THE BEAUTY AND THE SWANS.

From Dr. Boli’s Fables for Children Who Are Too Old to Believe in Fables.

A BEAUTIFUL YOUNG woman was taking a walk in the garden. She had just had a letter from her most ardent admirer, so she was more than usually conscious of her own beauty. It was very pleasant to stroll among the flowers, enjoying the soft breeze and turning over in her mind the many praises and endearments she had just read.

In a while she came down the steps to the pond, and there at the edge two graceful white swans floated, hardly rippling the water as they moved. She admired the beauty of the swans, but even more she admired her own beauty reflected in the still water.

“Indeed it is true,” she said to herself: “the comparison Montague made was a just one.” (Montague was the name of her most ardent admirer.) “For see, my complexion, how perfectly white it is! How like the plumage of the swan, the whitest of all birds! And the delicate grace of my carriage, how like the grace of these noble creatures!”

The swans looked back at her, almost as if they could understand what she was saying, and would add their praises to her own if they were but gifted with speech.

“And my neck,” she continued, touching her neck with her fingertips—“my neck, how slender like the swan’s, and how gracefully formed! Oh, Montague, what an artist you are, and what an accurate observer of nature!”

Still the swans gazed back at her; but the young woman had tired of this recreation and walked on toward the summer-house.

As she walked off, the male swan turned to the female.

“Did you ever see such a clumsy biped in your life?” he asked her.

“Indeed!” she agreed. “And that horrible mottled pink skin! It looks as though she’s been attacked by a fungus.”

“I’ll tell you one thing,” the male concluded. “If I had a stumpy fat neck like that, I’d cut my own throat.”

 

MORAL: Comparisons are odious, at least to one side of the equation.

 

 

From DR. BOLI’S ALPHABET OF OCCUPATIONS.

V for the amateur Violinist,
Whose tone (regrettably) was the thinnest
That ever was heard from a violin.
You never heard anything quite so thin.
It was thinner than twigs or the legs of plovers,
Thinner than models on magazine covers;
Thinner than greyhounds, thinner than whippets;
Thinner than hairs or the tiniest snippets
Of fur from a vole or a shrew or a bat:
Whatever you think, it was thinner than that.
At last, one day, his friends took him aside
And explained why they all seemed to run and hide
Whenever he reached for his violin.
And when, in the end, their advice had sunk in,
He finally put his fiddle to bed
And took up the theremin instead.

THE BOY’S BOOK OF CRAFTS AND HANDY-WORKS.

No. 512.—A Perpetual-Motion Machine.

MY MOTHER WAS not pleased by the electric bill that arrived a few weeks after Ned and I had built our Simple Supercollider (No. 503), and she positively prohibited me from undertaking any more constructions that used up our electricity. Although I strongly disagreed with her reasoning (believing that a thorough education in the physical sciences was well worth the few hundred thousand dollars it might cost in electricity), I was of course an obedient child, and I would never willingly disobey my mother. I therefore turned my attention to finding some means of obtaining electric power that did not involve the Duquesne Light company.

My first thought was naturally of batteries. Ned and I had already discovered how to make a battery from an onion, some beef broth, and a cup of grated Gruyere cheese. No, come to think of it, that was soup, not a battery. But the fundamental principles were doubtless similar. Batteries, however, while they worked well for such small projects as flashlights, telegraphs, and cattle prods, provided far too little power for some of the more advanced projects that Ned and I had already contemplated. For those, we needed a far more powerful source of electricity. In short, we needed a generator.

Building a generator was no great feat. My mother had a large collection of refrigerator magnets, and it was a simple matter to lump them together and spin coils of wire around them to produce an electrical current. But the spinning required a great deal of attention. It was necessary to keep the coils rotating constantly, which was very hard work. Even when Ned and I took turns, it cost us more effort than we were capable of to power our supercollider. It was obvious that we needed some form of motive power to keep our generator spinning.

But what could we use? We thought of hydroelectric power, but I pointed out that my mother was not likely to be any more reasonable about the water bill than she had been about the electrical bill. Wind power proved impractical: both Ned and I were out of breath and nearly turning blue before we could generate enough power just to get the supercollider warmed up.

We experimented with a clockwork mechanism removed from an old Edison phonograph. This gave us good results at first, but we found that the winding was nearly as tiring as spinning the generator directly had been. Steam power worked well until the kettle boiled dry and began to melt on the stove. It seemed as though every form of motive power had unfortunate limitations. What we needed was some sort of machine that, once started, would continue to spin with no further input of energy: in short, a perpetual-motion machine.

