The Flying Fool

Robert Smith gave an exclamation of astonishment. He turned to his wife and said:

"I see that Einstein has reduced all physics to one law."

Mrs. Smith was darning stockings at the other side of the table. The world that she was living in was a rather new world, but the stockings still had holes in them. In fact, the two dollar silk stockings had as many holes as the fifty cent Lisle variety used to have. Life for Mrs. Smith was not so very interesting. Even her two-year-old daughter, who had most inconsiderately arrived in the eleventh year of an otherwise uneventful companionate marriage, failed to provide the blase wife with thrill, though she did furnish lots of hard work.

Robert Smith was an inventor. That is, he was a dreamer of great innovations by night, and a seller of laces and ribbons in a large department store in the daytime. Naturally, such a spending of the twenty-four hours did not provide his wife with the luxuries of life and, gradually, through the years, she had come to regret the fact that her husband was just plain Robert Smith instead of an Edison. Of course, when she married him she was under the delusion that he really would invent something which would make them wealthy. She now saw, after thirteen years of gradually increasing disappointment, that her husband would always remain a salesman of ribbons and laces.

Her husband tried to keep her interested in his dreams. That was hard to do when she had so many stockings to darn and buttons to sew on. Besides, at the end of the day, she was tired. Also her mind had never been very much interested in higher mathematics or the laws of physics and all other interesting things that her husband felt useful to him in his nocturnal career as an inventor. Frequently, she did not even have an idea of what he was talking about, and his efforts to tell her, simply added to their mutual dissatisfaction with each other. Something of this kind happened on this particular evening. Smith said:

"I see that Einstein has reduced all physics to one law."

His wife looked up from her darning, as she said rather slowly:

"I think that is a good thing. We have too many laws as it is. What State does this man Einstein come from? I do not recall his name. But I really do not see how all the laws could be put into one law. That must be a newspaper mistake."

"Einstein, my dear, is a German," replied her husband.

"Well, of course, they have to be represented. Still, I think that they ought to be careful in regard to electing these foreigners. He may be a Bolshevik."

"You still do not understand. This man is not a senator. He is a scientist. When it says that he has formulated a new law, it means a law of physics. It has nothing to do with government."

"Well, why didn't you say so in the first place? You said a law. I guess I know what a law is. And another thing, don't yell at me so. You talk so loud that it is no pleasure to listen to you any more. If you would spend your evenings in taking a correspondence course in something instead of reading about things nobody understands, you would get away from that ribbon and lace counter. I showed you that paper about the Improvement Institute. A man was taking that course and he changed from a salary of twenty dollars a week to ten thousand a year, and he only studied ten weeks. Well, what about this new law?"

"It means this," replied Smith, in a rather low voice, "many centuries ago man realized that light and heat were related. Then Joule and Rumford showed that light, heat and energy are related according to definite physical laws. Thus, energy was added to light and heat. Now, gradually, the scientists have shown that to these three forces can be added matter, space, time, gravitation and electricity. The only factor absent was to determine the relation between electricity and gravitation. According to Einstein, there is only one substance, 'the field,' and this field contains electrical and gravitational components which are closely tied together by a single formula. That, to me," said Smith gravely, "is a most remarkable discovery."

"And to me," replied his wife, "it does not mean a thing."

"But you do not understand just what this means!" almost shouted Robert Smith. "This article says that it means that man can fly. Not in a plane or a balloon, but just go up in the air! The thing that holds us to the earth is gravitation. If that can be overcome, why mankind can go up into space. I believe I see something in that, a very simple machine, which could be produced for a few hundred dollars —"

But his wife interrupted him. She was led to do so by past experience.

"A few hundred dollars would pay our expenses for several months."

But Robert Smith was so absorbed that he never heard her remark. Just then the baby cried in the next room.

"Robert," said Mrs. Smith, "will you go and tend to the baby? I must finish this mending. You know it is your child as much as it is mine."

"Please stop calling the baby 'it.' She is too old, and besides, she has a very nice name."

Nevertheless, he put down the paper and disappeared into the shadows of the next room to attend to the baby.

When he returned from the care of the baby, he found that his wife had gone to bed. The sounds from their bedroom indicated that she was fast asleep. So, relaxing, Smith started to read the article very carefully. He read that a New York professor was making some startling statements about the new law of Einstein. He prophesied that the time would come when airplanes would be able to remain in the air without engines or visible support; that a man, properly equipped, could step out of a twenty-story window and not be in danger of falling; and that, were it not for the deadly cold of the regions beyond the earth's atmosphere, a trip to the moon might be a very easy matter. This law provided a means for insulating the body against the laws of gravitation.

