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 system 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