by John Crowley
seemed a deprivation hard to bear: the pads of his fingers could sense
the raised ridges of metal as though longing for them.
Their tutor affixed the disc to the plate of the gramophone and
slipped the catch that allowed it to rotate. It was one of only a handful
in existence, though the boys’ father was confident of changing that:
20 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
he, like Berliner, could see a day not far off when communication by
discs small enough to fit in a breast pocket or slip into an envelope,
playable on machines that would become as common as telephones,
would bring the voices of loved ones (and the instructions of bosses
and officials too) anywhere in the world right to our ears, living let-
ters.
The tutor placed the stylus on the disc’s edge, and it was swept into
the grooves. “My dear boys,” they heard their father’s voice say, speak-
ing in English with his distinctive but unplaceable accent. Hendryk felt
his brother, Jules, who sat close beside him bent to the gramophone’s
horn, shiver involuntarily at the sound. “I have some good news that I
think will interest you. I’ll bet you remember a day five years ago—
Jules, my dear, you were only five—when you saw Monsieur Ader fly
his Avion, the ‘Eolus,’ at Armainvilliers. What a day that was. Well,
next week he is to make a test flight of his latest machine, the Avion III,
called ‘Zephyr.’ The flight—if the thing does fly—will be at the army’s
grounds at Satory, on the fourteenth of this month, which if my calen-
dar is correct will be three days after you hear this. It is a beautiful
machine. Monsieur Ader’s inspiration is the bat, as you know, and not
the bird. Take the earliest morning train to Versailles and a carriage
will meet you. All my love as usual. This is your father, now ceasing to
speak.” The stylus screeched against the disc’s ungrooved center, and
the tutor lifted it off.
“And what,” he asked the boys, “do we see in the name of this new
machine?”
“Avion is a thing that flies, like a bird,” said Hendryk. “Avis, a
bird.”
“Zephyr is wind,” said Jules. “Breeze.” His hands described gentle
airs. “Can we listen again?”
Henry Van Damme and his brother were Americans, born in Ohio of an
American mother, but their father—though he spent, on and off, a
decade or more in the States—was European, a Dutch businessman.
He disliked that term, which seemed to name a person different from
himself, but Dutch alternatives were worse— handelaar, zakenman—
redolent of strong cigars and evil banter and low tastes. If he could he
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 21
would have described himself as a dreamer; he wished that entrepre-
neur meant in French what it had come to mean in English, the glam-
orous suggestion of risk and romance.
His sons grew up on trains and steamships, speaking French or
Dutch or English or all three at once, a compound language they would
use for years to keep their secrets. Their education was conducted in
motion, so to speak, and staged as though by an invisible mentor-magi-
cian as a series of adventures and encounters the point of which seemed
to be to discover why they had occurred, and what each had to do with
the preceding ones. At least that’s how the boys made sense of it—they
worshiped their father, and their young British tutor amiably turned
their attempts at exegesis into standard lessons in mathematics or lan-
guage.
Eudoxe Van Damme (he had been christened Hendryk, like his son
and his father, but found the name unappealing) was a large investor in
mechanical and scientific devices and schemes, about three-quarters of
which failed or evaporated, but one or two of which had been so spec-
tacularly successful that Van Damme now seemed impervious to finan-
cial disaster. He had a quick mind and had trained it in science and
engineering; he could not only discern the value (or futility) of most
schemes presented to him but also could often make suggestions for
improvements that didn’t annoy the inventors. His son Hendryk, large
and optimistic, was like him; Jules was slighter and more melancholy,
like his mother, whom he would miss lifelong.
The Berliner discs weren’t the only sound recording device Van
Damme had taken an interest in. As a young man he had assembled a
consortium of other young men with young heads and hearts to develop
the phonautograph of Scott, the machine that produced those ghostly
scratchings on smoked films representing (or better say resulting from)
sound amplified and projected by a horn. It could even produce pic-
tures of the human voice speaking, which Scott had called logographs.
The great problem with the Scott apparatus was that although it pro-
duced what was provably a picture of sound, the sound itself could not
be recovered from the picture. Van Damme was interested in this prob-
lem—he was hardly alone in that, for problems of representation, mod-
eling, scalability, were absorbing the attention of engineers and
mathematicians worldwide just then—but he was even more interested
22 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
in the claim that the machine might be able to receive and amplify
sounds—and voices—from the other world, a claim that Van Damme
spent a good deal of time thinking how to establish, or at least investi-
gate. His money and his support did seem to have results: a revamped
phonautograph, though shut up alone in a carefully soundproofed
room, had nevertheless produced films showing the distinctive traces
of human voices. When at length the problem of retrieving from the
Scott films the sounds that had left their shadows there (a process
requiring great delicacy and never truly satisfactory) Van Damme saw
to it that these logographs from the soundproof room were also pro-
cessed: and what certainly seemed to be human voices could indeed be
heard, though far less distinctly than the ones caught in the usual way.
