Astounding Magazine - Inspirational Short Stories

I would like to write in this magazine, articles that readers find interesting and useful. This magazine is about literature, the arts, science and history.

To measure the World

Once men tried to measure the Earth
Its length, its weight and it's distant Moon
The transit of Venus gave the length to the Sun
Now all heavenly bodies had a place to move from

A strange young man walked north from London
Meticulously measuring and making adjustments
And by measuring the angle of the sun
The length of the Earth came like a bun

To Weigh the Earth do you need a Scale
A Big blue Mountain would tell the Tale
The angle of it's feeble pull
Will weigh the Earth like a Bull

The following article is based mainly on a book that won the Aventis Prize for Science Books, and has been re written for easier reading. The poem was written by me.

A man named Richard Norwood walked north from the Tower of London to York, a distance of 208 miles. It took him two years to repeatedly stop and measure his way with a chain, making the most meticulous adjustments for the rise and fall of the land and the meanderings of the road. Then he measured the angle of the Sun at York and again a year later on the same day at the same time measured the angle in London. From this he calculated the length of a degree (and so the circumference of the Earth) as 110.72 Km. Incredibly he was off by only a trifling 600 yards (to a degree.)

In 1687 his Masterwork of Navigation was published as Seaman’s Practice. Norwood returned to Bermuda with his wife and family to become a successful planter. As a young man he had traveled to Bermuda to try to make a fortune by scooping pearls off the seabed. He intended to do this by using a diving bell modeled after Halley’s device but the search failed, for there were no pearls on the seabed, and anyway the diving bell didn’t work. But while crossing from England by ship his two young sons had so successfully traumatized a young vicar named Reverend Nathaniel White that he spent the rest of his career persecuting Norwood in any small way he could think of.

Meanwhile a man named Jean Picard used an incredibly complicated method of triangulation using the moons of Jupiter to arrive at a more accurate figure of 110.46.
But it was based of the assumption that the earth was a perfect sphere which Newton now said it was not. According to him the earths spin made it bulge near the equator so a degree was longer at the poles and shorter near the equator.




The Wooden Tri Plane

Many years ago I visited a shop to buy a walkman which cost about 700 Rupees. In the same shelf there was a plane that had a price tag of 2500 Rupees. I asked the salesman what it was and he showed it to me. It was a small model Aero-plane with a wing span of just 5 inches. It was not a toy for it was an exact model and had to be carefully assembled together. I wondered who on earth would buy such a thing, and then I realized it was a collectors item. Perhaps a man who worked for an Airline as an Engineer would use it to show his friends about a plane he used to repair, or perhaps the retired Air Force General would keep it on his table, or a collector who had a fascination with planes.

I decided to make a plane like it with wood and sell it for 1500 Rupees. The trouble is I knew nothing at all about woodworking, and I didn’t know anyone whom I could ask. But in the library I found a book about woodworking, it was a wonderfully written book with clear pictures. The tools you need are simple. There is the hand saw which is used to cut planks but this is usually not needed when making small items because the wood can be cut to size in the wood mill. But its cousin a small saw that resembles a hacksaw but is much smaller and cheaper than it, is still needed. The chisel which is used to sculpt wood by hitting the handle with a hammer or applying pressure is a basic tool for woodworking. (But I didn’t use it much for I used the saw to cut the wood to size and the Rasp to shape it). A rasp which is actually a sought of file, but with bigger grooving. When used in a similar way to a file it scrapes off wood very efficiently. Although it was not mentioned in the book I found the normal file, which is usually used only on metal very useful for smoothing the surface. And the vice which is tightened to the table is used to hold the wood firmly when cutting it with the saw, or working on it with another tool. The vice is usually quite a heavy tool, but a small vice which cost only about 250 rupees is perfectly adequate for this purpose. A hand drill is useful, and of course the hammer which was already there.

I wondered where I could buy these tools, and found a stretch of road about a kilometer long, and on both sides of the road there are shops that sell only wood working tools. I bought all the tools I need for less than 1000 Rupees. I found it incredible that a man could start business in one of the main areas of commerce by reading a book, or by getting a few tips from a carpenter, and buy all he needed for just 1000 rupees. If as I hoped I could sell my plane for 1500 rupees, I would have most probably covered all the cost in the first transaction, but the tools would still be there so from the second plane onwards I would make a big profit.

