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Education's Thorndike. The record of the Thorndike family confirms his own emphasis on the importance of heredity. His late brother Ashley was one of the foremost U. S. Shakespearean scholars. Another brother, Lynn, is an authority on medieval history, his sister (now retired) was a brilliant high-school teacher. Of his four children, three are college teachers and the fourth an undergraduate, all unusual scholars.
Big, paunchy and kindly, with thick grey hair falling over his forehead and a droopy grey mustache, Edward Thorndike (affectionately called "The Big Chief" by his associates) still works 70 hours a week. "We have a factory here for finding the truth," he says. It is a highceilinged, barnlike room in a remote corner of Teachers College, with a little office in the back where Dr. Thorndike sits in a high-backed chair at a rolltop desk. The factory is crammed to the ceiling with manila-wrapped bundles containing tests and data. Dr. Thorndike knows what is in every last one of them.
Each morning Dr. Thorndike spends exactly eight minutes reading the newspaper, each night reads himself to sleep with Punch, a detective story or the encyclopedia. An exceedingly rapid reader, he has read through both the Britannica and the Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences. He is colorblind, cannot drive a car. Once, walking with his brother in Boston, he saw a golf club in a store window. They bought it, went home and looked up golf in the encyclopedia, then experimented in the back yard with the one club, a ball and two tomato cans.
Such are his peculiarities, but one thing about him will never be known: his I. Q. Since he devised most intelligence tests and knows all the answers, it is quite useless to try to test him.
*Except attendance in the Unitarian, Universalist and Christian Science churches, which had a high positive correlation with GG.