Читать книгу The Twins - Sheldon Cohen - Страница 3

The farm, just outside of Augsberg, Germany, had been in the Stegerwald family for five generations. In 1906, the main crop was barley, which made the farm very important because the Germans used barley to make beer—their national drink.

Yellow crops in parallel rows as far as the eye could see interrupted a thick carpet of grass. Narrow dirt roads wound up the low hills, disappeared on the other side and emerged again over the next hill. Crystal clear streams coursed over the land. Wooden fences divided the land into sections, and small homes and barns dotted the landscape.

Ludwig Stegerwald, a forty-eight-year-old widower, owned the farm. He was a short man of five foot five inches with dark brown hair that matched his intense, brown eyes burning from under heavy brows.

His gaze never rested on one site for long, his head moving from observation to observation like a bird perched on a branch. One could tell he was making mental calculations when his eyes would stop blinking and his wordless lips would move with his thoughts. The entire farm’s financial data, stretching back to the time that he inherited the farm from his father, were in his brain available for instant recall on a second’s notice. He had no need of paper records.

His amazing computational expertise was legend in Bavaria and Swabia. People would bring him long columns of figures. “Ludwig, add this please.” He would stare for two or three seconds, and respond, “Six thousand eight hundred and sixty-five.”

“How much is 4,245 times 3,204?”

This would take a few seconds longer. “13,600,980.” Numbers squared or cubed were faster. “What is eighteen cubed?”

With the question would come the response, “5,832.”

“How do you add so fast?”

His answer never varied. “I just do.”

Ludwig was the calculator of the community long before the average person had access to them. Neighbors who grew up with him reported amazing stories of his school exploits. His teachers did not know what to do, because when he entered kindergarten he was reading at a fifth-grade level. His parents, who were just as exasperated as his teachers, pulled him out of school after it became clear that the course of instruction had nothing to offer their son.

Ludwig’s parents were poor farmers. They never considered an education beyond grade school, and, even if they had, they could never have afforded it.

He had no formal education, but it made no difference. He was a voracious reader with a photographic memory. He became a source of information on any subject, not only mathematics. He was enamored with the history of science and had an encyclopedic knowledge in this area. In fact, on every business trip to Munich, he would stop at the main library to read the latest Annalen der Physik journal so that he could keep up with recent advances. Although he could not always understand the advanced mathematics so often included in the articles, he did have a good grasp of the physical principles involved.

He would try to duplicate the experiments he had read about in the journals. For this purpose, he set up a small laboratory in his attic, and when he was at work in his sanctuary, no one dared disturb him. He worked with closed glass tubes emptied of air through which he would send an electric current from the negative pole (cathode) of an electric source. The tube would glow with beautiful colored rays of light that fascinated him. What were the rays that appeared once the current started? Was electricity an actual particle of matter? Was it a wave? Was it a complete atom?

On one of these trips to Munich, he learned that Joseph John Thomson, a Scottish physicist, had solved the mystery. Thomson determined that the so-called cathode ray was composed of negative charges of electricity. Scientists would soon be calling them electrons.

This was the source of great fascination for Ludwig. However, people he could discuss these developments with were a precious few. One of them was his business advisor, Joshua Weiss, who appreciated Ludwig’s scientific genius. “You’re like Michael Faraday, Ludwig. He didn’t have any scientific training either.” So Ludwig became content to add scientific information to his vast store of physical knowledge and found great satisfaction in doing so. He set up a similar experiment and tried to duplicate Thomson’s work.

If anyone in town needed information on any subject, they would approach him. He never conveyed an attitude of superiority, answering their questions with whatever amount of detail he felt necessary to convey the information. For this, his neighbors showered him with love and respect.