“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
committed suicide not two years later. And still we do not fly.” He lit
his cigar with care; he seemed, to his elder son, to be standing on the
far side of a divide that Hendryk would himself one day have to cross,
because he could just now for the first time perceive it: on that far side
there was enterprise, and failure; possibility and impossibility; cigars,
power, and death. “It may be, you know,” he said to the boys, “that we
may one day solve the problem of how it is that birds fly, and bats; and
at the same time, in the same solution, prove also that we can never do
it ourselves. How tragic that would be.”
Of course the problem was solved, it did not exclude mankind, and
Eudoxe Van Damme lived to see it solved, though by then he was
largely indifferent to a success like that.
In the days after the Great War, when the Wright brothers planned
joint ventures with the Van Damme brothers, ventures that somehow
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 27
never came to fruition, the Wrights used to talk about how they had
played (“experimented” they always said, those two didn’t play) with
those rubber-string-driven bats that Hendryk and Jules were sending
aloft, at the same time, not far from the Wrights’ Ohio home. The
Wrights, though, weren’t simply marveling but trying to figure out
what caused the bats to behave so differently at different sizes. The
machines, as willful and pertinacious as living things, as liable to fail-
ure, beating aloft in the summer twilights.
It was odd how many pairs of brothers had advanced the great
quest. So often one luminous brave gay chance-taker, one careful wor-
ried pencil-and-paper one, issuing warnings, trying to keep up. The
Lilienthals, fussy Gustav and his wild brother Otto, who not long
before the Van Damme brothers watched the Avion III not fly, killed
himself in a man-bearing kite: Gustav was absent and thus had not
done the safety drill he always did. Hiram Maxim had a brother,
Hudson, who resented and plotted against him. The Voisin brothers.
The Montgolfiers, for the matter of that, back in the beginning. The
Wrights: Wilbur the daredevil, so badly hurt in a crash when careful
Orville had not been there to watch out for him. Never the same after.
And the Van Dammes.
Henry sometimes wondered if there was something about brother-
hood itself that opened the secret in the end. For what the Wrights
learned, and learned from gliders, and from M. Pénaud’s planophores
too, was that a flying machine, so far from needing to be perfectly and
completely stable, was only possible if it was continually, controllably,
un stable, like a bicycle ridden in three dimensions: an ongoing argu-
ment among yaw, pitch, roll, and lift, managed moment to moment by
a hand ready to make cooperation between the unpredictable air and
the never-finished technologies of wood, power, and wire. It was a
partnership, a brotherhood. There never was a conquest of the air. The
air would not let itself be conquered, and didn’t need to be.
Madame Van Damme, née Gertie Pilcher of Toledo, died of peritonitis
aboard the Bulgarian Express on her way to meet her husband in Con-
stantinople. The train was passing through remote country when she
was taken, and a decision had to be made whether to stop the train and