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Four Freedoms

Page 3

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

 

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