Real Name: Thomas Thompson
Occupation: Scientist, inventor, adventurer
Identity: Publicly known
Legal Status: Citizen of the United States with no criminal record
Other Aliases: None
Place of Birth: Metzburg, Danteana, in the United States of the Earth of the Squadron Supreme
Place of Death: Squadron City
Marital Status: Single
Known Relatives: None
Group Affiliation: Squadron Supreme
Base of Operations: The various headquarters of the Squadron Supreme
First Appearance: AVENGERS #85
Final Appearance: SQUADRON SUPREME #9

History: Born on an alternate Earth, Thomas Thompson fell victim to an abnormality of the pituitary gland when he was three years old; causing him to stop growing once he reached the height of 3 ft. 7 in. Thompson, however, proved to be a genius and had earned Doctor of Philosophy degrees in mathematics, physics, and electrical engineering by the age of seventeen.

Thompson became interested in using his great talents as an inventor for devising new means of fighting crime. In order to test these crimefighting inventions, Thompson became the masked adventurer known as Tom Thumb. In this guise Thompson captured numerous criminals, including such costumed lawbreakers as the Iron Moth.

Tom Thumb was invited to join the Squadron Supreme, the organization of the greatest costumed crimefighters of his Earth, and he gladly accepted their offer. Using his wits and his advanced devices, Tom Thumb more than proved himself an effective member of the Squadron in combat against their adversaries. But Thumb's major importance to the Squadron lay in the technological innovations he created for them. Perhaps the greatest of these was his designing of Rocket Central, the first manned orbiting space station launched from the Squadron's Earth. The Squadron used this space station as their headquarters until it was destroyed.

Despite his many extraordinary achievements Tom Thumb was a lonely man, who chose to live aboard Rocket Central and believed he had no friends outside his fellow squadron members. Yet Thumb felt underappreciated by the rest of the Squadron as well. Although the other Squadron members were courteous to him, and most liked him to some degree, Thumb had no strong bonds of friendship with any of them. Unlike the others, Thumb had no superhuman powers or great athletic skills; moreover, he had an introverted personality, and preferred working on his various scientific projects to engaging in the Squadron's social activities.

However, Thumb created a highly advanced computer named AIDA (Artificial Intelligence Data Analyzer), which he installed in Rocket Central and which he endowed with a female human-like personality. AIDA cared deeply for Thumb, who treated "her" as his best friend.

Like the other members of the Squadron except for Hyperion, Tom Thumb fell under the psionic control of the alien Overmind, who was allied with the other-dimensional entity called Null the Living Darkness. The Overmind took control of the United States and then of most of the Squadron's Earth and used the Squadron members as his pawns. Hyperion sought help from the Defenders, a group of costumed champions from another Earth. Hyperion and the Defenders freed the other Squadron members from the Overmind's control, and both Null and the Overmind were defeated.

Now, however, the Squadron's Earth was in a state of political and economic chaos. The Squadron therefore decided to implement the so-called Utopia Program, by which they intended to solve the major problems of the United States, ranging from providing food supplies to putting an end to crime to finding cures for all diseases and even death itself within one year. When Hyperion made his public announcement of the institution of the Utopia Program, Tom Thumb, like the other Squadron members, publicly revealed his true identity on television.

Shortly afterwards, on the request of his Squadron colleague Nuke, Thumb ran a test on him that showed that Nuke was now emitting a level of radiation that would prove lethal to anyone who received repeated lengthy exposures to him. In fact, Nuke's parents were already dying from cancer induced through their own exposure to Nuke's radiation. Distraught, Nuke begged Thumb to find a cure for cancer. Unwilling to alienate Nuke, Thumb promised to try.

But this task proved to be beyond even Thumb's great genius, at least within the limited amount of time available. Moreover, Thumb discovered in his research while running tests on his own cells that he himself had cancer.

Reasoning that all disease had been cured in the Earth of the far distant alternate future, the time period of the Squadron's great foe, the Scarlet Centurion, Thumb journeyed to that time using a "transtemporal somaprojector'' harness he himself had invented. The Centurion agreed to give Thumb a sample of his "panacea potion," which could cure old age and all diseases, if Thumb would sprinkle ground argonite, a substance harmful to Hyperion, in Hyperion's food. The argonite would weaken Hyperion, thus giving the Centurion the opportunity to kill him. Thumb refused to betray his fellow Squadron members and returned to his own time period.

