by Ann Wroe
Yet he also showed care for authenticity. If a story resisted tracking down, he would give it the dateline “Bolivia”. If it relied on “scientific research”, he would make sure the scientists were Bulgarian. Writers who made up the names of Georgia natives terrorised by giant chickens would be asked to check in the telephone book to make sure they did not exist. Loving editorial attention was given to the face of Satan when he appeared in a cloud formation over New York.
The result of this was that many readers appeared to believe Mr Clontz’s stories. Letters poured in, especially from the conservative and rural parts of the country where Ed Anger’s columns struck a chord. If a sensible man like Anger kept company with aliens and 20-pound cucumbers, perhaps those stories too were true. When the News reported the discovery of a hive of baby ghosts, more than a thousand readers wrote in to adopt one. But the saddest tale was of the soldier who wrote, in all seriousness, offering marriage to the two-headed woman.
Christopher Cockerell
Sir Christopher Sydney Cockerell, hovercraft inventor, died on June 1st 1999, aged 88
The story most often told about Christopher Cockerell is that he invented the hovercraft by experimenting with a device made from two empty cans and a vacuum cleaner. Some accounts say one of the cans had contained cat food and the other coffee. Some maintain that both were coffee cans. In other versions a pair of kitchen scales is mentioned. Sir Christopher (as he later became) seems not to have clarified these technical points. He was content for this homely story to become part of inventors’ folklore, unencumbered by too much detail.
Everything was stacked against becoming an inventor, he once said. People did not really want new ideas, even when they offered a better way of doing something. He had first learnt this as a child, when his mother declined to have her sewing machine powered by Christopher’s steam engine. But “some silly chaps seem to be driven” to inventing. Britain, he believed, needed more silly chaps like George Stephenson, James Watt and Richard Arkwright, who had given the world its first industrial revolution. What could be more encouraging to their successors than the knowledge that a great invention could be given birth with a couple of cans salvaged from the dustbin?
This was an antidote to the gloomy notion that would-be inventors these days needed to work in the sort of scientific palaces where Nobel prize-winners seek drugs that will enable people to live for ever. Simple-tech was still with us. As a piece of engineering, the Cockerell hovercraft, travelling on a cushion of air and released from the friction of water, was in the elegant tradition of Stephenson’s steam locomotive. There would always be a market, too, for what might be called primitive-tech. In someone’s mind there was surely an idea waiting to be born as brilliant as the paper clip and the safety pin. Sir Christopher never found that golden fleece, but he never gave up the search and in the course of a long life patented more than 70 inventions.
With all these inventions to his credit, Sir Christopher felt that he should have been rich. The hovercraft, versatile, fast, able to operate independently of harbours, was in demand throughout the world after the prototype first crossed the English Channel successfully in 1959. This conveyance, described in its patent as “neither an aeroplane, nor a boat, nor a wheeled land-vehicle”, was, it was claimed, the all-purpose craft of the future. To a large extent this claim has been realised. It is reckoned that in the past 40 years some 600m people have travelled by hovercraft. But not all of them have travelled in a hovercraft more than once. The vehicle’s movement, especially over choppy seas, can encourage nausea. Hovercraft still ply the English Channel, where the craft first flew, but many people prefer the steamers or the tunnel. Its future may be more as a transport for uncomplaining soldiers. American marines are enthusiastic about the hovercraft and it is widely used in the Russian army. In Finland coastguards have found that it goes well over ice. Car-size hovercrafts have become a toy for the rich. In America there are hovercraft races.
