Max walked into Professor Stoner’s class for the first time. The room was an auditorium-style room with seats that lined up in slightly curved rows, with each row of seats set higher behind the one in front. There were three aisles, one on each side and one in the middle that led up between a dozen rows of seats. Opposite the seats, in the front of the room, was a one-foot-high platform in front of a double-sliding chalkboard and a science lab-style desk about five feet in front of the chalkboards.

  The room was located in the older building and had wood walls and even a ceiling made of wood. It was all correlated with a burnt umber finish over beautiful walnut wood, although the finish had long lost its luster. There were no windows at all―only three doors: the main entrance on the bottom level, a door on the opposite wall that appeared to be the professor’s office, and an emergency exit at the top of the center aisle.

  The ceiling was high and, along with the walls, consisted of designs and carvings that left crevices and ledges that had long since foregone dusting. The air above head level was old and stagnant and, combined with the smell of old wood, gave the room an odor that seemed all too familiar to Max. It smelled like a church.

  Max had hoped to get a seat up front but was surprised to see the room already mostly filled. He ascended the middle staircase and found a seat by the aisle about seven rows up. Along the right side of the seat near the aisle was a small desk platform that manually rotated up, which provided an area on which to place your books.

  The room was abuzz with obscure chatter, quiet laughter, and feet shuffling.

  As the clock hit the top of the hour, Professor Stoner entered from his office door. He wore dark pleated slacks and a sports jacket over a white button-up shirt, which displayed a slender tie coming from underneath the neatly pressed collar. He took his place behind his desk and began.

  “Okay, settle down, everyone. Let’s get started. I have a list here of people who are supposed to be here. I will read it off and, when you hear your name, you will say, ‘Newton.’ If you do not hear your name, it is a distinct possibility that you are lost.” He began to read off the names without looking up. One by one, students rattled off the word ‘Newton’ as their name was called.

  “Johnny Maxwell,” the professor called out, looking up from the list for the first time.

  “Newton,” Max said and raised his hand as well.

  The professor smiled and continued. After he completed the list, he set a cardboard box upon the desk. “Okay, class. It’s good to see so many new faces. The bad news is, if you are taking my class early in your college career, I am saddened to inform you that it’s all downhill from here.”

  Low but very audible laughter filled the room.

  “Now most of you have no doubt heard,” the professor continued, “that every semester I provide you with a chance to pick up bonus points for your grade. I assure you that most of you will need it. This bonus comes in the form of what has been dubbed ‘The Near Impossible Assignment.’ It was originally called ‘The Impossible Assignment,’ but since several students have actually succeeded, the name just didn’t seem to fit anymore. This year’s assignment is going to take a lot of balls.”

  This made the room fill with much louder laughter, even from Max who was excited to hear the assignment.

  The professor reached into the box and brought out a round metal ball. “These balls are made of lead. Your assignment, should you choose to accept it, is to make this ball magnetic. You can do anything you want to the ball as long as at the end of the semester it can be picked up by this very strong magnet.” He held up a magnet about three inches long, an inch wide, and a half-inch thick. He scanned it over his desk, and paperclips and even a ballpoint pen launched upward to attach themselves to the magnet.

  Max looked on in amazement.

  “Nothing can be attached to the ball at the time of the test,” the professor continued. “It doesn’t even have to be in a spherical form at the time, but it must consist only of lead. You cannot add anything to it.”

  Max had waited so long for this moment. Now it was here, and it did indeed seem like an impossible challenge. He couldn’t wait to get started.

  The professor stood at the bottom of the seats and held the box for anyone who wanted to try it. Over seventy-five percent of the students filtered down to grab one, each with the same smile Max displayed, perhaps each thinking they would be the one to pull it off.

  As the class progressed, Max could barely concentrate on the subject matter as Professor Stoner scribbled on the chalkboards and even showed the students a slide show. It was the bulge in his pocket, a simple lump of lead that kept succeeding over and over in capturing his thought process. Why is lead not magnetic? he asked himself. How do you make it so?

  It was late Thursday afternoon when Max got home from the first day of class of his second semester. He didn’t have to work so he rushed through his homework so he could get on the computer and research questions that had plagued him the better part of the day. As the internet slowly came on, he typed into the search bar, “Why is lead not magnetic?”

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  Several pages came up and Max began to scan through them all. Finally, one read:

  “Lead is not magnetic because it does not have electron spin. For any metal to be magnetic, it must produce an electronic angular momentum to interact with the magnetic field.”

  Okay, thought Max. All I have to do is get its electrons to spin. He then laughed at the absurdity of it. But he continued to research. He read up on electrons, electromagnetic fields, and electricity. They all seemed to go hand-in-hand. He read that you can take electricity and run it through wires wrapped around an iron rod and it would turn the iron magnetic. But that wouldn’t work with lead. Or would it? It seemed like the best place to start.