The next step was to find a plane to make. I have an old encyclopedia which has pictures of aircraft and under “Historic Aircraft of World War I” I found a red Tri-plane (three wings) that particularly appealed to me. It was the Fokker Dr. 1 Tri-plane flown by Baron Manfred von Richthofen (1892-1918), the World War I German flying Ace, who as leader of an air group called the “Flying Circus” personally shot down 80 Allied planes. Richthofen served in the cavalry and infantry before entering air service in 1915, and was known as the “Red Baron” for the color of the plane he flew, but was shot down in aerial combat possibly by Captain A. R. Brown of the British Air Force.
I first built a plane to get familiar with the tools, considering I worked on it without a plan it still looked quite good. To build an exact model I needed details like the wing span, the length and width of the fuselage, size and shape of the tail fin and other details. I wondered from where I could find such specialized details. Incredibly in a book I found in the Library on Aircraft there are diagrams of planes giving these details. I drew these diagrams by hand and set out building the plane. I wanted to build a plane with a wing span of 10 inches.

I used mahogany for it is easy to work on. I bought a plank from the wood mill but it was too thick. There is a machine in any wood mill called a Plainer-thicknesser that is used to plain wood to the required thickness. I plained it to a fraction of an inch and drew the three wings on it, held it in the vice and used the small saw to cut it. Then I used the rasp for the slight tapering effect on the top of the wings, and the file to smooth it. In a similar way I cut the tail sections, the propeller and all the other sections except the fuselage from the same plank of wood. The tail sections were a little thinner so I used the rasp and file to make it thin. I bought a square pole and used the thicknesser to make it to the size of the front end of the fuselage. The fuselage tapers up and becomes smaller as it nears the tail section, all I had to do is to cut this part with the small saw and use the rasp and file to shape it.

The small teeth of the small saw cuts the wood rapidly and does not hold the wood and get stuck like the hand saw. The design simplicity of this plane is amazing, a big plank could be used to cut any amount of wings and other parts except the fuselage, and the fuselage itself is just a square pole, so any amount can be cut from a long pole.

Many people think to cut a wheel you need a wood lathe, but it is not so. I drew the wheel on the plank and cut slightly around the line of the wheel, and a few stokes of the file towards the line made a really good wheel. The axel was also made in a similar way, and I used the hand drill to make a hole and connect the wheel to the axel. The wheel and the propeller were movable parts.

I pasted all the parts with glue and painted it red, and when I painted the Iron Cross on the wings, fuselage and tail it looked incredibly good. I felt really happy at having made a model plane that actually had the same energy of the real Fokker Dr.1 flown by the “Red Baron.” The next day I wanted to take it to shops and show it as a sample of what I could build if they were willing to sell. But that evening a friend visited me with his son, and when I showed it to them, his son begged me to give him the plane. I reluctantly gave it thinking that I would be able to make another for now I knew how it was done. Soon after they left I felt a great sense of loss, and sadly never built a model tri plane again. For something more important came up and soon responsibilities overwhelmed me. And I lent some of my tools which were never returned. I feel the wooden Tri Plane is just at the edge of my hands, but I never really manage to make one. But one day when I am a little less busy I will make one for my son, and I am sure I can make many more and sell it at a profit.


The Cold Past

The ice age a terrible reality in Earths history has never touched men for we evolved and lived in an age of exceptionally mild weather. In 1815 a volcano erupted in a small island in the pacific, it took many months for the news to reach England but by the time it did the Thames had frozen. 1815 was known as a time of extremely cold weather, crops failed everywhere and there was widespread famine. In Ireland the famine and the associated typhoid epidemic killed sixty five thousand people. It was known as the year without summer. The year became popularly known as Eighteen Hundred and Froze to Death. It was a dreadful year in every sense of the word, but incredibly the world wide temperature had fallen only by less than 1 degree.

The volcanic eruption had spewed so much ash and dust to the atmosphere that it blotted out the sun, and lead to weather that was the coldest in living memory. But the global temperature had fallen by less than one degree. If the entire history of the earth was two hands stretched wide and if the beginning of the earth was the tip of the left hand, all complex life forms would be in the right hand. And all human history could be erased by a single stroke of a medium sized nail file. During this unfathomable time span, ice ages have come and gone, wrecking havoc in countless eons in countless ages.

But why do ice ages come and go, why does the climate change so abruptly without any outside stimulus. The answer is both simple and complex. The earths orbit around the sun changes from elliptical to nearly circular to elliptical again, this leads to the coming and going of ice ages roughly once every eighty thousand years. But this alone does not explain an ice age for the earth’s orientation to the sun, its tilt, pitch and wobble also determine the frequency and intensity of an ice age. Changes in the suns radiation level could also trigger an ice age, and the worst ice ages are triggered for this reason.

In between the ice ages there are periods of extreme heat where both the arctic and the Antarctic melt completely. A world of extreme heat is as bad as a world of extreme cold. A super ice age could turn the earth into an ice ball and wipe out all life except some microorganisms. In this event evolution would take a different path, because it is largely a matter of chance, it is unlikely that animals of the kind found on earth would be created again, or as Darwin would have said Evolve again.