Quentin Daniels
From Conservapedia
Quentin Daniels, in Ayn Rand's novel Atlas Shrugged, was a consulting engineer who attempted to reverse-engineer the electrostatic motor that John Galt had invented. When John Galt learned of his activities, he recruited him into the strike of the men of the mind and flew him to Galt's Gulch. That flight almost caused a fatality and was the reason for the unplanned visit to the Gulch by Dagny Taggart.
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Background
The novel says little of his background. But it does reveal this salient fact: Robert Stadler, Director of the State Science Institute, tried to recruit him into the Institute. Quentin refused out-of-hand, on philosophical grounds. So he was mildly surprised when Dr. Stadler later recommended him to Dagny Taggart.
Dagny Taggart
Dagny Taggart of the Taggart Transcontinental Railroad contacted him at the recommendation of his old mentor, Robert Stadler. She described to him the ruined prototype of an electrostatic motor, the first practical example of such a device ever built, and the incomplete notes that she had found with it. Daniels was very enthusiastic about working on such a project and asked to see the prototype immediately.
When Daniels received the prototype, he agreed with Miss Taggart that someone had stripped it of certain key parts. He recognized the collecting coil, as Dagny had, but recognized that, as it was, the motor would not run. Dagny paid him handsomely to attempt to reconstruct the missing parts and reassemble the motor.
Time and events (chiefly Directive 10-289) would change his mind. He became so disgusted with the political situation in the United States that he begged Miss Taggart to cease to remunerate him, because he did not wish to have any tax liability. This was probably the most unusual income tax protest ever conducted.
John Galt
In the end of May 1929 (assuming, as is likely, that the strike began in 1917), a young but no-nonsense man came to see him. He introduced himself as John Galt and showed Daniels that he was in fact the original inventor of the motor. The novel gives no details of their conversation, but the narrative strongly implies that John Galt showed Daniels that he knew how he felt about paying income taxes in a "looters' society" (so much so that he would work without remuneration to avoid paying them) and that if he really wanted to hurt the system, then he must withdraw from it entirely and not share the secret of the motor with the world. John Galt would not (and indeed could not) have threatened to prosecute Daniels for patent infringement, because John Galt had not obtained a patent on the motor (and probably would not until the post-strike militia coalition was able to reactivate the United States Patent Office). But he might have indicated to Daniels that he ought not attempt to reconstruct another man's work, for that would be tantamount to plagiarism.
Flight to the Gulch
After an unspecified period, Quentin Daniels agreed to join John Galt in his great strike. John Galt had flown in to the town in which Daniels lived, and now proposed to fly Daniels out to what Galt might have described as a "secret place of rest." The two men climbed into John Galt's aircraft (a Dwight Sanders monoplane), and John Galt took off. They probably noticed another monoplane landing at the same airfield just as they were taking off. John Galt certainly noticed, and probably shared with Daniels, that that other aircraft had taken off from that airfield within five minutes of landing at it and was now pursuing them.
Again, the novel gives no details of any conversation between these two men. One would expect, however, that Daniels asked Galt whether the pilot of the other aircraft would discover his secret, and Galt assured him that he would not. Daniels would be worried when Galt began to descend into a desolate-looking, rocky valley, and Galt would ask him to have patience. Galt would then call a mysterious "ground controller" on his radio, and suddenly a lovely green valley would appear below their plane, instead of the rocky valley that had appeared before. Daniels would later learn about the refractor-ray screen that kept the valley invisible to anyone looking down on it from above.
John Galt would land his aircraft safely enough, and then would ask Daniels to excuse him while he attended to "an emergency." A man like Daniels would not be content to remain aboard the aircraft. He would step out, look up, and realize that the pursuing plane was still looking for them, and still descending. Then a bright flash would appear, and after the after-image had cleared, Daniels would see the pursuit craft again—falling in a dead-stick spin. The pilot would have time to make one last, desperate control input before crash-landing in the grass.
The pilot was, of course, Dagny Taggart. Remarkably, she was uninjured except for a twisted ankle.
Life in the Gulch
Quentin Daniels would not leave the Gulch for several months. Doubtless John Galt trained him in the theory and practice of electrostatic motors and hired him to take charge of the valley's electrostatic power plant when John Galt left the valley for the last time. When John Galt was later arrested in New York City, Daniels probably participated as a member of Ragnar Danneskjold's hastily assembled militia in the rescue operation that followed.
Daniels would remain in John Galt's employ through the winter. Then in the springtime of 1930, when John Galt determined that "the road [was] cleared," Daniels would probably take the post of chief manufacturing engineer in the company that John Galt would form to build electrostatic motors for a variety of transportation and stationary-power applications. Among the very first products would be a line of electrostatic locomotives.
Spoilers end here.
Typology
Quentin Daniels is a type of an individual of remarkable, even outstanding, but still relatively minor talent. Though he accepts the challenge of reconstructing the electrostatic motor, he does not attempt to reinvent that motor. Discerning the ideas of another inventor is one thing. Using one's own ideas to accomplish the same thing is quite another.
In addition, Quentin Daniels is not a leader. He is one of many men of excellent (but not superior) talent, who might be open to persuasion to withdraw their talents from the world, but who would wait for a strong-enough leader with a compelling-enough message to convince him. John Galt is that leader in Atlas Shrugged. One can well wonder how many modern Quentin Daniels might be ready to follow a modern John Galt, should such a person appear.
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