But Conrad was a Darwinian. He had never admitted this to his father, of course, and as he watched the archaic ichthyologist shrink on the dock, waving his arms happily overhead, Conrad felt an indescribable pang. For instead of sailing to Uruguay and fulfilling his father’s mission, he sailed to the nearby town of Wilhelmshaven, where he dismantled his ship, dispersed his crew, and exchanged the name Fehrmann for Pflug.
He never saw his father again.
He did, however, keep up with one or two ichthyology journals, and from those pages he gleaned that his father never lost hope that his son would return with the Uruguayan river fish that would destroy Darwin. Forty years later, when his father was 101 and evolution a settled issue among ichthyologists, Rudolf wrote to the Journal of Fish Biology that his son (“a brilliant scientist in his own right”) would “soon sail into Hamburg harbor with a tiny Uruguayan fish of the family Rivulidae that will create massive problems for Mr. Darwin.” He died a few months later, and Conrad eulogized him in the same journal. “If anything indicates the inadequacy of natural law,” Conrad wrote, “it isn’t the intricate gonads of a Uruguayan river fish but the uncanny faith of a Swiss ichthyologist.”
51: THE UPPSALA SCHOOL OF METEOROLOGY
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The example of Fehrmann’s son was cited repeatedly in 1938 by the Swedish meteorologist Gustaf Almqvist, father of the Uppsala School of Meteorology, whose son Gunnar disappeared in early January of that year after flying straight into the center of an enormous extratropical cyclone in order to disprove his father’s so-called Uppsala Model of Extratropical Cyclone Intensification.
The elder Almqvist, weirdly unperturbed by his son’s missing plane, explained to the journalists who gathered outside his office that Gunnar had subscribed to the Uppsala orthodoxy on the genesis and decay of extratropical cyclones, but not on their intensification. On the birth of cyclones he was “an Uppsala man” and on the death of cyclones he was “an Uppsala man through and through,” said the elder Almqvist, but on the intensification of cyclones he was “profoundly anti-Uppsala.” On the beginnings and endings of extratropical cyclones you could not wish for a more faithful Uppsala apostle, but on the intensification issue it was hard to find anyone more un-Uppsalian, so much so that in some ways he was actually closer to the Gothenburg School.
The fundamental question was whether air temperatures in the core of an extratropical cyclone were very cold (Gustaf) or moderately cold (Gunnar) compared to the surrounding air. Three months prior, Gustaf had once again reiterated his belief that the core air was “very cold,” Gunnar had replied that the air was only “moderately cold,” Gustaf had called him “a Gothenburg man through and through,” and not a word had passed between them since.
Only now did the elder Almqvist, cocking his head slightly, show a little emotion: “I ought to have said ‘You’re a Gothenburg man on the intensification question, otherwise Uppsala.’ ”
It soon emerged that the peculiar equanimity of the elder Almqvist in the face of his son’s disappearance stemmed from his absolute conviction that Gunnar had flown into the core of the cyclone, sampled air that was very (not moderately) cold, and resolved to vanish, airplane and all, much as Fehrmann fils had almost a century earlier, albeit for different reasons, rather than return to his father with his wounded pride and his refuted cyclonic beliefs. When a reporter for the Svenska Dagbladet suggested he at least consider the possibility that both airplane and son really had been lost in the storm, which was in fact of historic intensity, the elder Almqvist merely laughed. “He sampled some very cold air and vanished, that’s all!” he said.
The next day, bits of the young Almqvist’s plane were found floating in the North Sea. These bits — none of which, after all, were wings, propellers, or other components of special aerodynamical consequence — did not seem to trouble his father greatly. “Just come home,” he said, addressing his son in an interview with Dagens Nyheter. “Bring the air temperature measurements.” The next night the plane itself was found incinerated in a field near the town of Hanstholm in northern Denmark. The elder Almqvist told reporters that his proud son must have ejected himself upon noting the coldness of the core air and was now living in Denmark or perhaps by this point Germany, along with his evidence of a very (not moderately) cold cyclone core. But the Swedish newspapers felt now that they would be exploiting an obviously distraught and delusional old man to print these thoughts, or his pleading with his son to “come home, with or without the measurements, though preferably with,” so the journalists wrapped up their articles and left Uppsala.
That, plus political events, pushed the cyclone tragedy off the front page. But Almqvist, who suffered a stroke in ’42 and was bedridden thereafter, asked his extensive network of students to keep an eye out for a tall Swedish meteorologist with a fake name who held down-the-line Uppsala positions on the genesis and decay of extratropical cyclones yet was trying to hold onto a Gothenburg-like model on their intensification, in the face of his own empirical air temperature data. For a long time he heard nothing, but in 1947, shortly before his death, he received an anonymous letter, which may have been a prank, informing him of the appointment of a new M.I.T. professor who seemed to match that exact description.
52: THE KONIGSBERG BUILDING
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The billionaire banker Konigsberg made major donations to three top business schools — Harvard, Stanford, and Wharton — so that his son, who was only seven at the time, would have his “pick of the litter.” By the time the son applied to business schools fifteen years later, there were Konigsberg Buildings and Konigsberg Gardens on all three campuses. He decided to go to the school with the tallest Konigsberg Building, which was Wharton, and after the first day of class he flung himself off the top of it. He landed, however, on the soft mulch of the Konigsberg Garden, thus surviving the fall and losing only the use of his legs. Since then, thanks to another substantial donation from Konigsberg’s father, Wharton has worked hard to improve the accessibility of its facilities for people with disabilities. Today, Wharton boasts the most accessible business school campus in the world.
53: TALENT
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Details have emerged regarding the recent case of patricide in our town. It seems that the perpetrator had been living rent-free in his father’s attic for ten years. According to court transcripts, the son was attempting during that decade to write a single short story, which was itself about a father and son. For five years the father let the son write, but in the sixth year he began pestering him to see some pages. One member of the jury told the press that the father simply wanted some evidence his son “actually had talent.” Finally, in year ten, the father issued an ultimatum: if the son wouldn’t show him his short story, he would evict him from the attic.
The son hatched a plan to humiliate his father. He knew very well that his father had already made his judgment — that his son had no talent — and would therefore deem anything he showed him a failure. He also knew that his father knew nothing about literature. So the son typed up a canonical short story — Kafka’s “The Judgment”—and presented it under his own name. When his father inevitably dismissed it, according to court transcripts, the son would reveal that he had “just dismissed Kafka” and was thus no authority on literary matters.