Skinner, Burrhus Frederic

Early Life (1904–1922)

Skinner was born on March 20, 1904, in Susquehanna, a small town of about 2,000 inhabitants, nestled in the hills of the northeast corner of Pennsylvania. In the early 20th century, before trucks or airplanes, railroads provided the main east-west transportation of goods and passengers, and Susquehanna was a railroad town. Skinner's early life coincided with tremendous improvements in daily living. Electricity was replacing gas and kerosene lamps. The telephone and the radio were making possible instant communication over long distances. Travel, too, was changing. Early automobiles sputtered and bounced over unpaved roads, scaring horses and pedestrians alike, and Skinner and his family saw one of the first airplanes land near Susquehanna.

Skinner's father was a lawyer, active in the business concerns of the town. Skinner's mother was a housewife. Skinner and his brother, younger by 2½ years, grew up in a warm and stable environment. Skinner's mother insisted on proper social behavior, but she and her husband allowed their children a great deal of freedom in other ways. They were allowed to roam the countryside and had few limits on what they could put together from the discarded pieces of wood and machinery around the house. Skinner constructed everything from a tiny theater, with pulley-operated curtains, to a cabin in the woods. He built slides, teeter-totters, carts, bookshelves, and dozens of other contraptions. He even made a cannon, operated by a small steam engine that, when fired up, shot plugs of carrot across the weedy back yard behind the Skinner house. Skinner was not taught how to use tools and had to figure out himself how to solve problems of construction, an independence that was to serve him well later in graduate school.

Skinner went through nine grades in a public school within walking distance from his house. In eighth grade, an episode occurred that was to have a lasting effect on his future. His English class, taught by Miss Graves, was studying Shakespeare's As You Like It. One evening over dinner, he must have mentioned the play, because his father commented that some people believed that Shakespeare was not the real author of the plays attributed to him. The real author was Francis Bacon. The next day, the young Skinner presented this theory in class. Miss Graves dismissed the idea, saying that Skinner did not know what he was talking about. That might have silenced another student, but not Skinner. That afternoon he went to the library and looked up Francis Bacon. In his autobiography, he described the continuing

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