His resilient wife, Frank's grandmother and Stephen's great-grandmother, saved the family from complete ruin by opening a school in their home. Frank's very prosperous Yorkshire grandfather had over-extended himself buying farm land and then gone bankrupt in the great agricultural depression of the early twentieth century. Stephen's parents, Frank and Isobel Hawking, were not wealthy. But few people in January 1942 were thinking about Galileo. Hawking likes to recall that his birth was exactly three hundred years after the death of Galileo, who is called the father of modern science. It was a winter of discouragement and fear, not a happy time to be born.

Stephen William Hawking was born during the Second World War, on January 8, 1942, in Oxford. I still keep asking these how and why questions. Hawking would have it that he is still 'just a child who has never grown up. How such transformations happen is a mystery that biographical details alone cannot explain. Because Stephen Hawking, after such an unexceptional beginning, is now one of the intellectual giants of our modern world-and among its most heroic figures. He hasn't claimed his bag of sweets, but it's time he does. Maybe he did see things about Stephen that teachers, parents and Stephen himself couldn't see. John McClenahan had good reason to think he would win the wager.īasil King probably was just being a loyal friend or liked betting on long shots. Stephen was never well-coordinated physically, not keen on sports or other physical activities, and almost always the last to be chosen for any sports team. He took them apart to find out, but he could seldom reassemble them. He ranked no more than halfway up in his school class, though he now says, in his defense, 'It was a very bright class.' Maybe someone might have predicted a career in science or engineering from the fact that Stephen was intensely interested in learning the secrets of how things such as clocks and radios work. Some reports claim he was brilliant in a haphazard way, but Hawking remembers that he was just another ordinary English schoolboy, slow learning to read, his handwriting the despair of his teachers. John McClenahan bet that Stephen 'would never come to anything' Basil King, that he would 'turn out to be unusually capable.' The stake was a bag of candy. When Stephen Hawking was twelve years old, two of his schoolmates made a bet about his future. Editor's note: The following is an excerpt from the chapter 'Equal to Anything!' from the new book Stephen Hawking: An Unfettered Mind (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), by Kitty Ferguson.

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