SYNOPSIS:

In 1905, heir to a cotton fortune, Colonel George Fabyan creates Riverbank, an idyllic community of thinkers, on six hundred acres of farmland and pasture along the banks of the Fox River in conservative Geneva, Illinois.

A man of great curiosity, Fabyan would buy sight unseen, boxcars of freight. World-renowned physicists came to visit including a fellow by the name of Albert Einstein. Cryptologists, geneticists, horticulturists, biologists, physiologists, agriculturists, and military people gather to work on the colonel’s myriad research projects. Experiments in sound, the first cases of fingerprinting, field use of hand grenades and the study of the human body were just a few of the many assorted experiments carried on.

Is Sir Francis Bacon Shakespeare? Fabyan thinks there are hidden Baconian ciphers in Shakespeare’s plays, spending $500,000 of his own money; an exorbitant sum back in the early nineteen hundreds. His elderly Baconian scholar, Miss Gallup, a Whistler’s mother look alike, discovers Francis Bacon is a member of the clandestine Rosicrucian society of England.

A society that among other things, carries out secret experiments, specifically one involving an acoustical levitating machine deciphered by Miss Gallup. A prototype is developed at Riverbank. The sound vibrations don’t quite work so Fabyan sends for Wallace Sabine, an acoustical engineer from Harvard. Sabine finds there just isn’t enough sound energy to lift anything but stays on and helps Riverbank becomes a premier acoustical laboratory. Which it still remains today.

Riverbank became America’s top code breaking facility in the early nineteen hundreds. Fabyan’s studies of the Bacon ciphers lead to the nations first military cryptology classes taught by the brilliant William Friedman who went on to break the infamous Purple code, a formerly indecipherable Japanese diplomatic cipher. Friedman meets his future wife, Elizebeth Smith, a Shakespeare scholar at Riverbank who becomes a top code breaking expert in her own right. Together they tackle the Colonel’s projects with mixed opinions and results.

Is Fabyan a tyrant or transformer of life? An egotistical fame seeker or gifted entrepreneur? He may as well have been a composite of all of these features. At any measure, he was certainly a man ahead of his time at a magical place called Riverbank.