On 4 July 1862, Charles Dodgson, a mathematics lecturer at Christ Church, Oxford, rowed up the Thames from Folly Bridge towards Godstow with a friend and his three young daughters. To pass the afternoon, he told them a story about a girl who followed a rabbit underground. Ten-year-old Alice Liddell asked Dodgson to write it down, and three years later he published it as Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland under the name Lewis Carroll. A story told to amuse three children became far better known than anything Dodgson published.
Multi-dimensional careers are full of adventures and possibilities. Dodgson also wrote on logic and voting systems, was ordained a deacon, became one of the finest amateur photographers of the Victorian era, and invented word puzzles such as Doublets. He belongs to a long line of people whose best work came from a discipline different from the one they trained in. Samuel Morse was a successful portrait painter before he helped develop the electric telegraph and the code that bears his name. Alexander Borodin spent his career as a research chemist in St Petersburg and composed the opera Prince Igor in his spare hours. Anton Chekhov practised medicine while writing the stories and plays that reshaped the short story and modern drama. Vladimir Nabokov studied blue butterflies so closely between novels that DNA research confirmed his theory of their evolution more than thirty years after his death. The Hollywood actress Hedy Lamarr co-invented, with the composer George Antheil, a frequency-hopping system during the Second World War that anticipated the technology behind Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. In each case, expertise in one field gave its owner an unusual vantage point on another. Dodgson’s logic supplied Wonderland’s paradoxes, and his love of puzzles its wordplay.