"That would be rather fine," said Smith, softly, to himself. "That would be the real thing. This air work they are doing now is too complicated. I do not believe that it will ever be popular. Besides, it is so very dependent on machinery and fuel, and a person has to keep on going. Now, my idea is to go up in the air about fifty feet and just slowly mosey around. I feel that it would be so much more pleasant than the way they do it now. Then I would want to stop, if I saw anything interesting beneath me, and stay where I was in the air till I had made a thorough examination of the particular object my attention had been called to. You cannot do that in a plane — in one of those things a man has to keep on moving or fall. The big thing would be to have a cheap apparatus, costing a few hundred dollars. Something that would go up easily, stop at any point and stay there in the air; something that would move slowly, be easily guided and in some way obtain all of its power through the air. It would have to go up like a slow elevator and come down like a feather or a thistledown.

"That would be a fine apparatus to own. A man could go on little excursions in the evening, after the wife was asleep, and it would sort of take his mind off of things. There are so many things that I would like to see from the air. I bet Broadway would be an interesting sight, or the Statue of Liberty, and it certainly would be a lark to take a piece of chalk and write your name on the top of the Washington Monument. Of course, for a long trip it would be necessary for me to tell the wife just where I was going — but, perhaps, she would have no objections if I brought back a nice present for her. Going across the ocean would be a little dangerous, but it ought to be safe to go up the Hudson. After a little practice a man could go a great distance, if he had a box of lunch with him.

"It all ought to be rather easy. All we need is a starter and a stopper, and, of course, the stopper would be just a gradual shutting off of the starting force. Then there would have to be something to cause a progressive movement in the air, something like the propeller of an airplane and something more to guide the thing with, and there would have to be a method of obtaining power from the air; of course, there is lots of power and all kinds of electrical waves, but the question of hooking the engine on to them is a different matter.

"If I could just do that — just that simple invention — I would be rich — perhaps, rich enough to educate the baby. I believe I can do it if I can only work out a few of the details. There would have to be some kind of a chair to sit on and something to keep the whole machine from turning upside down. That would be most embarrassing, even to be a hundred feet in the air and have it turn over and dump you out. I would not like that to happen — at least, not until I have more insurance."

The next morning he was once again a seller of ribbons and laces, but it was hard to keep his mind on the delicate difference in the tints and colors and the various designs of lace. He sold these things, standing behind a counter, to dozens of ladies standing before the counter, but his soul was far away — in the air. He day-dreamed of floating up and whispering in the ear of the Sphinx, that peculiar woman who could live a thousand generations without betraying a secret or uttering a word. He thought that it would be fine to go slowly over the top of Mount Ararat and see if the Ark was still there, where it had grounded in the days of Noah. He promised himself that he would spend a Sunday over the Battlefield of Gettysburg, a place sacred to him because his grandfather had died there.

That noon, as he ate the lunch that he always brought with him from home, he feverishly read the evening paper. He was still on the trail of Einstein. It was a singular coincidence that he found one of the very facts that he was looking for. It was just a simple statement to the effect that the Bell Telephone laboratories had produced a new alloy called permalloy, which was particularly sensitive in its relation to magnetism. When a bar of it was placed above a magnet, the bar of permalloy rose in the air and floated an inch above the magnet.

That made Robert Smith do a lot of thinking. Could a man pull himself up in the air by lifting on his bootstraps? Suppose there was a magnet and resting on it was a bar of permalloy? Both the magnet and the bar would be of the same size. The bar is repelled by the magnet to such a degree that it rises two inches above it and remains suspended in the air. What Smith could not make out was this problem. Suppose the bar was fastened to the magnet so that it could only rise one inch in the air? But is the other inch to be ignored? There is a pull there. Would it go up the extra inch? If it did, it would have to pull the magnet with it, as they cannot be more than an inch apart. If it kept on doing that, what was there to keep it from going on right up into the air? The magnet would be the same. The permalloy would always try to withdraw two inches from the magnet, and in doing so, it would always pull the magnet upward. If it did, then gravitation would be overcome, and if a man was seated on the bar, he would go up with the magnet and the bar.

