Jem Cip was a devout vegetarian, in other words one of those herbivores who forbid all animal food and all fermented liquor, half-Brahman, half-Muslim, a rival of those Newmans, Pitmans, Wards, and Davies who have won renown for that sect of harmless crackpots.3
On this occasion, Jem Cip was supported by another club member, William T. Forbes, the director of a large factory, where glucose was produced by treating cloth with sulfuric acid—which allows one to make sugar out of old rags.4 He was a man of high standing, this William T. Forbes, the father of two charming spinsters, Miss Dorothy, called Doll, and Miss Martha, called Mat, who set the tone in the best circles of Philadelphia society.5
And so from Jem Cip’s proposal, seconded by William T. Forbes and several others, the decision was made to appoint the club president using the “midpoint method.”
In truth, this system of election could well be applied to any case where the worthiest candidate must be chosen, and numerous sensible Americans were already thinking of using it to nominate the president of the United States.
On two easel boards entirely white, a black line had been traced. The length of each of these lines was mathematically equal, for they had been determined with as much exactitude as if the problem involved the base of the first triangle in a work of triangulation. That done, the two boards were unveiled on the same day in the middle of the meeting hall, and each of the two competitors armed himself with a fine needle and marched simultaneously to the board allotted him. Whichever of the two rivals planted his needle closer to the middle of the line would be proclaimed president of the Weldon Institute.
Needless to say, the operation had to be done in one go, without points of reference, without trial and error, by sheer accuracy of sight alone. Keep a compass in your eye, as the popular expression goes; all else hung on that.
Uncle Prudent planted his needle, at the same time that Phil Evans planted his. Then they were measured, so as to determine which of the two competitors was closer to the midpoint.
O prodigious event! Such was the precision of the operators that the measures showed no discernible difference at all. Even if they had not marked the exact mathematical center of the line, the distance between the two needles was imperceptible. They appeared to be equally close.
Hence, great embarrassment from the assembly.
Fortunately, one of the members, Truk Milnor, insisted that the measurements be carried out again, using a ruler marked by the process of Monsieur Perreaux’s micrometrical machine, which allows the millimeter to be divided into fifteen hundred parts.6 This ruler, with its fifteen-hundredths of a millimeter etched in with a sliver of diamond, served to remeasure; and after reading out the divisions using a microscope, the following results were obtained:
Uncle Prudent had missed the midpoint by six fifteen-hundredths of a millimeter, Phil Evans by nine fifteen-hundredths.
And that was why Phil Evans was merely the secretary of the Weldon Institute, while Uncle Prudent was declared president of the club.
A difference of three fifteen-hundredths of a millimeter: no more was needed for Phil Evans to hate Uncle Prudent with one of those hatreds that, though latent, are no less ferocious.7
In that era, since the experiments undertaken in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, the question of dirigible balloons had made some progress. Baskets fitted with propulsion propellers, hung in 1852 from elongated aerostats by Henri Giffard, in 1872 by Dupuy de Lôme, in 1883 by the brothers Messrs. Tissandier, in 1884 by Captains Krebs and Renard, had given certain results that should be taken into account.8 But if these machines, plunged into a milieu heavier than they were, maneuvered by power from a propeller, tilting with the course of the wind, even changing direction with a contrary breeze and returning to their starting point, can really be said to have been steered, they had only succeeded thanks to extremely favorable circumstances. In vast halls with walls and roofs, perfect! In calm atmospheres, very good! With a light wind of five or six meters a second, still passable! But, all things considered, nothing really practical had yet been achieved. Against enough wind to power a windmill—eight meters per second—these machines remained almost stationary; against a fresh breeze—ten meters per second—they traveled backward; against a storm—twenty-five to thirty meters per second—they were carried off like feathers; in the midst of a hurricane—forty-five meters per sec-ond—they ran the risk of being smashed to pieces; and, in one of those cyclones that surpass a hundred meters per second, they would have disappeared without a trace.
Uncle Prudent planted his needle.
So it remained clear that, even after the groundbreaking experiments by Captains Krebs and Renard, if dirigible balloons had gained a little in speed, they still needed every bit of that speed to hold up against a mere breeze. Hence the impossibility, so far, of putting such means of aerial travel to practical use.
Be that as it may, beyond the problem of steering balloons—that is to say, considering the means used to give them their own speed—much faster progress had been made in the question of motors. Henri Giffard’s steam-powered machines, Dupuy de Lôme’s use of muscular force, had gradually given way to motors run by electricity. Batteries of potassium dichromate, forming storage cells mounted in series, gave the brothers Messrs. Tissandier a speed of four meters per second. Dynamoelectric machines, driven by Captains Krebs and Renard at twelve horsepower, produced a speed of six and a half meters, on average.
And then, in the way of motors, engineers and electricians had tried to come closer and closer to that desideratum one might call “horsepower in a pocket watch.”9 So, little by little, the effects of the battery that Captains Krebs and Renard kept secret were surpassed, and aeronauts were able to use motors whose lightness increased with their power.
So there was much to encourage those who believed in the practicality of dirigible balloons. And yet how many bright minds refused to admit that practicality! The fact is, if an aerostat finds a point of support in midair, it belongs to the same milieu in which the whole apparatus is immersed. In such conditions, how could its mass, fighting the currents of the atmosphere, hold up against even moderate winds, no matter how powerful its propeller?
That was still the question; but there was hope of resolving it, by employing apparatuses of large dimension.
The question of balloons
Now it happened that, in this fight between inventors in search of a light and powerful motor, the Americans were the closest to the famous desideratum. A dynamoelectric apparatus, based on the use of a new kind of battery, the composition of which was still a mystery, had been bought from its inventor, a Boston chemist hitherto unknown. Calculations made with the greatest care, diagrams plotted out with the strictest exactitude, demonstrated that with this apparatus, powering a propeller of appropriate dimensions, one could obtain movements of eighteen or twenty meters per second.
In truth, that would be magnificent!
“And it isn’t expensive either!” Uncle Prudent had added, giving the inventor, in exchange for his receipt in due form, the final packet of the hundred thousand paper dollars they were paying for his invention.
The Weldon Institute set to work immediately. When an experiment is proposed that might have some practical utility, cash flows willingly out of American pockets. Funds abounded, without it even becoming necessary to form a stock company. Three hundred
