Starting in the fall term of 1928, Fowler distributed to his seminar students a brush and a scraper and asked them to raise, whenever they were arguing a philosophical point, either the brush, if they were dislodging loose logico-linguistic soot, or the scraper, if they were chipping away at solid logico-linguistic soot. He himself brought to seminar every week a long, adjustable, articulated rod with a brush head affixed to one end. With your brushes and scrapers and this long, flexible rod, Fowler exhorted them, we shall clear out the philosophical flue.
“Having done so,” said Fowler, in one student’s notes, “we mustn’t expect the flue to remain clear ever after. Soon, with use, it will fill up with ash and soot once again and we shall have to climb up it once more with our brushes and scrapers, our adjustable rods. Such is the nature of chimneys.” He fielded from a student the usual question—are you talking about regular chimneys or logico-linguistic chimneys? — but replied this time that he did not understand the distinction the student was trying to draw.
“A chimney,” said Fowler, “is a chimney. We clear out the soot.” He gestured up and down with the long rod. “We clear out the soot.”
In late autumn of 1930, a number of Fowler’s students complained to the head of the department that most of their seminars were now spent clearing out chimneys around Oxford, work which was dirty, dangerous, and not conspicuously philosophical in nature. Yesterday he had sent them up a very treacherous chimney whose flue had both vertical and horizontal sections and multiple right angles. Two students had almost suffocated to death. The only sign that a logic seminar had been taking place was that Fowler had occasionally referred to the flue as “the philosophical flue.”
He became, after this, quite a controversial figure. Half the university persisted in thinking him a genius, a refugee from poverty who had not only escaped his past but now wielded it as a metaphor to demolish our old beliefs about logic and language. They looked on with wonder as he crossed the quadrangle covered in soot, carrying his long adjustable rod with the brush head affixed to one end. The other half thought his escape attempt had, belatedly, failed. He was, in the end, still a chimney sweep. He was not so much wielding his past as being wielded by it, less seizing upon a metaphor than being seized upon by it, they said, and he would, in due course, cause a number of students to die of suffocation.
From our modern vantage point we understand both perspectives on Fowler. Both were right. He did sweep out some nineteenth-century nonsense from our understanding of logic and language, and he did cause the death by suffocation of numerous undergraduate and graduate students. Both were right; but these days, if Fowler is remembered at all, it’s as a chimney sweep, the last of a breed, not as the first of a new kind of logician. His own body was found wedged in his own particularly narrow flue in the winter of 1953. A bricklayer had to be summoned to gain access to the corpse.
4: THE WORKER’S FIST
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In 1902 the rubber-goods mogul Moses Frenkel gave his son a large sum of money to produce the company catalog. Unbeknownst to his father, Isaac Frenkel was a nascent anarchist whose feelings toward his father — an arch-capitalist who was nevertheless a humane, compassionate man, beloved by his factory workers — were ambivalent in the extreme. Isaac embezzled the money and produced an anarchist broadsheet called The Worker’s Fist. Isaac’s ambivalent feelings, however, must have bled over into the text, for his father studied The Worker’s Fist carefully and then congratulated him on an “outstanding rubber-goods catalog” with a “pungent, poetic title. Bravo, bravo.”
5: DIVING RECORD
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A Florida man died Monday while trying to surpass his father’s record for deep diving without the aid of oxygen or fins. Thirty years ago, in the Gulf of Mexico, the father famously dove 225 feet without using oxygen or fins. On Monday the son made three dives in the same location, all without using oxygen or fins. His first dive was 167 feet. His second dive was 191 feet. On his third attempt the son managed to dive down 216 feet without oxygen or fins, but his lungs burst on the way up and he died aboard his diving vessel. At the funeral, his father tearfully admitted that in his record-setting dive he had actually used both oxygen and fins.
6: PROGRESS
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One of those odd accidents that so often propel scientific and technological progress. A Bavarian physicist in the first decade of the twentieth century built a brilliant apparatus intended to produce evidence to support his father’s controversial theory of matter. When the evidence produced by his apparatus showed, however, that his father’s theory was, on the contrary, wrong — in fact, ridiculous — he faced a choice: either demolish the apparatus, thereby obliterating all evidence of his own scientific genius, or humiliate his father.
He wandered gloomily in the mountains surrounding his lab. First he resolved to destroy the thing, to preserve his father’s name by snuffing out his own. Then he resolved to do just the opposite, to thrust his apparatus into the spotlight, publish his results, make his own name by snuffing out his father’s. He went back and forth between destroying his apparatus and preserving his father, and preserving his apparatus and destroying his father. He sat and stared at the apparatus with an axe in his lap, growing increasingly tormented as he pondered these equally horrifying alternatives. Then, just as his torment reached a point of unparalleled intensity and he lifted the axe high above his head, intending either to bring it down upon the apparatus (thereby preserving his father) or to fling it away from him (thereby destroying his father), he realized, all of a sudden and completely unexpectedly, that the so-called supercooled detector plate, which was actually a relatively minor component of the apparatus, could also, presumably, be used, with the proper adjustments, to rapidly freeze meats.
Thus modern-day meat preservation was born.
Happy ending for the world — not so much for the father and son, who later fell out over the son’s frozen-beef export empire. The father could not understand how such a promising young physicist could abandon science for such a sordid and unscrupulous industry. He never found out that he had his son’s flash-frozen patties to thank for the endurance of his ridiculous theory of matter, which reigned supreme until his death and was superseded only with the development of quantum mechanics in the 1920s. The son’s technique, of course considerably modernized, remains to this day the most effective way to freeze beef quickly.
7: UNLIKE SOFIA COPPOLA
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For his first film, the great director’s son has gone to extraordinary lengths to avoid the appearance of nepotism. He did not use a dime of his father’s money. He did not use his father’s usual cast or crew. He did not use his father’s film camera, or any film camera at all, to avoid the appearance of nepotism. He filmed everything with his eyes and stored it all in his mind, to avoid the appearance of nepotism. Instead of using actors and a script — his father’s method — he relied heavily on regular people, going right up to them on the street and looking at them with his huge eyes, all to avoid even a hint of nepotism. A very improvisational film, to avoid the appearance of nepotism. Even though his father has an editing bay in his home, the son has refused to use it to edit down the hours upon hours of footage that he has stored in his mind, preferring to do it on a specific bench he likes beside a bicycle shop. Instead of playing the film in theaters — his father’s method — he projects it onto a thirty-by-seventy-foot screen inside his mind and summarizes it for others.