after Edward Elmer was born, where Mr. Smith was working as a contractor in 1900. In 1902, the family moved to Seneaquoteen, near the Pend Oreille River, in Kootenai County, Idaho. He had four siblings, Rachel M. born September 1882, Daniel M. born January 1884, Mary Elizabeth born February 1886 (all of whom were born in Michigan), and Walter E. born July 1891 in Washington. In 1910, Fred and Caroline Smith and their son Walter were living in the Markham Precinct of Bonner County, Idaho; Fred is listed in census records as a farmer.

Smith worked mainly as a manual laborer until he injured his wrist while fleeing from a fire at the age of 19. He attended the University of Idaho. (Many years later he would be installed in the 1984 Class of the University of Idaho Alumni Hall of Fame.) He entered its prep school in 1907, and graduated with a bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering in 1914; later he got an MS in 1917 and a PhD in 1918 from George Washington University. He was president of the Chemistry Club, the Chess Club, and the Mandolin and Guitar Club, and captain of the Drill and Rifle Team; he also sang the bass lead in Gilbert and Sullivan operettas. His undergraduate thesis was Some Clays of Idaho, co-written with classmate Chester Fowler Smith, who died in California of tuberculosis the following year, after taking a teaching fellowship at Berkeley. Whether the two were related is not known.

On October 5, 1915, in Boise, Idaho he married Jeanne Craig MacDougall, the sister of his college roommate, Allen Scott (Scotty) MacDougall. (Her sister was named Clarissa MacLean MacDougall; the heroine of the Lensman novels would later be named Clarrissa MacDougall.) Jeanne MacDougall was born in Glasgow, Scotland; her parents were Donald Scott MacDougall, a violinist, and Jessica Craig MacLean. Her father had moved to Boise when the children were young, and later sent for his family; he died while they were en route in 1905. Jeanne's mother, who remarried businessman and retired politician John F. Kessler in 1914 worked at, and later owned, a boarding house on Ridenbaugh Street.

The Smiths had three children. Roderick N., born June 3, 1918, in the District of Columbia, was employed as a design engineer at Lockheed Aircraft. Verna Jean (later Verna Smith Trestrail), born August 25, 1920, in Michigan, was E. E. Smith's literary executor until her death in 1994. (Her son Kim Trestrail is now the executor.) Robert A. Heinlein in part dedicated his 1982 novel Friday to Verna. Clarissa M. (later Clarissa Wilcox), was born December 13, 1921, in Michigan.

Early chemical career and the beginning of Skylark

After college, Smith was a junior chemist for the National Bureau of Standards in Washington, D.C., developing standards for butter and for oysters, while studying food chemistry at George Washington University. During World War I, he "wanted to fly a Jenny biplane, but chemists were too scarce. (Or were Jennies too valuable?)" He ended up being sent to the Commission for Relief in Belgium headed by Herbert Hoover.

One evening in 1915, the Smiths were visiting a former classmate from the University of Idaho, Dr. Carl Garby (1890–1928) who had also moved to Washington, D.C. He lived nearby in the Seaton Place Apartments with his wife, Lee Hawkins Garby. A long discussion about journeys into outer space ensued, and it was suggested that Smith should write down his ideas and speculations as a story about interstellar travel. Although he was interested, Smith believed after some thought that some romantic elements would be required and he was uncomfortable with that.

Lee Garby offered to take care of the love interest and the romantic dialogue, and Smith decided to give it a try. The sources of inspirations for the main characters in the novel were themselves; the "Seatons" and "Cranes" were based on the Smiths and Garbys, respectively. About one third of The Skylark of Space was completed by the end of 1916, when Smith and Garby gradually abandoned work on it.

Smith earned his master's degree in chemistry from the George Washington University in 1917, studying under Dr. Charles E. Munroe, whom Smith called "probably the greatest high-explosives man yet to live". Smith completed his PhD in chemical engineering in 1918, with a food engineering focus. His dissertation, The effect of bleaching with oxides of nitrogen upon the baking quality and commercial value of wheat flour, was published in 1919.

Writing Skylark

In 1919, Smith was hired as chief chemist for F. W. Stock & Sons of Hillsdale, Michigan, at one time the largest family-owned mill east of the Mississippi, working on doughnut mixes.