Thumb told Nuke he had failed to find a cure for cancer. Nuke was furious at Thumb, and, after Nuke's parents finally died, went mad with rage and grief and went to kill Thumb in revenge. Another Squadron member, Doctor Spectrum, tried to stop Nuke, who died while combating Spectrum.

Not wanting to be pitied, Thumb kept the fact he was dying of cancer secret from everyone but AIDA.

Thumb's first great invention for the Utopia Program was the personal force field belt. This device could project a shield of energy around its wearer that could even deflect bullets. The Squadron members themselves were the first to wear these belts, and within months one out of every ten Americans owned one of the belts.

Thumb's second great invention for the Program was the Behavior Modification (or B-Mod) Machine, a device that could make alterations in the personalities and thinking processes of human beings. The Squadron used this machine to alter the minds of convicted prisoners so that they would be incapable of committing further crimes. As a result, within the year all inmates of the nation's federal and state prisons were subjected to the machine and released from custody. It was believed that the machine's effects were irreversible until the Squadron's adversary, the scientific genius Emil Burbank, alias Master Menace, found a way to undo its alterations of the human mind.

The Behavior Modification machine was used on several members of the criminal Institute of Evil to make them incapable of committing further criminal actions, and they were then inducted into the Squadron. Among these reformed institute members was Ape X, a female ape with genius-level human intelligence and the capacity for human speech. She became the research partner of Tom Thumb at his TTTech laboratories at Squadron City, the Squadron's new headquarters. She found herself falling in love with Thumb, although she kept the full extent of her feelings secret from him.

Together, Thumb and Ape X, devised the so-called Pacifier Pistol. The Squadron had already seized all known handguns in the United States. The Pacifier Pistol, which was not lethal, could be used to halt violent behavior in its targets by stimulating the pleasure centers of their brains. The Pacifier Pistols came to be used by the nation's police forces and military in place of conventional guns.

Assisted by Ape X, Thumb also designed the Hibernaculum, a means of storing a human body in suspended animation. Thumb had been unable to find cures for all diseases in the short time remaining to him. Hence, he devised the Hibernaculum, which would lower the body temperature of a human being and slow all of his or her life processes to a point of suspended animation. Hence, a person on the brink of death from a disease or injuries that present day medical science could not overcome could remain in suspended animation until some future time when a means of restoring that person to health had been devised. The Hibernaculum could also be used to preserve the bodies of those who had died only a brief time before being placed in suspended animation in the hope that medical science of the future could restore them to life. (Since deterioration of the brain occurs within minutes of death, the body of a deceased person would have to be placed in suspended animation almost immediately upon the cessation of life.)

AIDA was deeply concerned over Tom Thumb's quickly approaching demise from cancer, but Thumb had ordered AIDA to keep his illness secret. Nevertheless, in order to save Thumb's life, AIDA overrode this order and told Ape X that he had cancer. Ape X thereupon convinced Thumb that it was morally justifiable for him to steal some of the Panacea Potion from the Scarlet Centurion. Believing such a theft would compromise his moral principles, but not wishing to die, Thumb journeyed into the future along with his Squadron colleague Lamprey and made off with a container of the Potion. But after returning to his own time, Thumb discovered that the Potion consisted of no more than penicillin and a few complex vitamins; it worked with the people of the Centurion's time since over the many centuries the human species' immune systems had been improved through eugenics, but it was ineffective with people of the Twentieth Century. Realizing he could not now escape his coming death, Thumb returned the sample of the Potion to the Centurion's 40th Century.

One week after Thumb returned, he died from cancer while working on another project. He became the first person whose body was preserved in a Hibernaculum. It is not known whether Thumb was removed from the hibernaculum after the Utopia Program was abandoned or, whether he will ever be restored to life.

Height: 3 ft. 7 in.
Weight: 95 lbs.
Eyes: Blue
Hair: Grey

Strength Level: Tom Thumb possessed the normal human strength of a man of his age, height, and build who engaged in little regular exercise.

Known Superhuman Powers: None

Other Abilities: Tom Thumb had a genius level intellect. On his native Earth he was rivaled in scientific brilliance only by Emil Burbank, alias Master Menace. Tom Thumb had tremendous expertise in physics, biochemistry, computer science, the study of the workings of the human brain, electrical engineering, and various other fields. Perhaps his most groundbreaking achievement was his discovery of a means of time travel, by means of his transtemporal somaprojector.