The workshop formerly known as Dick’s Tavern is unlike anywhere else in downtown Bellingham. Long gone are the days of bar stools, pool tables and pints; today, the building is home to nautical maps and lofty bookshelves.
Even more peculiar are the kayak frames. Their sleek aluminum skeletons, each in varied stages of completion, lend dreamlike contrast to the shop’s wooden finishings.
Since 1989, this tavern has functioned as the workshop of George Dyson, a science historian also known for crafting kayaks. From bestselling author to university lecturer and waterfront activist, he plays a near-comical amount of roles: “Some people think I’m a kayak designer,” George added earnestly. “My daughter thinks I’m her dad.”
George, 71, is modest about his achievements. As a youth, he spent years traversing the Inside Passage on kayaks he built. His books on the history of technology, covering topics from early computing to artificial intelligence, have been lauded by outlets from The Guardian to The New York Times.
Some might consider science history and kayak-building to be opposite disciplines.
“People try to make this distinction between working with your hands and working with your mind … I think that’s totally wrong,” he argued. “People should do both.”
Early years with mathematician and physicist parents
The son of mathematician Verena Huber-Dyson and theoretical physicist Freeman Dyson, George grew up immersed in the environment of Princeton, New Jersey’s prestigious Institute for Advanced Study, where Freeman had a lifetime appointment.
But George dropped out of high school at age 16, then became a deckhand in British Columbia at 17. That job was the first of many seafaring adventures between B.C. and southeast Alaska.
On the shores of Vancouver’s Burrard Inlet, the young man built a treehouse 95 feet in the air and lived in it for three years. In the workshop below, he began crafting baidarkas: skin-on-frame sea kayaks invented by the Aleut/Unangan people, then co-opted by Russian settlers.
George became an expert on the baidarka’s history, design and evolution, even publishing a book on the subject in 1986. One of his most famous constructions — a six-person, 48-foot vessel with a dragon head-shaped bow — now lives below his shop.
That particular kayak might be familiar to readers of Kenneth Brower’s “The Starship and the Canoe.” The 1978 book documents George and Freeman’s seemingly divergent lives: As Freeman dreamed of exploring the cosmos on nuclear-powered rockets, his son explored the Inside Passage on baidarkas of his own design.
From kayaks to the history of technology
Brower’s depiction of father/son dynamics struck a cultural chord in Japan, where it was adapted into a 1986 TV movie. Soon, a Japanese art magazine approached George about contributing to an upcoming issue on nature and technology.
“They assumed I would write a piece about kayaks, advanced technology,” George said. “And for some reason, I was bored. I didn’t want to go through my whole life being the guy who lived in the treehouse.”
George instead penned an article on the history of computing, which caught the attention of a literary agent. Seemingly overnight, he went from being “100 percent a kayak builder” to a science writer with a serious publisher.
He refers to his first history book, “Darwin Among the Machines: The Evolution of Global Intelligence” (1997), as the “last book about the internet written without the internet.” Its contents trace the course of the digital revolution — including the development of artificial intelligence.
Nowadays George is the author of five books, spanning topics from atomic spaceships (“Project Orion”) to postwar mathematicians and engineers (“Turing’s Cathedral”) and humanity’s evolving relationship to technology (“Analogia: The Emergence of Technology Beyond Programmable Control”).
George sees his role as finding and preserving the stories of early innovators — many of whom would otherwise die without telling them. “I’m always interested in who did something first,” he said, “and who helped them, but didn’t get the credit.”
Pablos Holman is a technology futurist who worked with George when he was hired as a historian and one of the first team members at Blue Origin. Holman said of his peer: He has an “incredible working knowledge of, and reverence for, the history of science, both in computation and in physics.”
“Being able to glean something from George now and then is delightful, because he’s able to tell a story in a way that I find wildly compelling and informative,” Holman continued. “He honors the lives of the people whose ideas and inventions and discoveries he’s chronicling … ‘Turing’s Cathedral’ is a Bible for me.”
From Dick’s Tavern to kayak workshop
Bellingham has been George’s home since 1989, the same year he moved into the tavern-turned-workshop. Its former owners moved out two years prior, leaving the place eerily intact — right down to the empty drinks, pool tables and pay phone.
“I thought all that stuff belonged to me,” George said. “I spent pretty much the day getting the pay phone to work without money — and then a guy came through, said ‘It’s our pay phone,’ and took it away.”
Despite initial disarray, George transformed Dick’s Tavern into a tidy, functional workspace. Through his company, Dyson, Baidarka & Co., he created and sold kits for aluminum-frame sea kayak designs to customers as far away as Tasmania.
George was also a pioneer in the local sea kayak community throughout the ’90s. In the early days of Ski to Sea — a time when kayaks were “less commercial and more homemade” — one out of every 10 vessels were his design.
That same decade, the former high school drop-out became an adjunct professor at Western. “I never thought I would teach,” George said. “It’s odd that I would not have been able to get in as a student, but they took me along as faculty.”
George was awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of Victoria in 2012. But he underlined that science wasn’t always a “restricted guild”: In the early history of computing, a lot of excellent science was done by engineers, not academics.
In this vein, he expressed his gratitude for publicly accessible knowledge.
“Historians, archivists and librarians are welcoming of everybody. If you wanted to go do some work in the physics lab, nobody would let you in,” he said. “But as a high school dropout, I could go to archives and get access to whatever I wanted.”
Waterfront activism
These days George is less focused on kayaks, having sold off the last of his baidarka skin fabric to a kayak-building and racing club in Greenland. He enjoys working on his boat at the Colony Wharf boatyard on Whatcom Waterway; additionally, he’s republishing his third book, “Project Orion,” with original footnotes and newly declassified material.
His most recent writing project is also his most personal: After Freeman’s death in 2020, George wrote his dad’s 32-page biographical memoir for the Royal Society.
“I got to spend an entire year learning what my dad had done, which I hadn’t really absorbed,” George said. (He also emphasized that, despite his father’s fame, his mother was just as important — and “way too brilliant for her own good.”)
Locally, George’s legacy is tied to decades of waterfront activism. He has long advocated for relocation of the Whatcom Creek sewer line, reinstallation of a public dock and better waterfront access overall — goals that haven’t come to fruition.
For 35 years, “We had meetings of really capable people on how to plan for the future of the waterfront,” George said. “We didn’t agree on everything, but we all agreed on one thing: not to build condos at the edge of the water.”
George’s tenure on the board of the Working Waterfront Coalition (WWC), however, yielded more tangible success. Over the past 11 years, the organization has fought to “preserve the docks, shipyards and other facilities that keep our working waterfront ecosystem intact,” he said.
“He can sit through a meeting very quietly — but when he talks, he’s the rare person who everyone stops what they’re doing and listens [to] intently,” added Jim Kyle, a founding WWC member who’s known George for 15 years. “He knows so much, and he always makes so much sense.”
WWC also helped establish a maritime apprenticeship program, designed to bring new generations into the trade. The apprenticeship is the kind of program George, having grown up aboard commercial ships and among boat builders, would have “jumped on” in his youth. But his life charted a different course — less linear, perhaps, yet irrefutably remarkable.
Cocoa Laney is CDN’s lifestyle editor; reach her at cocoalaney@cascadiadaily.com; 360-922-3090 ext. 128.
