recognized by someone in the engineering department. There was every possibility, Petra Fairbrother related to me, that the sign I had written, 35,000 feet above the Atlantic, represented a concept evolved in hydrodynamic engineering known as a ‘Saltire Wave’.
A few hours in a local library unearthed the key facts about the Saltire Wave. It was a phenomenon discovered by the Scottish engineer Findlay Smith Quarrie in 1834. One afternoon, riding his horse along the banks of the Union Canal near Edinburgh, he noticed that when a barge was suddenly halted, the body of water around it, after an initial violent agitation, calmed itself and then moved ahead independently in an even wave, as if the barge were still there and the displacement of the water caused by the barge’s forward motion was still occurring. On this particular day, Quarrie had spurred his horse forward and had followed this wave along the canalside for several miles. The wave was miraculously real, but its cause seemed spectral. It was as if, Quarrie remarked in the paper he submitted to the Institute of Hydrodynamic Engineering – with due apologies for the anthropomorphic nature of his observation – ‘the water was still
remembering
the effect of the barge’.
In the paper he proposed a mathematical symbol to represent this phenomenon: two parallel lines forced to cross as a result of an energy twist in the middle. He called it the Saltire Wave because the shape that ensued resembled an elongated version of the white ‘x’ on the blue ground of the Scottish flag – known familiarly as the ‘Saltire Cross’.
I sat in the shadowy hall of the Institute, waiting for Mr Auchinleck, with an empty but open mind. I was not sure why I felt I had to come to Edinburgh, or of what I might achieve or discover, but at least I felt I was acting, doing something positive. Some strange enlightenment might arrive as a result of this visit and I had a sixth sense that it would be found in the long-defunct persona of Findlay Smith Quarrie.
There was the sound of squeaking rubber on the polished parquet of the Institute before Mr Auchinleck appeared. He was a young man in his thirties with a frizzy mass of wavy brown hair. He was wearing a grey suit and a plaid shirt with no tie. The squeaks had been produced by the crude sandals he was wearing, the soles apparently cut from auto tyres. I could not help looking down and was vaguely distressed to see his unduly long toenails extending through the sandal thongs like curved yellow talons.
Auchinleck – ‘Call me Gilles,’ he immediately invited – was a genial fellow and intrigued to learn I was on the trail of Findlay Smith Quarrie and his Saltire Wave.
‘A fascinating man,’ Auchinleck said. ‘Sort of ahead of his time. I don’t think, to be honest, he really knew what he had found with his Wave.’ He grinned. ‘Now we say everything’s a wave, don’t we? Atoms are both wave and particle,’ he recited in a sing-song voice. ‘Don’t they claim that even thought is basically a wave phenomenon?’
‘Is it?’ I asked, intrigued.
‘Well, so they say. Waves, waves everywhere. Do you want to see what he looked like?’
‘Who?’
‘Quarrie.’
Gilles Auchinleck led me upstairs to the Institute’s original lecture room, purpose built, a semicircular bank of wooden pews facing a wooden dais that backed on to an enormous, crowded oil painting.
‘1834,’ he said. ‘The founding members. There’s Quarrie standing by his famous pump.’
I stepped forward, following the direction of his pointing finger to stare at the well-executed portrait of a plump rosy-faced figure, more like a country squire than one’s idea of a Victorian engineer, his stomach straining at the buttons of his silk waistcoat.
‘Quarrie made a fortune from that pump,’ Auchinleck said. ‘By the middle of the century it was in every coal mine in the world.’
He went on, but I wasn’t listening, as my eye had been caught
A few hours in a local library unearthed the key facts about the Saltire Wave. It was a phenomenon discovered by the Scottish engineer Findlay Smith Quarrie in 1834. One afternoon, riding his horse along the banks of the Union Canal near Edinburgh, he noticed that when a barge was suddenly halted, the body of water around it, after an initial violent agitation, calmed itself and then moved ahead independently in an even wave, as if the barge were still there and the displacement of the water caused by the barge’s forward motion was still occurring. On this particular day, Quarrie had spurred his horse forward and had followed this wave along the canalside for several miles. The wave was miraculously real, but its cause seemed spectral. It was as if, Quarrie remarked in the paper he submitted to the Institute of Hydrodynamic Engineering – with due apologies for the anthropomorphic nature of his observation – ‘the water was still
remembering
the effect of the barge’.
In the paper he proposed a mathematical symbol to represent this phenomenon: two parallel lines forced to cross as a result of an energy twist in the middle. He called it the Saltire Wave because the shape that ensued resembled an elongated version of the white ‘x’ on the blue ground of the Scottish flag – known familiarly as the ‘Saltire Cross’.
I sat in the shadowy hall of the Institute, waiting for Mr Auchinleck, with an empty but open mind. I was not sure why I felt I had to come to Edinburgh, or of what I might achieve or discover, but at least I felt I was acting, doing something positive. Some strange enlightenment might arrive as a result of this visit and I had a sixth sense that it would be found in the long-defunct persona of Findlay Smith Quarrie.
There was the sound of squeaking rubber on the polished parquet of the Institute before Mr Auchinleck appeared. He was a young man in his thirties with a frizzy mass of wavy brown hair. He was wearing a grey suit and a plaid shirt with no tie. The squeaks had been produced by the crude sandals he was wearing, the soles apparently cut from auto tyres. I could not help looking down and was vaguely distressed to see his unduly long toenails extending through the sandal thongs like curved yellow talons.
Auchinleck – ‘Call me Gilles,’ he immediately invited – was a genial fellow and intrigued to learn I was on the trail of Findlay Smith Quarrie and his Saltire Wave.
‘A fascinating man,’ Auchinleck said. ‘Sort of ahead of his time. I don’t think, to be honest, he really knew what he had found with his Wave.’ He grinned. ‘Now we say everything’s a wave, don’t we? Atoms are both wave and particle,’ he recited in a sing-song voice. ‘Don’t they claim that even thought is basically a wave phenomenon?’
‘Is it?’ I asked, intrigued.
‘Well, so they say. Waves, waves everywhere. Do you want to see what he looked like?’
‘Who?’
‘Quarrie.’
Gilles Auchinleck led me upstairs to the Institute’s original lecture room, purpose built, a semicircular bank of wooden pews facing a wooden dais that backed on to an enormous, crowded oil painting.
‘1834,’ he said. ‘The founding members. There’s Quarrie standing by his famous pump.’
I stepped forward, following the direction of his pointing finger to stare at the well-executed portrait of a plump rosy-faced figure, more like a country squire than one’s idea of a Victorian engineer, his stomach straining at the buttons of his silk waistcoat.
‘Quarrie made a fortune from that pump,’ Auchinleck said. ‘By the middle of the century it was in every coal mine in the world.’
He went on, but I wasn’t listening, as my eye had been caught
Similar Books