One way or another the hovercraft has been quite a success. The name has gone
into the language. “Hovercraft will always be around,” Sir Christopher predicted. Had he been an entrepreneur as well as an inventor he might indeed have made a fortune. But creativity and salesmanship do not always go together. In 1955 he had shown an early model of the craft, about two feet long, to the British government. A bad move to involve the bureaucrats, perhaps, but he was a patriot and thought the hovercraft might have a military use. The government agreed, and classified it as a state secret. Later the government took the hovercraft off the secret list and put up some money to develop it commercially; and later still helped to set up a corporation to market the vehicle. Sir Christopher surrendered his patents to the corporation. In 1969 hereceived £150,000 ($1.6m in today’s money) in settlement of his claims, a knighthood from a grateful government and the admiration of his colleagues. “Numerous medals”, he notes in a biographical entry in a reference book.
“I’ve enjoyed life,” Sir Christopher remarked, “but it would have been nice to treat my wife to dinner once in a while.” He may have felt bitter, but he was never poor. He had a comfortable childhood in Cambridge, where his father was director of the Fitzwilliam Museum. He gained an engineering degree and worked for Marconi. During the second world war at Marconi he was part of the team that invented a radio direction-finder which was fitted to British bombers.
He liked messing around in boats, and after the war bought a boatyard in Norfolk. As a business it was a failure, but it was here that he first experimented with his tins; and mulled over the possibilities of generating electricity from the movement of sea waves, an idea that once seemed silly but now seems less so. But for the silly chaps, said Christopher Cockerell, we would still be living in the stone age.
The Columbia seven
Columbia’s crew of seven died on February 1st 2003
The space shuttle Columbia took off on its last flight without particular ceremony. Shuttles have been America’s space workhorses for more than 20 years. They are regularly rocketed into space loaded with satellites, or supplies for a space station, or boxes of plants to see how they grow without gravity; that sort of thing. Yet, humdrum or not, getting a ride in a shuttle, joining the still tiny group of people who have viewed the world from the heavens like gods, is greatly coveted. All seven in Columbia’s crew had served long apprenticeships in more earthbound activities before being considered for a space trip. All seven were in their 40s; the five men with receding hairlines; the two women doing their best to look alluring in their working clothes. No movie director would have cast them for a space epic. Yet each had a personality more interesting than that suggested by the routine grins offered to cameramen.
Kalpana Chawla, an Indian-born naturalised American, had for years radiated star quality, particularly in Karnal, the small farming town in northern India where she grew up. She said that J. R. D. Tata, who flew the first mail flights in India, had been her childhood hero. The Times of India and India Today, a news magazine, ran pictures of Miss Chawla as she prepared for her mission. Readers were told when to watch the skies of southern India as Columbia passed over in orbit during the 16-day journey.
Miss Chawla had had an earlier trip into space in 1997 after studying aerospace engineering in India and America, and learning to pilot practically anything that could fly, from gliders to airliners. For Indian politicians her career has for years been an argument that technology promised a hopeful future for all Indians, a powerful message in a country where millions live in poverty. When technology failed Kalpana Chawla last weekend, Karnal turned to its old, trusted ways. Incense was burnt and marigolds were placed on her photographs.
The United States turned to its own trusted symbol, the flag. All over the country flags were lowered to half-mast. Israel did the same. Ilan Ramon, an Israeli air force colonel, was the only non-American in the crew. In the aftermath of the shuttle disaster, Israel, perhaps understandably, sought to emphasise its links with the United S
tates. Ariel Sharon, the Israeli prime minister, said that “at times like these” the two countries felt their “common fate, identity and values, and shared vision”. Just as Indian newspapers had dwelt on Miss Chawla’s qualities as a symbol of the new India, the Israeli press recounted Mr Ramon’s exploits in defence of his country. In 1981 he had taken part in an air attack on a nuclear reactor being built in Iraq. He was a modest soldier. “There was no knife between his teeth,” said a colleague. Mr Ramon recalled that an Arab, Sultan bin Salman of Saudi Arabia, had flown in a space shuttle in 1985, so he was not the first astronaut from the Middle East. As well as Israel, he represented “all our neighbours”.
Mr Ramon was one of a number of foreigners who have been invited from time to time to take part in shuttle flights.