Of course, Smith realized that certain formulas would have to be determined. Just how much should the bar of permalloy weigh in proportion to the weight of the magnet? Would the lifting ability of the bar be in proportion to its weight or in relation to the size of the magnet. How long would the magnet retain its magnetism? Could it be recharged by electrical induction while it was in the air? But to Smith's eager mind these were but details, petty trifles to be worked out after the larger facts had been determined. What he was sure of was his ability to rise in the air, provided he had a magnet and a bar of permalloy and a chair to sit on fastened to the bar.

Hastily eating his dinner, he went to a public telephone booth and called up the Bell Telephone Company. Had they any permalloy to sell? To his surprise, they said they had and how much did he want — it was ten dollars a pound — in the form of a very fine wire. He said that he would call them later, and went back to the ribbon and lace counter. He knew that he could secure a magnet without difficulty, but how could he manage with five pounds of wire? For fifty dollars was about all that he could spend. Even that was a birthday present that he had carefully concealed from his wife. Then the wonderful thought came to him. After long months of careful saving on the part of his wife, she had finally put aside enough to get a new suit for him — a real tailor-made suit. There had been several trying periods of measurements and fittings. He would take this five pounds of fine wire and have the tailor sew it in, in some way, all through the suit. Then all he would need was a chair tied to the magnet and himself tied to the chair — and up they would go.

"I may be a flying fool," he whispered to himself, "but it certainly will be wonderful."

It took him several days of going without his lunch to buy the metal wire and show the puzzled tailor just what he wanted done. Of course, this increased the charge for the suit, but Smith paid that himself out of his personal allowance. He was particular in his instructions that under no circumstance was his wife to be told about the wire. He finally obtained a promise that the suit would be delivered in a few weeks. As a matter of fact it was delivered and hung in the moth bag a full week before the rest of the machine was completed.

In fancy, Smith was now up in the air. He had taken no time at all in perfecting a simple arrangement of wires which, when a button was pressed, would extract a powerful current of electricity from the atmosphere, and this, as everyone has known from the days of Benjamin Franklin, is constantly surcharged with this mysterious force. It was no trick at all to get the magnet and attach to it the wires. He arranged to have the starting button at the side of his chair. He was going to press the button; that would greatly increase the magnetism which would repel the permalloy in his clothes, and up they would go. When he wanted to come down, he would cease to pull the electricity from the air, the magnetic force would slowly wear out, and down he would come, like a thistledown — he liked the idea of coming down like a thistledown — any other thought made him shudder.

But the question of balance bothered him. Suppose he tilted? And turned over? Where would the pull come then? Certainly it would be difficult to enjoy a ride upside down. And landing on the ground, head first, tied to a chair, would be too ridiculous. Then he thought of the gyroscope! That solved everything. It would be the stabilizer. Nothing would be easier than to have a gyroscope under the chair. All he had to do was to make the gyroscope the wheel of an electric motor, with finely adjusted contact mechanisms to reduce to a minimum the problem of friction. He could run the motor from the same electrical source that he used to electrically induct his magnet. Now, he was up in the air and was going to stay right-side-up.

The securing of a small gyroscope was a problem that almost proved to be too great for the ribbon seller. He probably never would have solved it were it not for a friend, who, knowing of his problem, told him of a small private yacht that was being torn to pieces as junk. This small pleasure boat had an equally small gyroscope to keep it from rolling at sea. Smith found out what the cost was, and it was possible, by selling some very special jewels left him by his father to buy that gyroscope. It was very small, but it worked perfectly and fitted to perfection in the space under the seat of the chair. And it was almost noiseless.

Now he could stay up without turning over. He could press a button and go up, and another button and slowly come down, like a thistledown, and all the time the little gyroscope would keep him right side up. Now, all his problems were solved and all his money gone, and he still had the problem of moving through the air. It would not be very interesting to just go up from the balcony and stay up for a while and then come right back down again, though, of course, that would be pleasant on a hot evening and rather a relief at other times. But he wanted to move. He wanted to go somewhere, if only to Coney Island. He grew rather tired of seeing his wife darn stockings — every night; though it was dear of her to do so.

Then, as a last resort, he conceived the idea of using an electric fan. He could attach it to the back of the chair, or he could fix it so that it would have a movable point of attachment. Then he could go and come and perhaps even turn around. He would not go fast — but he did not want to go fast — He just wanted to go somewhere and see something. It made no difference what it was, just so he could get away from the daily grind of laces and ribbons and ribbons and laces and more laces and starting to work every morning and back again every night and stockings — He was ashamed of himself, but he was nervous about those stockings, and he knew that it was his fault that they were not thrown away and new ones bought. Men were wearing such fancy stockings now-a-days, but he only got stockings at Christmas as presents from his wife, and from his mother.