Van Damme told his sons that it sounded like the striving but unintel-
ligible voices of spastics.
Unfortunately the more reliable gramophones of Berliner caught
nothing in soundproof rooms but the noise of their own operation.
These enterprises took time and travel, but it was above all flight—
heavier-than-air, man-carrying flight—that most engaged Eudoxe Van
Damme’s imagination and his money in those years. Hendryk and
Jules arrived in Paris in that autumn of 1897 from England, where
with their tutor they had visited Baldwyns Park in Kent and seen
Hiram Maxim’s aircraft attempt to get off the ground. What a thing
that was, the largest contraption yet built to attempt heavier-than-air
flight, powered by steam, with a propeller that seemed the size of a
steamship screw. Old white-bearded Hiram Maxim, inventor of the
weapon still called by his name around the world, and builder of the
hugest wind tunnel in existence. That July day when the boys watched,
it actually got going so fast it broke the syst
em of belts and wires tying
it down like Gulliver, tore up the guardrails, and with propellers beat-
ing like mad and the mean little steam engines boiling went rocketing
at a good thirty or forty miles an hour, and almost—almost!—gained
the air, old Hiram’s white beard tossed behind him and the crew
knocked about. It was impossible not to laugh in delight and terror. If
M. Ader’s delicate beings of silk and aluminum rods were rightly
named for gods of breath and wind, that one of Maxim’s should have
been called Sphinx—it was about the size of the one in Egypt and in
the end as flightless, though Maxim wouldn’t admit that and later
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 23
claimed he’d felt the euphoria of earth-leaving and flown a short dis-
tance that day.
M. Ader too would remember the day at Satory differently than
others would. Eudoxe Van Damme met his boys and their tutor at the
field at Satory, drizzly breezy October and chilly, not like the blue into
which Hiram Maxim had thrust himself. Van Damme looked as ele-
gant as always, even in a large brown ulster; his soft fedora at an angle,
waxed mustaches upright. More than once he had been mistaken in
train stations or hotel lobbies for the composer Puccini. Around the
field gathered in knots were French Army officers, M. Ader’s backers.
As Maxim did, these Frenchmen expected the chief use of “manflight,”
as Maxim called it, would be war.
“I can’t say I think much of his preparations here,” Eudoxe told his
sons as they followed after his quick determined footsteps over the
damp field. “You see the track on which the machine will run. Observe
that the track is circular— M. Ader will start with the wind at his back,
presumably, but as he rounds there and there the wind will be first
athwart, then at his head. Ah but look, do look!”
The Avion III “Zephyr” was unfolding now on its stand. Dull day-
light glowed through its silk skin as though through a moth’s wing. Its
inspiration was indeed the bat—the long spectral fingerbones on which a
bat’s wing is stretched modeled by flexing struts and complex knuckles.
Tiny wheels like bat’s claws gripped the track. Incongruous on its front
or forehead, the stacks of two compact black steam engines. “He claims
to be getting forty-two horsepower from those engines, and they weigh
less than three hundred pounds,” Eudoxe cried, hurrying toward the
craft, holding his hat, his boys trailing after him.
The attempt was a quick failure. Fast as it rolled down its track it
could not lift off. Like a running seabird its tail lifted, its wings
stretched, but it wouldn’t rise. Then those contrary winds caught it and
simply tipped it gently off its weak little wheels to settle in the damp
grass.
In the few photographs taken of the events at Satory that day,
Eudoxe Van Damme is the small figure apart from the caped military
officers, facing the disaster, back to the camera, arms akimbo to
express his disgust, and the two boys beside him, their arms extended
as though to help the Avion to rise.
24 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
“Now, boys,” said their father in the train compartment, “what can
we see to be the primary error of M. Ader?”
“Copying the look of flying things,” said Hendryk.
“But not . . .”
“Not their, their—not their reasons.”
Eudoxe laughed, delighted with this answer. “Their reasons!”
“He means,” Jules said, “the principles. It can’t fly just because it
looks like something that can. Leonardo thought that was so, and he
was wrong too, that if a thing has wings that look like a bird’s . . .”
“Or a bat’s . . .”
“Then they will function in the same way,” said the tutor, who
tended to get impatient and pony up the answers the boys were fishing
for.
“Very well,” said Eudoxe. “Of course just because it resembled a
bat, or a pterosaur, did not necessarily mean it would not fly. And what
other error, related to that first one, did we see?”
