The Balloonist Read Online Free PDF

forward into position for the next step, the weight of the body is left on the remaining one, a precarious condition which results in lurching and inefficient motion. For this reason nature has evolved the horse and other four-legged animals, so that a sufficient number of legs will always be where they are needed without an undue effort. But the wheel is vastly superior to the quadruped. By a well-known mathematical principle, the number of legs is increased until it approaches infinity; analogically speaking, the polygon is extended to the circle. Now there is always a leg—that is to say a mathematically infinite point of the wheel—under the progressing body. The rider can relax his own legs at will, for short periods, and it is not even necessary for him to mind very carefully what he is doing. The wheel in its dumb perseverance will take care of the physics for him. His progress is assured, and he can add momentum or subtract it as he pleases by working the pedals or the brake in turn. Regarded purely as a locomoting animal, he has converted himself into a greatly improved one by combining himself with the product of his thought. Thus Waldemer, appearing behind me on the outskirts of Harrisburg on that bucolic summer day, waved cheerily, braked on the dusty road, and fell flat in front of me along with his machine.
    Only a littleless cheerful, he extricated himself from the bicycle, slapped the dust from his clothing, and introduced himself. He was about thirty in those days, a stocky young man with a handsome head, horizontal eyebrows, and a soft but bushy mustache shaped like the handlebars of his bicycle. He resembled exactly one of those clean-cut heroes in the American dime novels I had read as a boy in Stockholm, those who smile but only with a little wrinkle-of-takinglife-seriously between their brows, and this was prescient, because it was exactly one of those boys’ adventures that he and I were setting out on together. He was irrepressibly good-natured and there was no question whatsoever about his intelligence. He had just begun work as the central Pennsylvania correspondent of the
New York Herald
, and he regarded his encounter with me as his first
opportunity
(he was fond of the word opportunity, quintessentially American as he was) to move from his small-town origins into the realm of world events. After he had explained the circumstances, he helped me onto the handlebars of his machine, and together we went on down the road in search of Woodlawn State College and Professor Eggert.
    Cuthman Eggert was at that time a leading authority on aerostatics. I had come to him ostensibly out of curiosity, but at a deeper level no doubt because some demon inside me sensed that balloons were to play a part in my destiny. I had known he was interested in the problem of dirigibility because of his papers, which I had read in the library of the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, and he in turn had taken note of my own publications on aeromagnetics. We corresponded, exchanged opinions, and agreed to meet—I because what I was interested in lay up in the sky too high to be reached with ladders, and he because he hoped, perhaps, that my knowledge of magnetic phenomena might be of some use to him in solving the problem of the dirigibility of aerostats. He proved to be a humourless man with a bony frame, a little smaller than ordinary size, intensely devoted to his researches and scarcely aware of the practicalities of daily life around him. He had no small talk. He proposed an ascension for that very afternoon, and together we went out to his apparatus, which he kept in a shed at the edge of the college hockey field. His balloon—the only one of the three he owned that was currently in working order—was a rather small one, capable of lifting about a hundred and fifty kilograms, including the basket. It was made of a single layer of ordinarysilk, varnished after stitching, and no doubt leaked