SPARK

A warm salute to an undersung Black scientist.

Budding inventors could do worse than to pick Jim West as a role model. Growing up a farm boy with a compulsion to take things apart to see how they worked and—thanks to an encounter with a live wire he was lucky to survive—a fascination with electricity, West went on to study science in college, where he was one of only two Black students. He supported himself by repairing TVs and eventually built a career from a summer internship at Bell Labs. There (generally posed as a solitary figure with an intent look in Fiadzigbey’s illustrations) he worked on an improved design for headphones and discovered a new way to make microphones using Teflon and other “electrets,” or substances that hold electrical charges, that consequently don’t need to be connected to a source of power to work. Today they can be found everywhere, Ramirez writes, in toys, cell phones, and computers. Her explanations of the science are in-depth and sure to appeal to STEM-minded kids like West. In her biographical afterword, the author also points to West’s continuing efforts to draw more people of color into scientific fields—a theme the illustrator underscores by adding colleagues and students with darker skin tones to group scenes.

Unusual in both subject and its gratifying level of technical detail.