Ups and Downs
ALONG with Dietrich and Garbo and General Franco and Sir Anthony Eden, the Professor is one of the very few of the pre-war internationally famous to have successfully ignored the disfigure- ments of lime. For nearly half a lifetime, it seems, one has been in touch with the familiar figure, pictorially a sort of continental Red Dean, frozen by the cameras in the manhole of a machine which is just about to take him up or down, and always looking rather puzzled.
Appearance apart, he has never attained that degree of universal respect to which his pioneering spirit • and undoubted courage would seem to have entitled him. The reason for this is to be found in his book. For him balloons and bathyscaphes have not been means but ends. He talks vaguely about the importance of measuring the cosmic rays in the stratosphere and of inspecting the flora and fauna of the deep, but clearly this side of things has little interest for him. Even the trips in the machines them- selves do not seem to have stimulated him as much as the mathe- matical problems of their construction. Some of his enthusiasm for this he succeeds in communicating to the reader, but too often one is pulled up by such knock-out statements as: 'So we had to give up the idea of an interposed layer and make use of .the autoclave joint.' The twenty-eight drawings show a strong influence of Beachcomber (some are almost a parody of him), and confirm what a world of difference there is between an experimental physicist, however brilliant, and a pilgrim father.
LUDOVIC KENNEDY
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