Ned warned me that such a device would violate the laws of physics; but I regarded the laws of physics as fundamentally unenforceable, a view I was prepared to argue before the highest court in the land if necessary. We experimented with a number of different configurations involving segmented disks with balls in the segments, but they all disappointed us. An arrangement of hammers on the edge of a wheel got a bit out of hand when we spun it too fast, with results best left undescribed.

Finally, we hit on the idea of powering our generator with an electric motor. Although my mother had prohibited me from tapping into our electricity for any such purpose, our neighbor, old Mrs. Smythe, had an electrical outlet on her back porch that was easy to reach with a 50-foot extension cord. We attached our generator to the electric motor, plugged in the cord, and were pleased to see that the thing worked the very first time. Unlike the clockwork motor, the steam-powered wheel, or the various mechanical contrivances we had tried, our electric motor continued to turn without any input of energy from us, and indeed continued to do so as long as Mrs. Smythe continued to pay her electric bill. We had succeeded in creating perpetual motion, and our electrical generator served us well in many later projects, about some of which you will read later on in this very book.

THE MONKEYS AND THE BOAT.

From Dr. Boli’s Fables for Children Who Are Too Old to Believe in Fables.

ONCE THERE WAS a small island in the middle of a great river, and on this little island lived a tribe of monkeys. At first they lived very happily, for the island produced fruit in abundance. But as time went on, the monkeys multiplied faster than the fruit did, so that the whole tribe was hungry and miserable.

Now, one day it happened that the monkeys saw a boat full of intrepid explorers drifting down the river. They had never seen a boat before, and they were filled with wonder; but they were clever monkeys, and soon grasped the purpose of the thing.

“Behold,” said one especially bright young monkey: “those odd but obviously intelligent bald monkeys have hit on the simple and obvious solution to our food problem. If we were to build such a floating island as they have, we could all float downstream to a place of abundance, where we need never be hungry again.”

All the monkeys agreed that this was a capital idea—all but one, that is. She was an old grump who had never had a good idea in her life, and she never had a kind word for anybody.

“It’ll never work,” she said in a loud and grating screech. “No one can build a floating island.”

Here the chief of the monkeys spoke up. He was a wise and kindly monkey, always ready to acknowledge and reward a good idea when he heard one.

“On the contrary,” said the chief, “we have just seen it done: the bald monkeys have done it, and done it successfully. I decree, therefore, that a floating island shall be built, and that all monkeys of the tribe shall contribute to the building of it.”

All the monkeys cheered—all except the old grump.

“You’re all fools!” she screeched. “You’ll all drown in the river. No one can build a floating island.”

The others ignored her, for they had become accustomed to her outbursts and had learned to ignore them.

Immediately the whole tribe set to work. Some used sharp rocks to cut down small saplings; some cut the saplings into equal lengths; some gathered strong vines to lash them together. Everyone worked merrily—everyone, that is, except the old grump, who refused to have anything to do with the project. “You’ll all drown,” she told anyone who would listen, and anyone who would not listen as well. “No one can build a floating island.” The other monkeys began to find her quite annoying, but the wise and kindly chief advised them merely to ignore her and keep working. Success, he said, would be the best retort.

With all the monkeys working, a large raft quickly took shape; and when they pushed it into the water and saw that it floated, the whole tribe cried out with a triumphant cheer.

“And now,” said the chief when the cheering had died down, “we have but to float to our new home, where there will be fruit in abundance for all.” Then he turned to the old grump. “But you, old one, shall not accompany us. Since you took no part in the effort of the whole tribe, you shall not share in its success.”

The monkeys all nodded and murmured their approval at the chief’s wise and just decision.

“For the rest of us, let us leap to our floating island and float to the land of plenty!”

With a mighty cheer, all the monkeys leapt at once to the raft they had constructed. Immediately it broke apart and sank under their weight, and the monkeys were carried away by the swift current and never heard from again.

The old grump, however, had the island to herself, with all the fruit she could want, and she lived out the rest of her days in peace and plenty.

MORAL: There’s a reason why so many grumps are old.

THE BOY’S BOOK OF CRAFTS AND HANDY-WORKS.

No. 241.—A Simple Time-Machine.

IT GOES WITHOUT saying that Ned and I were attentive to all our classes in school, for a thorough education is the foundation of future success—a truth that was even then abundantly apparent to us. But I must confess that, for me at least, the study of history held a special fascination. The stirring stories of heroes, saints, and conquerors of old filled my imagination with a thousand exciting scenes. How I wished I could have been there myself to see Caesar crossing the Rubicon, Washington crossing the Delaware, or any of the other great heroes of history crossing any of the other great rivers of geography. Ned, too, harbored those very thoughts, as he revealed to me once during a particularly spirited game of double solitaire.

