By the time Lloyd was four, he had produced a functioning aeolipile, a steam-driven monorail that ran from their house to the barn, a crude family telephone exchange, and an accurate clock that needed no winding. A rocking horse had turned into a simple bicycle, and a giant slingshot had propelled a meat safe over the river. The boy had even experimented with the use of primitive anesthetics while performing surgery on various farm animals. No wonder Hephaestus felt threatened-and the need to keep his son’s innovations under wraps wherever possible. Zanesville was like that.

Lloyd Meadhorn Sitturd had hair the color of rye grass, skin the color of river sand, and green animal irises that gave the impression that they saw more than ordinary human eyes saw. There was nothing childlike about him other than his size. His vocabulary was already immense, and his mathematical ability was that of a savant. (When Judith Temby, the wife of the dry-goods-store owner once remarked, “The tree is best measured when it’s down,” the boy replied bluntly, “You don’t know much about trigonometry, do you?”)

After spending a single Saturday with Mr. Fleischer, the knife sharpener, he could speak passable German. The same was true for Norwegian and Spanish-and, even more remarkably, Chinese, as Hephaestus discovered following the boy’s visit to the laundry shack down by the carriage bridge. From Hayden Zogbaum, the prodigy absorbed four full years of Latin and Greek in just four afternoons, in return for supplying the former parson with a serving of pork cheese (an Ohio delicacy made from the head, tongue, and jowls of a young pig, boiled with marjoram and caraway, poured into pudding molds, and eaten cold).

The boy’s most profound aptitude lay in the area of mechanics-an innate understanding/curiosity regarding how things worked: windmills, water wheels, animals, insects, flowers. He was forever noticing and diagramming, taking things apart and putting new things together.