  Max walked out to the barn with his lead ball in hand and a large flashlight from the pantry. The barn had one light fixture that operated by pulling a string, but it did not illuminate the far reaches of the building. Looking around, he found a roll of plastic-covered wiring. That, along with the six-volt battery from the flashlight, was enough to run his first test.

  Wrapping the wire clumsily around the lead ball, he attached one end to the positive terminal of the battery and the other end to the negative. He took a nail and touched it to the ball.

  Nothing.

  But the nail gave him another idea. He placed the lead ball in the vice of his dad’s drill press and located a drill bit that was the same size in diameter as the nail. He drilled a hole right through the middle of the ball and was surprised at how easy it was to drill through a soft metal such as lead. Taking the nail, he tried to slide it through the hole, but it was a tight fit, so he took a hammer and drove it through until two inches of the steel nail protruded from each side of the lead ball.

  Max placed the ball on the table and began wrapping the wire around the nail instead of the ball itself. Then he hooked it up to the battery again, took another nail, and placed it on the ball.

  Nothing.

  He tried placing the nail on the wire-covered nail, which ran through the ball, and the nail latched on in a magnetic embrace. So, the premise of the electromagnet was sound, but it only worked with metals already magnetic. Max shook his head.

  Just then he heard his dad’s truck pull into the driveway. He walked out to the front of the barn entrance and waved. His dad walked to the barn. He was wearing work clothes with no coat, even though it was winter and quite chilly outside, so Max knew right away that he had been on a plumbing job.

  “What are you doing out here, son?”

  Max explained about the assignment and what he had read on the internet. He explained how his first experiment had failed.

  “Using a flashlight battery, huh?” his dad asked in obvious interest.

  Max nodded.

  His dad continued. “What happens if you use a stronger battery?”

  Max smiled. “It says it will make the electromagnet stronger.”

  “You don’t say.” His dad turned and went to his truck, went into a side compartment, and took out some tools. He opened the hood of his truck and worked a few minutes then headed back to the barn with his truck battery hanging by the handle in his right hand, swaying in rhythm of his arm movement as he walked.

  Max couldn’t help but grin at his dad’s enthusiasm.

  The reverend set the battery on the table and hooked up one end of the wire to the positive post on the battery using a small clamp. He grabbed a set of vice grips to attach the other side. He then stopped and motioned for Max to take over.

  Max stepped up and took the vice grips and, as he placed the other end of the wire to the negative battery post, he said, “Here goes nothing.”

  He and his dad looked on for a few seconds until Max took a nail and again lay it on the wire-wrapped nail. It grabbed on harder this time. He pried it away and then touched it to the lead ball.

  Nothing.

  He looked at his dad, smiled, and shrugged his shoulders. “Good idea anyway,” he said.

  Something caught their attention as they looked at each other and simultaneously crunched up their noses. There was an unmistakable tickle to their olfactory senses, a familiar twinge in the ozone that takes a few seconds for the brain to recognize. In unison again, they looked back at the lead ball. Smoke was surrounding the plastic-coated wires. It was dense smoke that hovered instead of rose but was starting to spread.

  “Oh shoot!” cried Max, and he grabbed the wire and pulled it off the battery without loosening the clamp. As he unwound it from the nail, it was obvious that the plastic had begun to melt. As he peeled back the layers, the plastic coating went from being soft to smoldering. He quickly unraveled it all to reveal burning embers. Max leaned down and did the only thing he could think to do―blow real hard. It worked. That was the blast of oxygen the embers needed to ignite and that’s what they did. Flames appeared like ghosts to dance in the air above the wires.

  The reverend walked over to the entrance of the barn and picked up a plastic five-gallon bucket, which had originally held sheetrock mud but had for years been sitting right outside the barn doors collecting rainwater as if for this very moment. He carried it inside and dumped the entire contents onto the table, extinguishing the fire.

  His dad looked at him and then back at the mangled mess of exposed wire and charred coating. He looked back up at Max and said, “That reminds me of the one and only rule I have for this experiment.”

  “Don’t burn down the barn?” Max asked with a wry smile.

  His dad simply touched his finger to his nose then picked up the battery and took it back to his truck. After he got it reinstalled, he closed the hood of the truck and went into the house.

  Max stayed behind to clean up the mess. The entire table and surrounding floor were soaked with the stagnant rainwater. He casually unwound all the burnt wiring and discarded it into the now empty bucket. As he stared at the lead ball with the nail through it, he began to doubt his approach. Should I go back to the drawing board? he wondered.

  Then he smiled as he remembered a lecture in high school about successful people who refused to let adversity and failure stand in their way. One of his favorite stories was of Colonel Sanders and his idea to peddle his family chicken recipe to restaurants across the country. When asked how many rejections he had received before the first restaurant said “yes,” Max had answered ten. He and the others in his class were shocked to learn it was over nine hundred.

  When he put it into that perspective, one little barn fire was nothing.