Front: Chawla, McCool, Husband Back: Ramon, Anderson, Clark, Brown
He had been training with the rest of the crew since July 1998. As Columbia’s “payload specialist” he had the most peaceful of the 59 scientific tasks being carried out: studying the effects of sandstorms on climate.
Three of the Americans in Columbia were on their first space flights. Laurel Clark was a physician and much of her previous experience had been in submarines, where she worked on escape techniques. The day before the shuttle burnt up, she sent to her family an e-mail, now a footnote in space history, describing the trip. David Brown was another doctor. As a young man he worked in a circus as an acrobat. He said it taught him the value of team work. William McCool, the pilot of the shuttle, was a former test pilot. Rick Husband, the shuttle’s commander, was on his second space flight. He was working with a team designing spacecraft for possible trips to the moon and beyond.
This was the first shuttle mission for three years to be given over entirely to scientific experiments, rather than as a space truck carrying cargoes to a space station being assembled 200 miles above the earth. Michael Anderson, anAfrican-American, had the job of checking that all the experiments were going well. He, like Miss Chawla and Mr Ramon, was aware that he carried an extra burden in his job: as a role model for young blacks. Impressively, he had logged more than 200 hours in space. One of his trips was to Mir, a Russian station that has since been abandoned after years in space.
It is obvious to say that the seven made a unified group. If you work together towards a common objective over a period of several years there is likely to be a unity. But for the Columbia seven there was more than that. Some people call themselves Europeans, some Asians, some indeed Americans. Kalpana Chawla said, “When you are in space and look at the stars and the galaxy, you feel that you are not just from any particular piece of land, but from the solar system.”
Charles Conrad
Charles Peter Conrad, the third man on the moon, died on July 9th 1999, aged 69
Anyone interested in space travel can probably name Neil Armstrong as the first man to step on the moon 30 years ago, uttering the carefully scripted words, “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.” Perhaps the name of his companion, Buzz Aldrin, may also come to mind. Charles Conrad, though, was in the second moon landing four months later, and for him memories have faded. Nice guys come last, as the cruel American aphorism puts it, or, in the case of Mr Conrad, third. He was a nice guy; everyone said that. A nicer man never put on a space suit. He could also be amusing, and this may have been one reason why he was not selected for the first moon trip.
Going to the moon was a very serious undertaking: only a successful landing would justify the colossal amount of money spent on space research and, most important, would put one over on the Russians, who had sent up the first satellite and whose Yuri Gagarin had been the first person to circle the earth in a spacecraft. Neil Armstrong was serious to the point of shyness, and was preferred as leader of the first moon trip even though Buzz Aldrin had had more experience in space.
But Mr Conrad was a wild card. During his training as an astronaut he had made light of the physical and psychological tests that spacemen had to endure. He scoffed at attempts to probe his mind, and was convinced that the medical staff had an unhealthy obsession about enemas. When the diminutive (5ft 6in) Charles Conrad made his first step on to the moon, his slightly mocking words were, “Whoopee! Man, that may have been a small one for Neil, but that’s a long one for me.” There were more shudders among the space people when Mr Conrad appeared in a television advertisement for the American Express bank. “Do you know me?” he said. “I walked on the moon.”
Those who did know Charles Conrad had a high regard for his competence. Getting off the ground, he said, was a family tradition: his father had been a balloonist observing enemy lines in the first world war. Father had come down to earth and had made a fortune as a stockbroker, providing Charles, or Pete, as his parents called him, with a privileged childhood. The 1930s were the heroic days of flying. Mr Conrad remembered assembling crates and chairs to resemble the aircraft in which Charles Lindbergh had made the first solo non-stop flight across the Atlantic, “then sit inside it for hours pretending to fly”.
