A Genius Encountered

(CBS)  Every year, the MacArthur Foundation selects smart, talented, creative people and gives them $500,000 fellowships, better known as "genius awards."

We at CBS got to wondering what it takes to make a genius. So we sent CBS News corresponent Steve Hartman to find out.

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I must confess: Until I met David Macaulay, I never really knew how our camera worked. And I certainly never wondered about the zipper on our cameraman's jacket.

"The light is reflecting off my face, it's passing through the lens," explains the Norwich, Vt., author.

"Unless you're curious, you tend not to think about it; it's like a battering ram inside this thing and it literally ... you force it between the teeth and it just pries them apart," he adds, moving on to the zipper question.

That's the genius of David Macaulay.

"I think of myself as an explainer, as a visual explainer of things that interest me," Macaulay offers.

In his book "The Way Things Work," Macaulay makes simple things fascinating. In other books, like "Cathedral" and "Pyramid," he makes complicated things understandable.

Which is why today the MacArthur Foundation bestowed on him its genius award. Actually, the call came last week, but he had to keep it a secret until today.

"Once you've hung up the phone, what do you do?" I asked. "You go down and you tell your wife, right away, because she actually picked up the phone first and heard this man say, 'Are you alone?'" came the response.

In addition to the awesome title of "genius," the award also comes with $500,000 — money the genius is supposed to use to do more genius things. In Macaulay's case, that means more painstakingly drawn, minutely detailed books.

There really doesn't seem to be anything that Macaulay can't make interesting and understandable. In fact, his next book will attempt to explain one of the most complicated structures on Earth; you.

"You want to keep the blood down here, it goes through the aortic arch, which is here," the author explains as he points at a diagram of the human body.

"You talk like you've been to medical school," I say.

"I've been to medical school, yes. That was one heck of a semester," he responds humbly.

In the time Macaulay spent researching this book — six years — he could have been a doctor. And he knew nothing about anatomy when he started. "Am I impressing you?" he asks. Yes!

Asked if he's looked into the mirror at all and said, "you're a genius," Macaulay replies, "No, I don't think its really sunk in, to be quite honest with you, what it really means."

Plus, he'd probably just end up explaining how the mirror works, anyway.