in the science of refrigeration. He married my mother, who at the time was a sixteen-year-old girl from Cincinnati, and moved to Waltham, Massachusetts, where he developed and patented his idea. He licensed the invention to General Electric and made a small fortune.
My father then spent the rest of his life tinkering and practicing a kind of genial crankiness. The grounds around our house looked like a junk heap. There was a windmill connected to an electric generator that lit a bulb inside a turning fresnel lens acquired from the old Shaddâs Rock Lighthouse. In short, it was a wind-powered lighthouse. No one was interested. Then there was the experimental air-cooling machine that my father built in the twenties. It weighed eight hundred pounds and sat in the corner of the barn like a square bull. It thumped and shuddered and issued a massive blast of chill air for three or four minutes before it blew the fuses. Whenever some naive visitor to our house introduced the subject of air-conditioning (and you would be surprised how often that subject comes up in normal conversation), my father would stamp off to the barn to prove that he, Henry S. Archibald, was the actual inventor of the air conditioner. My poor mother would cry out, âHenry, the fuse box,â and he would answer in heroic cadence: âDamn the fuse box!â
As a boy, I never developed an interest in machines or tinkering. I was captivated by the far more complicated workings of animals. I loved bones, their shapes, the way they fit together, the puzzle of assembling them. I loved the play of sunlight through the hollows of a skull and across the parietals, giving the skull the mysteriousglow of a Greek temple. I loved the curve of the orbit and the delicacy of the zygomatic process. It was a wonder to me that such structures could exist, formed in secret under the covering of flesh, exposed in their beauty only by death.
At that time, woods and pastures surrounded our house outside Boston, and I often collected dead animals and skeletons and brought them home in a wheelbarrow. The larger animals, such as cows and horses, I laid out on the roof of an old shed near our house, where they would be beyond the reach of dogs, but where the crows could peck off any remaining meat. The smaller animals I buried for a month or two. My parents, to their credit, allowed me the full indulgence of my hobby, although my mother often worried about germs and fire from the kerosene I used to degrease the bones.
My most exciting discovery of those years was finding a dead bull moose near the Sudbury swamp. I found him by tracking the smell for over a mile through the woods. He lay peacefully on a bed of sphagnum moss, a massive animal with a magnificent rack. He had expired recently and was in no condition to be transported, but I went back again and again, collecting the odd leg or antler as the dogs tore apart the carcass. Sometimes bones would be dragged hundreds of yards into the woods, and I had to search the underbrush for hours. In three months I had everything but the rib cage and pelvis, which needed more time, and those I was able to rescue in the spring, just as the snow was melting.
When the bones of one of my animals had been stripped of flesh and skin, I set to work. I boiled them in a kettle behind the barn, carved off the cartilage, soaked them in a tub of kerosene, and then washed that out with soap and water, bleached them, and laid them back on the shed roof for a final sunning. When the bones were a pure lovely white, and light as seasoned pine, I mounted the skeleton. It was a tedious process of drilling, screwing, gluing, wiring, and hanging. The end result was never, to my great disappointment, as elegant as the mounted skeletons in the Boston Museumof Natural History. Nor did my larger skeletons stay standing very long. The mounted moose lasted until I tried to set an antler in the pedicle. That was the proverbial straw, and the whole thing
My father then spent the rest of his life tinkering and practicing a kind of genial crankiness. The grounds around our house looked like a junk heap. There was a windmill connected to an electric generator that lit a bulb inside a turning fresnel lens acquired from the old Shaddâs Rock Lighthouse. In short, it was a wind-powered lighthouse. No one was interested. Then there was the experimental air-cooling machine that my father built in the twenties. It weighed eight hundred pounds and sat in the corner of the barn like a square bull. It thumped and shuddered and issued a massive blast of chill air for three or four minutes before it blew the fuses. Whenever some naive visitor to our house introduced the subject of air-conditioning (and you would be surprised how often that subject comes up in normal conversation), my father would stamp off to the barn to prove that he, Henry S. Archibald, was the actual inventor of the air conditioner. My poor mother would cry out, âHenry, the fuse box,â and he would answer in heroic cadence: âDamn the fuse box!â
As a boy, I never developed an interest in machines or tinkering. I was captivated by the far more complicated workings of animals. I loved bones, their shapes, the way they fit together, the puzzle of assembling them. I loved the play of sunlight through the hollows of a skull and across the parietals, giving the skull the mysteriousglow of a Greek temple. I loved the curve of the orbit and the delicacy of the zygomatic process. It was a wonder to me that such structures could exist, formed in secret under the covering of flesh, exposed in their beauty only by death.
At that time, woods and pastures surrounded our house outside Boston, and I often collected dead animals and skeletons and brought them home in a wheelbarrow. The larger animals, such as cows and horses, I laid out on the roof of an old shed near our house, where they would be beyond the reach of dogs, but where the crows could peck off any remaining meat. The smaller animals I buried for a month or two. My parents, to their credit, allowed me the full indulgence of my hobby, although my mother often worried about germs and fire from the kerosene I used to degrease the bones.
My most exciting discovery of those years was finding a dead bull moose near the Sudbury swamp. I found him by tracking the smell for over a mile through the woods. He lay peacefully on a bed of sphagnum moss, a massive animal with a magnificent rack. He had expired recently and was in no condition to be transported, but I went back again and again, collecting the odd leg or antler as the dogs tore apart the carcass. Sometimes bones would be dragged hundreds of yards into the woods, and I had to search the underbrush for hours. In three months I had everything but the rib cage and pelvis, which needed more time, and those I was able to rescue in the spring, just as the snow was melting.
When the bones of one of my animals had been stripped of flesh and skin, I set to work. I boiled them in a kettle behind the barn, carved off the cartilage, soaked them in a tub of kerosene, and then washed that out with soap and water, bleached them, and laid them back on the shed roof for a final sunning. When the bones were a pure lovely white, and light as seasoned pine, I mounted the skeleton. It was a tedious process of drilling, screwing, gluing, wiring, and hanging. The end result was never, to my great disappointment, as elegant as the mounted skeletons in the Boston Museumof Natural History. Nor did my larger skeletons stay standing very long. The mounted moose lasted until I tried to set an antler in the pedicle. That was the proverbial straw, and the whole thing
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