We had never seriously considered the possibility of bringing our dreams to fruition until some time later, when one of the technical journals to which Ned subscribed (I believe the title was Red-Blooded Adventures) carried an article about a man who built a time-machine. This he used to travel back to the Stone Age, where he met a number of cave women (all blonde, to judge by the accompanying illustration) who quite naturally took more pleasure in his company than in that of the primitive and savage males who until then had been their only companions.

This article planted the idea in our minds that we, too, could perhaps build a successful time-machine. The scientist in the article had access to a well-stocked laboratory, with (again according to the illustration) a number of Jacob’s ladders and Tesla coils; we had only what we could find in the attic. On the other hand, the scientist in the article had built a time-machine that took him back ten thousand years. It should be a much simpler matter, we reasoned, to build a machine that needed only to take us back a few centuries.

The question, of course, was how to create a machine that would actually reverse time. The article in Ned’s journal was maddeningly vague when it came to the details of the construction of the machine.

We already knew how to make time go forward rapidly. Ned had shown me the trick with his father’s Hamilton pocket watch: by removing the escapement, he caused the hands to swing wildly around the dial at tremendous speed. If we could somehow be inside that watch while the hands were spinning, Ned and I would have a time machine capable of carrying us forward in time. Ned suggested that we could work on a machine to shrink us, but I dismissed that suggestion as impractical. It would be better, I said, if we could somehow make the watch bigger. Ned pointed out that a grandfather clock was much bigger. This was a step in the right direction, but it would still be necessary to enlarge the case of the grandfather clock to accommodate two people. And we had not yet solved the problem of making time go backwards. Nevertheless, we supposed that we should probably hit on a solution soon. First, therefore, we made sure all our schoolwork was done, for it was our inflexible rule never to begin a project until we had finished our assignments. Then we set to work.

We began in my house, as Ned was for some reason prohibited from ever ever touching any watches or clocks anywhere in his house ever again as long as he lived. Taking the grandfather clock from the hall, we removed the pendulum and substituted a small weight hung directly from the hook. This sped time up considerably. Removing the sides of the case, we used a number of large crates to build a much larger enclosure, capable of accommodating both of us.

Ned insisted on having at least one Jacob’s ladder, just for tradition’s sake; but as there was no room for it inside our time machine, we had to install it on the top, where I must admit it was a very decorative touch, making our machine look much more advanced than it really was.

And so our machine was complete but for one detail: we still lacked a way of making time go backward instead of forward. I racked my brain to come up with some way of reversing the movement of the clock, but it was designed to move in one direction only. It was at this point that Ned was hit by one of his occasional flashes of brilliance. Instead of altering the movement, he suggested, we could merely repaint the numbers on the dial, so that 11 was where 1 had been, and 10 where 2 had been, and so on. In that way we could make time run backward without altering the movement of the clock at all. I was amazed that this elegantly simple solution to the problem had not occurred to us before. With a little bit of paint our time machine was finished, and that in less than three hours after we had begun the project.

We decided on a trial run in which we would go back only a few hours, just to make sure all the mechanisms were in good working condition. Ned set the Jacob’s ladder going, and we entered the machine, closed the door, and set the weight swinging.

Here we discovered we had made a slight miscalculation. The weight, as it turned out, was at the same height as our heads, and it began to batter our skulls repeatedly the instant we set the machine going. We awoke some time later on the floor, with no sign of our time machine anywhere. A moment’s consideration was sufficient for us to apprehend what had happened: we had gone back a few hours to the time before we had made the time machine. This was an outcome we had not considered, but it made perfect sense now that we thought about it; and we were grateful that we had not decided to go back several centuries, since we should have had no way of getting back to our own time. All in all, however, we considered the experiment a success, though the one galling thing was that we had also gone back to the time before we had done our schoolwork, and therefore had to do it all over again.

FROM DR. BOLI’S ALPHABET OF OCCUPATIONS.

            U is for the Undertaker, grave and solemn.
(But you should have seen her at Laurel Ridge, skiing the slalom.)
            Nothing can disturb her dignified expression.
(On Saturday night, though, she tosses aside self-possession.)
            Always she refrains from merriment too hearty.
(But you should have heard how she giggled last night at the party.)
            She prepares the dead for their eternal slumber.
(She’s lots of fun after hours, though. Here, I’ll give you her number.)

 

From DR. BOLI’S ALPHABET OF OCCUPATIONS.