He had an electric fan. He experimented and found, to his surprise, that he could run it on electricity taken from the air in the same way that he was securing the electric current for the motor of the gyroscope. And right there Robert Smith hovered on the edge of becoming a multimillionaire. Had he patented that little idea and protected the patent, his wife would have had no more need to darn stockings, but all he could think of at that time was going up in the air. He adored calling himself a flying fool. It sounded so very devilish.

Naturally, he could not assemble the pieces of this apparatus without his wife having some idea that a new invention was in process of birth. But she had lived through so many of these wonderful money-making plans that never amounted to a hill of beans, that this latest effort of her husband's left her cold and uninterested. She simply deplored silently and openly the fact that he was not getting more sleep, as she was sure this insomnia would result in his lowered efficiency as a salesman of ribbons and laces, and that, as she often said, was really the way that they managed to live from year to year, and it was especially important now, since little Angelica had come to live with them. She always said it that way, as though, by placing the initiative on the baby, she took from her own shoulders the burden of having made a failure of the major factor of companionate marriage.

The Smiths lived in an old-fashioned part of the city. In fact, unkind friends said behind their backs that they lived in the slums. However, their house had a balcony extending back from the second story and this balcony having no roof, it was especially desirable as a starting and landing place for Smith's new anti-gravitation machine. Two small bedrooms opened out on this balcony by French windows. The fact that the bedrooms connected with each other, made it an ideal arrangement. The baby slept in one room and her parents in the other. When she cried, it was very easy for the one who heard her first to look after her — and Robert Smith was a light sleeper.

Gradually, Smith assembled his machine on this balcony. When he was not working at it, he kept it covered with an old canvas. It just looked like an old chair to his wife; so, she did not bother it, and as the weather was cold, she humored him by allowing him to use the electric fan. In her way she loved him, but, perhaps, her affection would have equaled her devotion had he been able to secure for the family a better income. However, she was really in love with him, and even if life had not brought her all she had hoped for, she was inclined to be philosophical about it. So she left his funny old chair alone, and kept on darning the stockings and trying to make a dollar buy two dollars' worth of food.

Finally, the machine was completed. Smith sat in the chair one night and tested the different parts. One button started the gyroscope, another started the fan, while a third made the fan move slowly on its metal track. There were other buttons connected with the magnet, but they were useless, so long as he did not have on his new suit. Several nights after the suit came he waited till his wife was asleep and then lovingly took it out of the moth bag. The tailor had been rather skillful in sewing the wire in through the various garments.

All was ready. Valuable evenings had been spent working on the mathematics of the invention. He wanted to be sure that it was powerful enough to carry his weight and also the weight of the entire machine. Even while he was working, the singular thought came to him that all his calculations were unnecessary, because if the permalloy was repelled by the magnet it had to take with it anything that it was attached to. Right here the idea came to him of a small circular track, with a block of permalloy on wheels, constantly retreating from a magnet on wheels. The very idea of it — the constant revolutions — why, it was almost perpetual motion — made him so dizzy that he nearly fell out of his chair, and his wife insisted on his taking a dose of calomel.

At the end of his calculations he was satisfied that nothing had been neglected. It was just a question of putting on that new suit, strapping himself to the chair and pressing a few buttons. He decided to wait till the moon was full and that would be just one more night. Then when he was sure that his wife was asleep, he would dress and soar. In a peculiar way, that was hard for him to understand, this first adventure in the air meant freedom to him, and yet he did not comprehend just what it was that he wanted release from.

All that he was afraid of was that it would rain. Of course, he knew that he could carry an umbrella, but that seemed, somehow, to be hardly suitable.

When the next evening came, he found that all of his fears had been useless. It was not only clear, it was a wonderful night. A strong wind had cleared the atmosphere; it was warm; there was hardly a breath stirring at ten o'clock, and the moonlight was so strong that it was almost possible to see the print on a newspaper.

Mrs. Smith unconsciously helped her husband in his plans by going to bed early. In fact, she was sound asleep by nine. The baby had been asleep for several hours. Smith tiptoed into their bedroom, took the new suit, moth bag and all, and tiptoed into the baby's room. There he rapidly and as quietly as he could, changed suits. He was glad to see how well the coat and vest fitted him. On his way to the balcony he had to pass the little crib. He paused a moment, even touched the little girl's hand. She had always been a wonder to him — he never fully understood just how it was that she had come into his life — but at night, as she slept, she was almost a miracle. For a long minute he hung over the crib, to satisfy himself that she was breathing. And the love that passed between them in some way recalled another love, and he thought of his wife, of what had been, of their early hopes and ambitions and how, gradually, one by one those hopes had slowly been blasted, and now, at the age of nearly fifty, he was still a salesman of ribbons and laces. He quietly walked to her bedside — she was still a pretty woman — and he realized, as never before, just what she had meant to him and what she had done for him and sacrificed for him in all those years of their married life. And in addition, she had somehow found that little new love of his, the charming Dresden china baby, Angelica.

