The coconut fiber is smoking. The fire comes all at once. Felix Elles quickly claps out the flames he’s ignited. Having harnessed the power of the sun into a single high-powered beam, he’s captured the rays and the children’s undivided attention. With one hundred small mirrors adhered to the inside of a repurposed satellite dish, he calmly warns them, “If you stand in the way of the light beam for too long, you can catch your clothes on fire.”
A retired Western Washington University adjunct faculty of physics and astronomy, Elles donates his time to tutor a five-year-old boy and six-year-old girl every week at the Community Food Coop Café bakery. Each class brings a new set of scientific concepts- spinning tops, bubble prisms, levitating elements, throwing sound waves, and creating current through cutie oranges. Mr. Felix, as the kids call him, wows the small table with experiments focused on the excitement of discovering how science answers our most fundamental questions regarding how and why the world works.
We met Elles a few months ago at the café over warm tea and his collection of handmade tops. Some of the tops had strings and others were finger top models having been modified through the laws of physics to spin for up to twenty-minutes at a time. Elles, now in his early 70’s, shared, “There are a number of things in life I think are magical: Tops are one, magnets are another, as well as lighter than air balloons. Tops were a spin off of physics for me,” he said. “Fascination with tops is common across all ages and cultures.”
In a day when students learn computer code, Felix Elles can still send Morse code; in fact, he’s quite fast at it. The midday sun shined bright as he showed the children how to tap their names out in dots and dashes on several different types of telegraph devices. Teaching youth Morse code is a stark departure from the distinguished naval cryptography career in which Elles was once assigned to highly classified operations in Germany during the cold war era.
Having grown up in a naval family, he spent his childhood on bases throughout the United States, his family finally settling on Whidbey Island in 1968. Elles recalls, “I remember being six or seven years old and my father, if he wasn’t at sea, would take me with him to the base and he’d give me an old radio chassis to take apart or some other electronic. I picked up a real enjoyment for playing around with that stuff.” With a quick mind and a minor in German, Elles enlisted in the Navy as the Vietnam War heated up. After coding school he remembers, “I had my 15 minutes of fame, but the rest was pretty boring.”
Not everyone starts out with such a clear vision of what they’ll be when they grow up. “I had a lot of part time jobs when I was younger that allowed me to pursue other fun interests,” he recounts. “When I moved to Whidbey I had the dull job of cleaning switches for the phone company.” Elles remembers a day off work when he was getting some dental work done. When he realized he’d rather be at the dentist getting his teeth drilled than do the repetitive work of cleaning switches, he instantly gave thirty days notice and went back to Western to further his studies.
From the time he was in high school though, Elles had already formulated a bucket list. 1) Go sailing on the ocean 2) Learn to fly, and 3) Find out what sex was all about. By the time Elles was 21, he was married, had completed two research cruises in oceanography, one short cruise on a Navy destroyer, and by age 22, he’d earned his pilot’s license in Germany. Mission(s) accomplished.
Dondi Tondro-Smith.
Elles seems to have studied everything. He began with Chemical Oceanography, which led him to Physics and Astronomy. He admits, “It’s a pretty broad background. Some might even say, a mile wide and an inch deep.” But this broad understanding of the physics and chemistry of the natural world informed the teaching abilities he’d later use as a professor.
When Elles first started teaching at Western he was in the science education department. There he observed students who struggled with relating scientific topics to everyday life. For instance, most students would think about trees in terms of wood boards alone. Elles would point out the fact that Georgia Pacific used wood to make vanilla and alcohol, that wood was used in many applications like tissue and cellulose insulation, not to mention to build boats and airplanes. In building and constructing objects like boats or telescopes, and many other devices from scratch, Elles has a grounded way of teaching based on his own wide ranging experiences. This teaching style is extremely applicable even to the youngest of students.
Dondi Tondro-Smith.
Elles grew up in a time when he could still fix his own car and remembers the days before scientists knew what the moon was made of, before plate tectonics or images of the Earth’s weather patterns were seen from space. Since then, he’s studied across many disciplines, been a sailor, an astronomer, assisted as a lab technician in experimental studies, operated as a hired pilot, still plays both the tuba and trombone in the symphony orchestra and knows more about the natural universe than most humans.
Felix Elles redefines what constitutes a classic renaissance mind. The fact that he’s sharing his knowledge with the next generation of young people is as magical as the science experiments he still dreams up and shares over tea and tops.
