It was occurring in an American city whose rapid development surpasses even that of New York, Chicago, Cincinnati, or San Francisco—a city that is neither a port, nor a center for mining oil or petroleum, nor an industrial hub, nor a terminus for a group of railroads—a city larger than Berlin, Manchester, Edinburgh, Liverpool, Vienna, Saint Petersburg, Dublin—a city that possesses a park in which all seven parks in the capital of England could fit together—a city, finally, that currently counts almost twelve hundred thousand souls and calls itself the fourth city in the world, after London, Paris, and New York.
Philadelphia is almost a city of marble, with its grand houses and unrivaled public establishments. The most important of all New World high schools is Girard College, and it is in Philadelphia. The largest iron bridge in the world is the bridge over the Schuylkill River, and it is in Philadelphia. The most beautiful temple of Freemasonry is the Masonic Temple, and it is in Philadelphia. Finally, the biggest club for enthusiasts of aerial navigation is in Philadelphia. And if one wants to pay it a visit during that meeting of June 12, perhaps one will find some amusement in what one sees.
In this great hall bustled, thrashed, gesticulated, talked, discussed, disputed—all with hats on their heads—some hundred balloonians, under the high authority of a president assisted by a secretary and a treasurer. It must not be supposed that these balloonians were professional engineers. No; they were simple aficionados of all that pertained to aerostatics, but rabidly enthusiastic aficionados, and particularly sworn enemies of those who opposed balloons with “heavier-than-air” apparatuses, whether flying machines, aerial ships, or other crafts. That these good people may never find a means of steering balloons is possible. In any case, their president had some difficulty in steering them.
This president, well-known in Philadelphia, was the famous Uncle Prudent—Prudent being his family name. As for the designation Uncle, that is unsurprising in America, where one can be an uncle without having either nephew or niece. People are called Uncle there, as elsewhere people are called Father who have never undertaken a work of paternity.
Uncle Prudent was a distinguished personage, and, despite his name, known for his audacity. Very rich, which does one no harm, even in the United States. And how could he not be rich, given that he owned a large fraction of stock in Niagara Falls? In that era, a society of engineers had been founded at Buffalo for the exploitation of the cataracts. Business boomed. The 7,500 cubic meters that the Niagara discharges per second produced seven million horsepower. This enormous force, distributed to all the factories built within a radius of five hundred kilometers, made for an annual saving of fifteen hundred million francs, part of which came back to the society’s funds, and in particular into Uncle Prudent’s pockets.2 Moreover, he was a bachelor, and lived simply, having no domestic staff but his valet Frycollin, who hardly merited serving so daring a master. Such anomalies happen.
That Uncle Prudent had friends, since he was rich, goes without saying; but he also had enemies, since he was the president of the club—among others, all those who envied that position. And among the fiercest of those enemies, one must mention the secretary of the Weldon Institute.
This was Phil Evans, himself very rich, for he directed the Walton Watch Company, an important factory that makes five thousand watch movements each day and delivers products comparable to the best mechanisms in Switzerland. Phil Evans could therefore have passed for one of the happiest men in the world, or even in the United States, were it not for Uncle Prudent’s situation. Like Uncle Prudent, he was forty-five years old; like him, endowed with indestructible health; like him, undeniably daring; like him, largely uninterested in trading the certain advantages of celibacy for the more doubtful ones of marriage. Here were two men well fitted for understanding each other, but that was exactly what they did not do. And both of them, it must be said, were extremely violent in character: Uncle Prudent hotly, and Phil Evans coldly.
And on what grounds had Phil Evans not been appointed club president? The votes were split exactly between him and Uncle Prudent. Twenty times they had been recounted, and twenty times no majority had appeared for either the one or the other. An embarrassing situation, which might outlast even the lives of the two candidates.
Then one of the members of the club proposed a means of breaking the tie. This was Jem Cip, the treasurer of the Weldon Institute. 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