He bent over and kissed her hair and then, sighing, passed through the door, out on the gallery, where his soaring invention awaited him. He sat down in the chair and started to fasten the straps. Everything was all ready to press the starting button —

And the baby cried.

Smith sat still; perhaps she would go to sleep; but she cried again.

A woman's clear voice came to his straining ears:

"Robert, can you take care of the baby? She has cried twice now and I am sure that she needs attention. I am so sleepy, and I know you are still dressed."

"I will attend to her as soon as I can," Smith replied. He unstrapped himself and went into the nursery. Sure enough Angelica needed help. With skillful, loving hands, he quietly cared for her, talking little nonsense verses to her as he did so, in the hope that she would not become wide-awake. But she did. When he left her crib, her little whimperings told him that she wanted him. She even sat up in bed and the next moment was standing up, ready to play.

He tried to persuade her to lie down. He told her that papa was building a flying machine and if she was a good girl, he would let her ride in it, like a bird some day. He had made this promise to her before, and it had always put her to sleep, but this time it only seemed to make her more excited.

"Angie fly birdie," she insisted.

Sighing, Robert Smith took his daughter out of the crib, and then the wonderful thought came to him that it would be a fine thing to take her with him. He could hold her in one arm and manage all the buttons with the other hand. It was a pleasant night, warm, and he would not go far, perhaps simply go up in the air for a while and then come right back down again. He carried Angelica out on the balcony and reseated himself in the chair. It was a little hard to strap himself in, but he finally did so, and he even found enough strap left over to put around the baby.

She enjoyed it all.

"Angelica," whispered the gray-haired man, "your father is a flying fool and so is his little baby."

"Angie fly birdie," cooed the little one.

Robert Smith shut his eyes. At last he had come to the parting of the ways. Here was freedom and adventure and perhaps romance, and he was sure that, with the baby in his arms, the romance would be of the purest variety. His heart began to beat faster; he held the baby so tight that she began to whimper — and then he pressed the starter button.

And waited.

Nothing happened — not a thing was different — sickened with disappointment, he realized that nothing was going to happen. Somewhere there had been a mistake.

As he sat there, the little girl went to sleep. Tired of waiting, anaesthetized by the fresh air, perhaps a little cold, she had cuddled close to her father and gone to sleep. Almost as in a dream, Robert Smith unstrapped himself and carried his sleeping daughter to her crib. She simply relaxed and kept on sleeping. Then Smith undressed — he put his new suit back in the moth bag and hung it up — and then he prepared for bed. Somehow, his wife awoke. It was a rather unusual thing for her to do this, and Smith did not understand it till she started to talk to him.

"You know, Robert, a most unusual thing happened this week, and I have been trying to find time and the right occasion to tell you about it. You know how I have planned and saved for that new suit, and how proud I was to think that at last you were going to have one tailor-made instead of a hand-me-down. Well, when that suit came, I examined it very carefully, and it had the most peculiar wire threaded through it, long pieces. I worked and worked at it and finally got it all out, and I took it to a dealer in old metals and he said he would give a dollar a pound for it, and it weighed just five pounds. So, there I had five dollars, and I spent it for stockings for you. I bought you six pairs, and they are guaranteed to be hole-proof. You needed some new stockings. I have tried to darn them as carefully as I could, but I really don't see how you could wear them, being on your feet the way you are all day. Now, how can you explain that wire in that new suit? I called up the tailor and I believe he was puzzled himself; at least, he acted so."

"It certainly is odd," answered her husband. "But I am glad you bought me the new stockings. You sew too much. Did you buy me striped or colored ones?"

"No. I thought for your ribbon and lace work it would be better to have black ones. Do you know, I am wide-awake? I want to talk. I was reading today about a man's claiming that some day men would float through the air. What do you think of that?"

"I think that any man who wanted to do a thing like that would be a flying fool!" said Robert Smith slowly. Then he forced himself to go to sleep, for the next day he would be busy, selling ribbons and laces.