He studied aeronautical engineering at Princeton and made a career as a navy airman. In the early 1960s he was taken on for training by America’s space agency. In the fragile contraptions that first took Americans into space, Mr Conrad’s small stature and light weight were great assets. Waiting for lift-off, he recalled, you had fears “just like bullfighters have fears of being killed by the bull”, but once you started “it’s all business” because that is what keeps you alive.
The Apollo craft, called Intrepid, that took Mr Conrad to the moon provided him with business that no one had expected. A minute after lift-off the craft was struck by lightning, and all the warning lights in Intrepid began to flash. Mr Conrad declined to abort the mission and carried on to make a perfect landing on the moon. He and his companion, Alan Bean (who now became the fourth man to walk on the moon), spent nearly eight hours there. Mr Conrad returned with what he called “the world’s greatest cold”. They also collected bits of moon rock and took lots of pictures (but mislaid a spool of film,presumably still on the moon). Neither these souvenirs nor those collected on the first moon flight seemed much to show as a return on the costly investment. But getting to the moon cheered up America, and but for the clever engineering involved we might not have gadgets such as the mobile phone. So be grateful.
Mr Conrad never went to the moon again, although there were four more successful missions. Twelve people in all have walked on the moon, all of them American. Mr Conrad did take part in extended space flights, one of them lasting for 28 days. To him, space was just another workplace. He did not see his moon trip as a religious experience. Those that did, such as James Irwin, who later led six expeditions to Turkey in search of Noah’s Ark, were, said Mr Conrad, religious before they went, and remained religious when they got back.
He predicted that, not too long in the future, there would be tourist flights into space, providing the costs could be kept down with reusable craft. There would be plenty to see. The earth, he said, resembled “a beautiful blue marble suspended against a black velvet blanket”. Space was healthy, he said, colds aside. He never suffered any ill effects from his space travels: he died in a motor-cycle accident.
Mr Conrad was asked whether there was life in other worlds. He said there probably was. “After all, there’s plenty of unearthly looking things moving around in my refrigerator, so there’s always a chance of life springing up almost anywhere.” He liked a joke, did Charles Conrad.
Alistair Cooke
Alistair Cooke, smoother of transatlantic tensions, died on March 30th 2004, aged 95
FOR as long as anyone can remember, Alistair Cooke was the perfect embodiment of the special relationship. British ambassadors sometimes take Washington by storm, but more usually blend in with the scenery. British prime ministers sometimes forge real personal bonds with American presidents, but more often have to do with the make-believe kind. Mr Cooke, a BBC broadcaster, was different. Fo
r more than half a century he formed a solid, though urbane, one-man bridge between the two cultures.
Every Thursday, for 58 years, he wrote his “Letter from America”. He would compose in his Manhattan flat, picking away at his typewriter, with the trees of Central Park laid out before him. The letters were generally pegged to some current event, but anything less like the urgent hectorings of foreign correspondents would be hard to imagine. Mr Cooke was a master of the perambulatory style. Each letter wandered for 15 minutes down all sorts of highways and byways only to end up, just when it seemed he must have lost his way, at his intended destination.
His voice alone lured listeners on. It was a treasure, light and high, with a jaunty breathiness honed by decades of smoking, and with a curious accent that floated somewhere in the mid-Atlantic. And this was where he belonged, patiently explaining one side to the other.
He had first seen America in the early 1930s, travelling on a Harkness Fellowship. Even in the Depression, its energy and vitality astonished him. “The landscape and the people”, he once said, “were far more gripping and dramatic than anything I had ever seen.” Until then, his interest had lain vaguely in the theatre. From then on, it shifted to what he saw as the real drama unfolding in the world – the United States. In 1941, he became an American citizen.
Mr Cooke made his analysis of his new country sound easy, but it was not. As he well knew, the superficial similarities between Britain and America hid differences that lay deep and needed careful unravelling. “The stress will tend always to be on the springs of American life, whose bubbles are the headlines, rather than on the headlines themselves,” he told the BBC as the letters began, in 1946.