“It was badly made,” said Jules.
“It was very well made,” said their father. “The fabrication was
excellent. My God! The vanes of the propellers, if that was what those
fans were supposed to be—bamboo, were they, interleaved with alumi-
num and paper and . . .”
“Scale,” said Hendryk.
Eudoxe halted, mouth open, and then smiled upon his son, a foxy
smile that made them laugh.
“It’s too big, ” cried Jules.
“Ah my boys,” said Eudoxe Van Damme. “The problem of scale.”
“The giants of Galileo,” the tutor put in, with a reminding forefinger
raised. “Who could not walk without breaking their legs, unless their
legs were the size of American sequoias. We have done the equations.”
“Weight increases as the cube of the linear dimensions,” Jules said.
But that principle was a simple one, known to every bridge builder
and ironworker now; the harder concept of making models that modeled
not simply the physical relations of a larger object but also that object’s
behavior was still to be solved. Ostwald had not yet published his paper
“On Physically Similar Systems,” wherein he asked a question that would
haunt Julius Van Damme lifelong—if the entire universe were to be
shrunk to a half, or a quarter, of its present size, atoms and all, would it
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 25
be possible to tell? What would behave differently? Helmholtz’s dimen-
sionless numbers could relate the motions of small dirigibles to great
unwieldy ones such as had never been (and might never be) made. But
the small flying “bats” like those the Van Damme boys played with
worked by twisted rubber strings that turned a screw, craft that might
carry miniature people on tiny errands in toyland, always failed when
scaled up to carry actual gross fleshly people. Something was wrong.
“Poor Monsieur Pénaud,” said Eudoxe Van Damme, and the boys
knew they were to hear again the tale of the day when Eudoxe Van
Damme saw the planophore and its inventor. “I was a child, your age,
Hendryk. What a day it was, a beautiful day in summer, the Jardin des
Tuileries—I could hear the music of the fair. An announcement had
been made—I don’t know where—that Monsieur Pénaud would con-
duct an experimental flight of his new device. A crowd had collected,
and we waited to see what would happen.”
Van Damme paused there, to extract a cigar from the case in his
pocket, which he examined without lighting.
“And what happened, Papa?” the boys asked, as they knew they
were supposed to.
“I saw flight,” said Eudoxe. “The first winged craft that was heavier
than air, pulled by a screw propeller, stabilized by its design, that flew
in a straight line. It flew, I don’t remember, a hundred and fifty feet.
Flight! There was only one drawback.”
The boys knew.
“It was only two feet long.”
The boys laughed anyway.
M. Pénaud had come out from a carriage that had brought him onto
the field. The crowd murmured a little as he came forth—those who
didn’t know him—because it could be seen that he was somehow dis-
abled, he walked with great difficulty using a pair of heavy canes; an
assistant came after him, carrying the planophore. M. Pénaud himself—
slight, dark, sad—turned the rubber strings as the assistant steadied the
device and counted. The strings were tightened 240 turns—that number
remained in Van Damme’s memory. When it was fully wound, M.
Pénaud—held erect by the assistant from behind, who gently put his
arms around his waist, as though in love or comradeship—lifted and
cast off the planophore, at the same time releasing the rubber strings.
26 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
The craft dipped at first, and the crowd made a low sound of awed
trepidation, but then it rose again, and so did the crowd’s general voice,
and it flew straight and true. The crowd began to cheer, though M.
Pénaud himself stood motionless and unsurprised. Eudoxe Van Damme
by his nurse’s side found himself as moved by the inventor as the inven-
tion, the flight over the earth less affecting than the crippled man just
barely able to hold himself up and keep from lying supine upon it.
Well, the world thought that M. Pénaud had invented a wonderful
toy, and so he had. But he believed he had discovered a principle and had
no interest in toys. He thought he could scale up the planophore to carry
a man, or two men. “If I’d been twenty years older, I’d have helped. I’d
have known he was right. I’d have come to his aid.” The Société Fran-
çaise de Navigation Aérienne, which had praised the planophore, gave
Pénaud no real help. He asked the great dirigibilist Henri Giffard, who
first encouraged and then ignored him. And one day in 1880 M. Pénaud
packed all of his drawings and designs and models into a wooden box
shaped, unmistakably, like a coffin, and had it delivered to M. Giffard’s
house. Then he took his life. “He was not more than thirty years old.”
The story was done. The principle was enunciated: what is small
may work, what is large may not, and not for the reasons of physics
alone, though those may underlie all others. The boys were silent.
“Oddly enough,” Eudoxe Van Damme said then, “Giffard himself
