The Technologists

by Matthew Pearl

  Marcus read it over. “Do you plan on resolving these in our leisure time?”

  “I thought we could post the list on the wall of the laboratory, and each place our initial by one we would like to do before we enter the heavenly kingdom.” Receiving no response from Marcus, he added, “It would help our rooms look more like a real society or club, you know.”

  “We are not a real society, Bob.”

  “Treason!”

  Marcus laughed as he handed the sheet back. “Post it if you wish, if Edwin allows it.”

  “Allows it?” Bob protested.

  “Allows it?” Edwin asked as he sat up, rubbing his eyes and stretching out a big yawn.

  After enduring a lecture from Edwin on the morality of looking at a sleeping man’s papers, Bob got his way and the list took its place on the laboratory wall.

  Later, just as Marcus was taking his turn on the floor, closing his eyes with relief, he was jolted by the sound of shattered glass and Edwin shouting. Marcus pushed himself to his feet.

  “What happened?” Bob asked, coughing.

  “The tube slipped out of my hand—I almost had it!” Edwin said with frustration.

  “Turn on the ventilating fan!” Marcus said.

  The fan yanked the gas through its moving teeth, but was no match for the lingering fumes. The three boys covered their mouths with handkerchiefs and barreled into the hallway.

  There, a trill of feminine laughter startled them. Ellen Swallow stood in the doorway of her laboratory. She was smiling, which for her almost counted as a fit of hysteria. She wore a dark outfit that looked like a gymnastics uniform, with a black apron over it, and her hair was wrapped in a series of intricate braids that could only be described as convoluted and would have been roundly condemned by any modern ladies’ magazine.

  “Yes?” Bob said to her, not certain how else to express his annoyance.

  She threw her sharp nose in the air and remarked, “Sulfuric acid with … fluoride of sodium.”

  “Right,” Edwin said, then looked at his friends. “Exactly right! But how did she know that?”

  Ellen’s steel-gray eyes turned deadly serious. “Because I know what you’re doing, Mr. Hoyt,” she warned. “And now it stops.”

  XXIII

  Afire

  NOT AGAIN! was what Ellen H. Swallow had thought some two weeks earlier, when, from her half window in the basement, she saw the mud-encrusted police boots climbing the steps into the Institute. She knew if the sort of anti-science frenzy she had already witnessed grew worse, the already financially tenuous Institute would be hanging by a thread.

  It is left to you, Ellen Swallow! was the next thought that crossed her mind.

  She would have to work in secret. There were so many suspicions of their institution that any sign of entanglement with mischief could grow out of control quickly. She could relate to this, because Ellen Henrietta Swallow was the Institute of Technology. She, too, could not make a single misstep.

  The morning the harbor disaster had transpired, Ellen had been returning to Boston from Worcester, where she had visited her mother. From the window of her rattling train—she always sat by the window of any conveyance—the harbor appeared to be afire.

  Not again! Not that her first career at college was curtailed by similar troubles, but her aims had been cut short nevertheless, just as her current ambitions could be if dark clouds collected over Boston and the Institute. She had entered Vassar shortly after the women’s college opened. Ellen had never had formal schooling whatsoever before; her parents were so disappointed in all the town schools that they decided to teach her themselves. They did so faithfully, and what they didn’t impart to her she studied on her own. When Vassar accepted her it was as a junior. It suited her to have two years at the women’s college instead of four, since she had to pay her own tuition and expenses. Even on her winter holidays, when she visited home she helped in her father’s store for extra money, during which time she organized the entire stock of inventory and did the bookkeeping. To her father’s chagrin, she flatly refused to allow his customers to smoke in the shop on her watch.

  “Why do you sell us tobacco if you don’t expect us to smoke it?” asked a man smoking a pipe by the stove on a cold day, as Ellen ushered him out the door.

  “I sold you molasses as well,” offered Ellen, “but we don’t expect you to stay here and cook it up.”

  She liked the other girls at Vassar well enough, though was surprised when she counted twenty-two of them who wore their hair flowing to their waists without any attempt at doing it up. It was as though they had not dressed. Their bonnets, which they claimed were the latest fashion from Paris, were so small you would need a microscope to find them.

  The only genuine trouble in her two years at Vassar was that the college’s administrators wouldn’t let her study enough. They feared if a student broke down from overwork it could prove to the world that girls could not get a college degree without injuring their health, which ultimately, as alleged by some medical experts, would disrupt their menstruation and future childbearing. With a death by suicide and one by illness among the student population, limitations became even stricter. But persistent Ellen received special permission to rise earlier than the other girls, and she soon discovered that she could study for nine hours without interruption before getting a headache from reading too long.

  During an elective course in science, Ellen and a small group of girls volunteered to analyze anything that came their way, from shoeblacking to baking powder. Her immersion in this endeavor, her fascination with it—her talent for it!—convinced Ellen to try chemistry as her life work. But after she was graduated from Vassar, everything seemed to stop short at one blank wall after another. Despite all her hard work, a degree from a women’s college proved insufficient to secure her admission into her newly chosen profession. She was living in purgatory, fretting and fuming so much that she began to think she couldn’t live much longer. She was thwarted and hedged in on every side, as though God wouldn’t help her a bit and man was doing his best against her, and her own heart even turned traitor.