T is for the Tennis Star.
No matter what you do or are,
Your job is more enjoyable by far
Than being just a plain old tennis star.
His work is dull monotony in the extreme;
His duties no more complicated than they seem:
He whacks the ball hard as he can across the court, and then,
As soon as it comes back to him, he whacks the ball again.
And yet his job is necessary, though it seems there’s nothing to it:
For if he didn’t hit the ball, some other fool would have to do it.

THE BOY’S BOOK OF CRAFTS AND HANDY-WORKS.

No. 412.—A National Monument.

 

HOW THRILLING IT was for Ned and me to see Mount Rushmore in person! The mountainous landscape, monumental in itself, and the green forest around the site gave a magnificence and color to the view that no photograph can adequately convey; and the colossal heads of four of our greatest presidents—George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and Warren G. Harding, if I remember correctly—filled us with patriotic ardor. We talked of it all the way home from our vacation that summer, and we agreed that, impressive as it was, the monument at Mount Rushmore was deficient in one important detail: there was no memorial to William Howard Taft, surely our most monumental president. Our disappointment was tempered, however, by a happy notion that, as far as I could tell, occurred to both of us simultaneously. Why should we not correct the omission ourselves? We lived in a place that, by fortunate coincidence, was also blessed with many hills and rocky outcrops; and, as for the design, Ned had won second place in a school competition whose object was to sculpt a flattering portrait of the vice-principal out of salt dough. Moreover, the form of William Howard Taft was so mountainous in itself that half our work was done for us already, if we could but find a hill of suitable shape.

We soon settled on a rocky eminence overlooking the Youghiogheny. This hill already bore an almost eerie resemblance to President Taft; and it was moreover easily visible from our home below in the valley, so that we should have the privilege of admiring our handiwork every day from our own back yards.

Now we needed some method of turning this unformed mountain into an accurate portrait. From our preliminary research at the library, we were able to determine that it had taken many years and hundreds of workers for Mr. Borglum to form the gigantic portraits at Mount Rushmore. Ned and I had only a week until the end of summer vacation, so we were determined to find, if possible, a more expeditious method than the one adopted by that talented but inefficient sculptor.

It was I who, remembering the happy hours I had spent the previous year watching the construction of the Mid-Valley Connector, suggested explosives. By placing charges at exactly the right points in the rock, it should be possible to do all the work at once, shearing away those portions of the mountain that did not resemble President Taft and leaving only those portions that did.

But where to obtain these explosives in sufficient quantity? My father kept only a small stock of dynamite for medicinal purposes, and Ned could find none at all in his house.

Here, however, we had a bit of luck: for Ned recollected that there was an old abandoned coal mine just a short trip away by bicycle. We visited the site and found what we were looking for: the previous owners had left a stock of old dynamite in one of the chambers of the mine. It was a little unstable from sitting unused for so many years, but we carefully tied as much of it as we could to our bicycles and transported it to our mountain. It took several trips to bring as much as we needed, but finally we were ready to begin the excavations.

Ned had drawn a pencil portrait of President Taft on a sheet of graph paper, and now we carefully marked each edge and wrinkle for placement of the dynamite. We would need almost an entire bicycle-load just for the chins, and needless to say digging in all that dynamite was hard work. Sometimes we were a bit frustrated when we had carefully dug out a hole and found that the dynamite stick would not quite fit, and then we often had recourse to the sledgehammer—a practice that, when I look back on it, I can see was perhaps not as careful as it ought to have been. It actually took us three days to get all the sticks in place and wired to the detonator. But at last we were ready; and, by the flip of a coin, I was given the honor of pushing down the plunger to create our newest national monument.

The roar was deafening. We had expected a loud noise, but nothing had prepared us for the intensity of the explosion. An avalanche of rock ensued—far more than we had anticipated—and a huge cloud of dust rose and obscured our view for several minutes.

When the dust finally settled, we caught our first glimpse of the sculpture we had made. Just as we had intended, a colossal portrait now stood where the mountain had been before; but you can easily imagine our horror when we discovered that it was not a portrait of William Howard Taft at all, but rather of the traitor James Buchanan! The unstable dynamite had exploded with more force than we had calculated. The next day, as emergency crews worked to remove the rock and earth from the railroad and highway below, there was much speculation as to who could have created the masterful and artistic colossus that had mysteriously appeared above the river; but Ned and I were too much ashamed of our creation to take the credit for it.

 

 

 

From DR. BOLI’S ALPHABET OF OCCUPATIONS.

S is for the Social Worker,
            Grim and worried,
            Flustered, flurried,
Solving problems left and right,
Staying up to work all night—
Who dares call the Social Worker
Lazy slob or idle shirker?
Bring your problems to this man:
He will solve them if he can.
            Griping, grumbling,
            Shambling, stumbling—
Frankly, if the truth were known,
He has problems of his own.

