Wonder boy. Whiz kid. Prodigy. Genius. The nation's top physicists hadn't seen the likes of Dick Garwin before.
When he was 23 and an assistant physics instructor at the University of Chicago, Mr. Garwin spent the first of his several summers at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, where he was granted access to the nation's nuclear secrets -- including the first-generation fission-based atomic weapons developed there just years earlier.
It's where Mr. Garwin was tapped to build a second-generation atomic weapon -- the hydrogen bomb. He succeeded.
Over the decades that followed, in perhaps his greatest achievement, and there were many, he worked as an adviser to the U.S. government on how to help keep the world from blowing itself up.
Mr. Garwin died May 13 from natural causes at his home in Scarsdale, New York, according to his family. He was 97.
If atomic weapons weren't already frightening enough, the hydrogen bomb scared a new level of living daylights out of people. It could provide a force hundreds or even thousands of times greater than the atom bombs the world had come to know after the United States used them on Japan in World War II.
"These weapons are just a whole other class," said Daniel Holz, a U. of C. physics professor who chairs the science and security board of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, which sets the symbolic Doomsday Clock. "Garwin worked for many years on ensuring that we wouldn't go to war, and these weapons wouldn't be used to end civilization. I think he felt a responsibility to do that."
After he designed the hydrogen bomb, Mr. Garwin served as a science adviser, focusing on nuclear deterrence, to every U.S. president who served during his lifetime.
With an emphasis on a presumed deterrent that was referred to as mutually assured destruction, he assisted in Cold War nuclear arms negotiations that aimed to ensure the United States and Soviet Union had ways to monitor and trust each other.
"It was a major accomplishment in the Cold War that helped reduce the number of nuclear weapons," Holz said. "He played a major role behind the scenes in many of these issues.
"He was a legend in both the physics community and the community of people who are kind of involved in weapons work," Holz said.
His work on the hydrogen bomb did not become widely known until a story in The New York Times in 2001 shed light on Mr. Garwin's role, making him perhaps the most influential scientist nobody had heard of.
In designing the first hydrogen bomb, Mr. Garwin relied on concepts developed by two other physicists: Edward Teller, who has been called the "father of the hydrogen bomb," and Stanislaw Ulam.
Enrico Fermi, the famed U. of C. physicist who was Mr. Garwin's mentor, once called him "the only true genius I have ever met."
It was only several years prior to the invention of the hydrogen bomb that Fermi, as part of the top-secret Manhattan Project, developed the world's first atomic weapon.
"His relationship with Fermi was probably the most important thing that ever happened in his life," said Mr. Garwin's son Thomas Garwin, who said his sister Laura was named after Fermi's wife.
In 1947, when Mr. Garwin arrived in Chicago from his hometown of Cleveland to begin work on his doctorate, he faced a problem physics could not solve -- finding a cheap place to live in a post-WWII housing crunch. He moved more than a dozen times in the first year he was in Chicago -- sometimes house-sitting, sometimes spending nights in a hotel -- before finding a more permanent home in a makeshift apartment a friend had created out of a wraparound porch.
He landed the place in time for his wife Lois to be able to bring their newborn son Jeffrey home there from the hospital.
"This was heaven for us, and we were able to buy furniture and to have a place for Jeffrey's crib," Mr. Garwin was quoted as saying in the 2017 book "True Genius: The Life and Work of Richard Garwin" by Joel N. Shurkin.
When he first headed to Los Alamos in the summer of 1950, Mr. Garwin and his wife fashioned a playpen in the rear of their car for their son, according to the book.
Mr. Garwin was not there when the hydrogen bomb he created was exploded in a test on a Pacific island on Nov. 1, 1952, that produced a mushroom cloud 100 miles wide.
Shortly after the successful test, Mr. Garwin joined IBM, which allowed him "complete freedom" to conduct a wide range of research while continuing his work as a science adviser to the U.S. government, according to his son.
His work for the government included aiding in the design of an new age of imaging technology used to spy on adversaries from above.
His work at IBM yielded dozens of patents and advances in fields ranging from technology to medicine and is credited as integral in the development of magnetic resonance imaging, high-speed laser printers and touch-screen monitors.
He also played a major role in setting the stage for the discovery of gravitational waves -- ripples in space and time that Albert Einstein predicted.
Mr. Garwin was born April 19, 1928, in Cleveland to Robert and Leona Garwin. His father was a high school science teacher who worked evenings as a movie projectionist. His mother worked as a legal secretary.
As a kid, Mr. Garwin delighted in taking things apart and putting them back together.
He graduated from high school at 16 and got a physics degree from what's now Case Western Reserve University before going on to earn master's and doctoral degrees from the U. of C. and then being hired to teach there.
"Ever since he was a Cleveland kid tinkering with his father's movie projectors, he's never met a problem he didn't want to solve," then-President Barack Obama said in 2016 as he presented Mr. Garwin with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor. "Reconnaissance satellites, the M.R.I., GPS technology, the touchscreen all bear his fingerprints. He even patented a mussel-washer for shellfish -- which I haven't used. The other stuff, I have."
Thomas Garwin explained why his father invented a mussel-washer.
"He had a very good friend who lived on Long Island, and they used to go out to the beach and collect mussels," he said. "And it was a pain to clean sand out of them, and he said, 'Well, I'll figure out a way to do this.' "