  She felt like the prophet Baalam, obstructed everywhere by an angel he could not even see.

  If she were to cut the new path she imagined, she now knew she would need to demonstrate her qualifications as a scientist by pioneering her way through a new type of scientific education, the one begun a few years before by the Institute of Technology.

  It was her birthday, December 3, when she sat down to write a letter to the Institute. Less than two weeks later she received a note from President Rogers. “Can you come to Boston before many days and see me? I will say now that you will have any and all advantages that the Institute has to offer without charge of any kind. I congratulate you and every earnest woman upon the result.” Ellen knew, even in her joy at the news, that her admission, however noteworthy, was but a single step. Without an income, she would hardly be able to afford to live in Boston, which even in the last two or three years had become more crowded with laborers, who had formerly lived in rural towns but now needed to find positions in industry. Then there was the fact that many landladies would not accept “lady college students,” never having heard of the exotic species, despite Ellen’s pointing out that, unlike her male brethren, she did not smoke or wear boots in bed; many others did not take on single women, or admitted only a limited number, so that their house would not be alleged to be a brothel. Ellen finally found an arrangement with a landlady named Mrs. Blodgett, whose daughter had been a classmate of Ellen’s at Vassar. Mrs. Blodgett would provide food and board in return for Ellen cleaning, cooking, keeping peace among the servants, and organizing the boardinghouse ledgers, whenever she was not doing her studies for the Institute.

  Ellen promised her father, who worried about her safety, that she would bring to Boston a pearl-handled revolver she had won in a shooting contest when she was fifteen. She purchased several cartridges for it and carried it in her coat poc
ket when she was walking in the city alone, especially at night; fortunately, she had not yet had an occasion to brandish it against any of the rapists he’d imagined populated the city. When she read details about such terrible incidents in the newspapers, she assured herself that she could defend her sanctity. Although she was not adverse to experiencing romantic love and physical passion, should she ever encounter it, she was not afraid of going through life without that experience. But it did frighten her deeply to think of being deprived of her own choice in a matter of intimacy.

  After only a few months at Tech, she was visiting her family in Worcester when word came that her father’s right arm had been crushed in a railroad accident while he’d been helping a friend who worked for a shipping company. Holding back her own anguish, she helped restrain him on the bed while the doctor amputated his arm, which almost took away her reason entirely. In his suffering and delirium, his cries for the arm that was not there, he looked to no one else but his Nellie for the four days before he died. After that, she sometimes feared she would give up her place at the Institute before the spring was over. For months, she went back and forth between Worcester and Boston every day so her mother would not be alone, yet she still succeeded at her studies.

  For what special mission was God preparing her? In this dark time, she learned that she had the will and power to control her mind, to a degree. She never could have lived through those sad months if she had for an instant allowed her thoughts to dwell on the terrible scenes of her father’s death. She dreamed only once of him dying, one night after sitting on her sofa in Boston mending a dress and thinking of home. Now when such thoughts ever came to her mind she shut the door tightly against them and directed her attention elsewhere, taking a book to read or a pencil to plan something for her future. Her mental focus seemed very like a child to please—so easily was it diverted from morbid and uncontrolled things.

  Calmness and self-reliance: Those were the most wonderful Christian graces.

  Most of the other students at the Institute took their positions for granted, but not Ellen, not for a moment. They wasted their time during breaks playing football and baseball, but not Ellen, though she would sometimes watch them run around outside her basement window, half of her wishing she could join in their silly, manly contests, the more sensible half of her ready to compose a paste of chloride of lime to treat their grass stains.

  Her own stains changed almost daily. Sometimes, the skin on her hands was tinted blue, sometimes brown, sometimes both. Her dresses often boasted holes from acids, some of which could even penetrate her oversize rubber apron.

  When they saw her inside the Institute, some of the Tech students hissed or made smacking sounds to mimic kissing. Others took off their hats and stopped all conversation in favor of chilly politeness. Whether polite or unfriendly, they all stared, and she hated herself whenever she felt color rising to her cheeks as she imagined what they were thinking. She far preferred being ignored. When she had to walk through the Institute building, she would usually shield herself with a stack of books over her chest, and if she had no choice but to wait on a bench for a passing throng of students in order to reach the stairs or supply closet, she would busily knit and never look up from her needles and ball of yarn.

  Ellen Swallow had never waited for any person, male or female, to do anything she could do herself. In the first weeks of her time at the Institute, the students were brought on an excursion to a gun manufacturer. She was not expected to go with the class, but she had appeared that morning in her finest dress, which was nevertheless still of the plain sort. The professor’s assistant, who was escorting the class, quietly pointed out to her that it was not an appropriate setting for a member of the gentler sex because, firstly, it was a factory that produced guns, and secondly, some of the brawny men on the shop floor would be half naked and disgusting to the eyes of a woman. Ellen responded, firstly, that there were mills and factories across the country employing young women, and if they could work in factories surely she could visit one; secondly, that she was never disgusted by any labor; and, thirdly, that she would do her best not to distract the men.