THE BOY’S BOOK OF CRAFTS AND HANDY-WORKS.

No. 349.—An Interplanetary Shuttle.

ON SUMMER NIGHTS my friend Ned and I used to spend hours lying out in the grass and gazing up into the impenetrable mysteries of the sky. How often we wondered what other strange creatures might be staring back at us from those illimitable vastnesses! Perhaps, at that very moment, some squat but jolly Jovian was looking into his own night sky, wondering what strange creatures might inhabit the planets closer to the sun. And so we would dream and speculate far into the evening, until at last my mother would come out and warn us to get into the house right away before we were abducted by possums. My mother’s greatest fear was that I should be abducted by possums, ever since she had lost my elder sister that way. It was always my own mother who came out to get us; I cannot recall Ned’s having a mother.

It was on one such evening, not so long ago in cosmological terms, that we first conceived the idea of making the trip ourselves, so that we might see firsthand those strange worlds with which we had filled our imaginations. We especially desired to see Mars, which a diligent perusal of certain pulp novels had convinced us must be host to a wide variety of interesting forms of life, many of them not much different from animals on earth but for such relatively small details as the number of legs or heads.

As was usually the case with us, once the idea had occurred to us we wasted no time in getting to work on it. It was too late in the evening for us to begin the construction of any sort of space capsule, but we had already begun making a sort of inventory of the materials we might need. It was clear to us that all the materials would of necessity be things we could readily find in the vicinity, as we were next to penniless. Ned had his paper route, but his unfortunate sarsaparilla habit swallowed nearly all his earnings; and my mind being of a more philosophical and abstract bent, I had no interest in gainful employment.

Fortunately the Limpets, our neighbors, had a large Dodge van that they were not using, or at least not very much; and, as they kept the keys on a hook by the back door, there would be no difficulty in obtaining them. This would make the main body of our vessel: it had plenty of room to store supplies, and the seats were comfortable enough for a long journey. It would, of course, be necessary to make it airtight, but we saw no difficulty there that could not be overcome with a bit of duct tape. Our air supply could be provided in the form of plastic bags, inflated by an electric fan and tied shut, to be pierced by a pin when we felt the need for more oxygen. Ned mentioned that we should take my little Brownie camera and a few rolls of 127 film, and I readily agreed.

We awoke early the next morning and set to work directly after breakfast. A little astronomical research informed us that Mars was at that moment more than two hundred million miles away, which was a considerable distance in those days. This distance posed us a bit of a challenge, as we had never seen the Limpets’ van do any better than thirty-five miles per hour even on the open highway. Since my mother would never consent to our being out later than suppertime, the speed of our vessel would have to be considerably improved.

In certain speculative journals, Ned had read of a kind of propulsion that worked by “warping” the “fabric” of space, much as bending a two-dimensional sheet of paper in three dimensions can bring the ends into close proximity without changing the two-dimensional distance between them. So much of the theory was obvious from even a cursory glance at Euclid, but the greater difficulty remained: by what means might we accomplish this “warping” in such a way as to send our vehicle hurtling through interplanetary space at a suitably high velocity?

We racked our brains for an answer, and finally realized that we had seen the answer at work on numerous occasions. Heat is the universal warper, so to speak. A little heat would warp thin plastic; a little more heat would warp old sound recordings beyond recognition, and a great deal of heat could warp even iron or steel. We had no doubt that, given a high enough temperature, we should be able to warp space itself, which was but the necessary next step in the series. We therefore gutted the engine compartment of the Dodge and filled it with dry pine logs, pine being a wood that burns intensely with a very high heat.

And so we were off to Mars, or so we thought. As it happened, we had considerably miscalculated the heat created by our engine-compartment fire. The pine burned so hot that space was apparently warped far beyond what we had intended; we shot far past Mars and indeed far beyond the limits of our solar system, arriving at last on an unnamed planet which Ned (by the flip of a coin) had the honor of naming after himself. Here we spent a pleasant afternoon riding on the exceedingly tame eight-legged, two-headed horses with which the planet Ned is singularly blessed. We met many other interesting creatures as well, and Ned (the sly dog) made quite an impression on one of the local princesses. But I shall not tell more, for I should not like to ruin the sport for any boys who might like to undertake their own journey to the planet Ned and see the sights for themselves. On our return, the pictures I took with my Brownie were published in the rotogravure section of our local newspaper, and for a while Ned and I were minor celebrities in our little town. All in all, we considered it a successful expedition, even if we did not reach our intended destination.