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alongside the Saltonseas’ four children. Meanwhile, Troutwine was rushing to put together the funds and facilities necessary for the experiment. He wanted to see if a chimpanzee could learn American Sign Language. There had been a few other notable attempts to teach sign language to chimps—most notably Allen and Beatrice Gardener’s experiments with the female chimp Washoe—but those experiments were dogged by accusations of sloppy methodology and data-fudging, and the results were dubious and disappointing at best. Troutwine thought this was in part because the chimps in previous experiments had been too old when serious attempts at language instruction had begun; you must begin molding the plastic of an animal mind with language right from birth. (I am an exception.) It is worth mentioning that neither Millicent nor Winn Saltonsea nor any of their children were fluent—or even capable—ASL signers. Troutwine had an ASL teacher instruct them in signs that they might impart to Clever. Unfruitful months passed as Troutwine dithered, and Clever quickly became too big and unruly for Winn Saltonsea. After a relatively short time of living with baby Clever, Winn had come to regret agreeing to house the chimp. Clever had begun to tear apart books, furniture, drapes—anything in the Saltonseas’ home that could be torn apart, including their marriage. But that is another story.

The Saltonseas had to forsake Clever and end their involvement in the project. Clever was passed from one home to another (never, by the way, to Troutwine’s own home) until Troutwine was finally able to secure enough funding and resources to begin the experiment in earnest. Eventually he managed to secure the use of a large and elegant Georgian mansion near the Princeton campus, owned by the university. The donor of the property had envisioned it as a botanical research station, as the house featured an English garden, sprawling lawns, koi ponds, and a greenhouse. For whatever reason this never happened, and since its donation the property had sat vacant and neglected, and had fallen into disrepair while the Princeton administration dragged its feet as to the question of what to do with it. Through faculty chatter Troutwine became apprised of its existence and asked Princeton to let him headquarter the Clever Hands project there. They said yes, and that was that: he had the house refurbished and chimp-proofed to the best of his knowledge and funding, hired a small army of caretakers and tutors to provide round-the-clock handling and upkeep, and moved Clever into the house. Only then was Troutwine able to provide enough space, facilities, and personnel to properly throw everything he could into the experiment, and by that time Clever was nearly three years old.

For the next several years Clever lived like a mad aristocrat: imprisoned in luxury, disallowed to venture beyond the twenty-room house and the ten acres of land surrounding it, yet with his every crazy whim slavishly attended to by a revolving crew of graduate students who kept him company, cared for him, fed and washed him, entertained him, and were always, and with steadily increasing desperation, trying to teach him sign language. As Clever got older and the experiment wore on, Troutwine frantically jumped from one methodological tack to another, changing methods of data collection and analysis in accordance with the nature of the results. Over the years, the logistics of the Clever Hands project exponentially compounded in complexity and eventually spiraled out into unmanageable oblivion. Not one fluent ASL signer ever worked on the experiment. Troutwine would sit Clever down for hours of deliberate instruction in a makeshift “classroom” they built in the house. His teachers would make signs and try to get him to mimic them, often molding his hands to make the signs. In order to keep getting funding from the National Science Foundation, Henry Troutwine (who gradually withdrew in all ways but in name from the daily experiments, and in the end had little actual contact with Clever) was forced to publish