  The professor’s assistant wouldn’t budge. He was a young man who had graduated from Yale and resented having anything to do with Ellen, gave her either too little or too much work for her assignments as suited his mood, and, passing her in the hallways, often greeted her as “Mr. Swallow.”

  “As you are apt to call me Mr. Swallow, I’m afraid I must insist you treat me as one of the men from now on,” she said, “and you will be glad to know that, like some men, I am not afraid of guns.” That was the moment the assistant became the only person in Boston to whom Ellen showed her pearl-handled revolver. When she glided by the stunned scion of Yale to join the group, it was already back in its morocco case in her pocket. Later, he complained to the faculty committee about her presence on the excursion (though his humiliation prevented him from mentioning the revolver), and they issued a resolution that her face and neck be completely covered up on visits to factories.

  She complied without an objection.

  After the visit of the police to the Institute, Ellen approached the matter as she approached all curiosities: with a book in hand. She researched the history of nautical wrecks and disasters and found, much to her amazement, that what had occurred at the Boston Harbor seemed unprecedented. Still, there were clues to draw from the past. An extract she found from a newspaper from 1843, for example, reported on the wreck of the vessel Reliance, traveling from China to England: “During the last ten days, Mr. Kent and his associates, who purchased the wreck of the Reliance, near Boulogne, have been busily employed in their endeavors to bring the wreck to land; they have found a chronometer, several silver and plated dishes, and a large iron tank, 46 feet long by 8 feet deep, and 6 feet wide.”

  Exploring this further in several French nautical histories at the public library reading room, Ellen discovered that the iron tank mentioned in the extract had been placed approximately eighteen feet below the binnacle compass. She calculated that the tank would have exerted a magnetic pull equal to 2,208 cubic feet of malleable iron, and that whatever part of the tank was on the port side of the ship would attract the south point of the compass. The Reliance would have charted an east by south course by compass, yet at the time of its disaster was running through the channel west by north, eight or nine leagues off its reckoned course. Driven ashore, the ship was lost and 114 people drowned.

  Using the information gleaned from this and a dozen other historical wrecks she could attribute to some presence of iron or other magnetically charged materials, Ellen arrived at a variety of calculations to estimate the amount and placement of iron that could cause damage on the scale of what happened at the Boston Harbor. There was this difference from the other wrecks: No amount of bad fortune could have led to the Boston disaster. No amount of luck or stupidity. Nor could luck have produced this, thought Ellen doggedly as she read about what had happened at State Street on April the tenth. She struggled to find a starting point for her research into this next incident, but kept thinking back to demonstrations of glassblowing techniques she had seen when she was ten. She read every word of material she could find on the subject. She felt certain the key to how something like a glass window was destroyed from the outside would be to find how it was made from the inside.

  When she saw Mr. Mansfield, that mechanical Johnny Appleseed, in her sphere, her basement, she knew it was no coincidence. She knew, for she assiduously collected every scrap of information about the Institute, its staff, and its students, that he was a charity scholar and beholden to the professors, enough so to spy on her as an agent for those elements of the faculty who did not wish her to remain.

  “We have a society. It is called the Technologists,” he had mumbled unconvincingly.

  He and his friends were a nuisance and a threat to her seclusion, and if she could see them shipped off for some violation, she would do so with a smile
and a flick of her handkerchief. Then again, they could do the same, were they to discover her.

  “A secret society,” that dandified, charmless, and overly handsome swell Bob Richards had added.

  Secret society! That was rich. Even the mere scents of chemicals that wafted into her laboratory from theirs revealed them to her. There were no secrets in nature or man that Ellen Swallow felt she would not discover, given proper time.

  She had to laugh to think how clever they believed they were, but she had decided. Worrying about them was a distraction. Instead, she would put them under her thumb.

  XXIV

  Greetings, Fellows

  “DO YOU MEAN TO TELL ME she has been conducting her own investigation, right under our noses?” Pacing Ellen’s laboratory, a pink-faced Bob Richards, arms crossed and eyes narrowed, addressed his fellow Technologists as though the mistress of the laboratory were not standing serenely by them, in front of the compass needles and fresh chemical solutions lined up neatly on her shelves.

  “The reputation of the Institute is at stake,” Ellen answered Bob evenly. “The reputation of everyone who teaches and works with technological arts rests on resolving this matter quickly, Mr. Richards. Anyone would be blind not to see that.”

  “But how did you know what we were doing, Miss Swallow?” Marcus asked, curious rather than hostile.

  “Without much difficulty at all, Mr. Mansfield. I have seen and heard you bumping and stumbling around that laboratory down here. And when neither you nor Mr. Richards could credibly explain the intent of your ‘society,’ I easily surmised what you were engaged in, though likely with far less success than I. As little as I relish a collaboration, your separate investigations must end now, I’m afraid, for I cannot have mistakes on the part of you three place my own progress in jeopardy. A little more hydrogen fluoride, gentlemen, and you would have killed us all.”