,14=/,15=#,23=%,24==> 3Engineering Studies L~U~D~W~I~G left school in the summer of 1906: the years from then until the end or towards the end of 1912 were, he told von Wright, ones of constant unhappiness. The unhappiness appeared in, and probably it was largely caused by, the difficulty he had in choosing an occupation. He was unusually free in this respect, because his father's wealth made it possible for him at any time to change his place or subject of study. He told von Wright also that it was his original wish to study under Boltzmann in Vienna, but that Boltzmann committed suicide precisely in the year he left school. Some details in this story are not quite clear: Boltzmann taught at the university and Ludwig's Matura certificate from the Realschule sufficed only to obtain him admission to a Technische Hochschule. In order to enter the university, he would have had to spend a further year at some other school. Probably he had at most a vague wish to study under Boltzmann, but arrangements had already been made for engineering training before Boltzmann's suicide. The wish to study under Boltzmann is interesting as being the first signs of his divided vocation, for it must have been the philosophy of science in Boltzmann that attracted him: he had not yet the necessary knowledge to appreciate the mathematical elegance of Boltzmann's strictly physical work. Ludwig was, however, to study mechancial engineering; and that being settled the choice of the Technische Hochschule at Charlottenburg is easily explained. It was the most renowned and the best of German engineering schools and Ludwig long retained a belief in the superiority of Germany in engineering matters_a year or two later he told his friend Eccles in Manchester that an engineering training demanded a stay in Germany: England's days as a leader were long over. Besides this there may well have been a desire (as we have seen about the school at Linz) to move away from Vienna. At every point in his life he was apt to see very clearly the deficiencies of the place where he happened then to be living. True, in 1914 and even, fleetingly, in 1938 he felt that he belonged to Vienna and must share its fate but before the First War he was quite clear that everything technical was better in Germany and everything to do with human relations better in England. To Berlin, then, he came, der kleine Wittgenstein, seventeen and a half years old, and about five foot six in height, still with the winning ways of his childhood but now especially formally dressed and serious-looking. Naturally contacts had been found for him there: there were the 55 3Engineering Studies Rieders_relations of the Sjo$3grens_to be called on, and a Professor Jolles in whose house he could stay. He was registered at the THS on 23 October 1906 as a student of mechanical engineering (Maschinen-Ingenieurwesen) and was to stay for three semesters_a year and a half in the German system. He was given his leaving certificate_Abgangszeugnis_on 5 May 1908. No records of his course of study appear to remain. His sister Mining thought that from the start he was concerned with aeronautics and he certainly came to Manchester in 1908 already full of projects connected with it. She says that at some point unknown to her he was gripped almost against his will by philosophy. Again, we do not know in what form. It is only certain that there seemed at that time to be many possibilities for his future_Mrs. Jolles said as much when she learnt in 1930 that he had become famous as a philosopher. At the THS he would have access not only to many specialized departments of engineering but to theoretical study of mathematics and physics at a university standard. There was however no institute of philosophy and it is unlikely that he made his way across the Tiergarten to the University proper to hear Stumpf or Dilthey. Wittgenstein, as he was now known_for in their brusque Berlin way even ladies would call him that_was given to a form of innocent boasting about any feature of his former life that seemed larger than lifesize: the remark about the nine grand pianos, already noted, was perhaps one instance of it. To this habit we owe our first detail of the Berlin period. He used to say that while there he had heard Die Meistersinger thirty times. The number must be an exaggeration, but the concentration on one great work is characteristic and reminds us again of the constant putting back of the gramophone needle to a crucial passage. Wittgenstein's reaction was not: "Die Meistersinger is a great work, I must hear more of Wagner' (or "I must study his development', as a scholar might say) but "Die Meistersinger is a great work, I must hear more of it.' As a matter of fact he would later sometimes avoid a concert or a part of a concert in which passages from Tristan or Parsifal were played. It is possible to guess why just this work said so much to him, partly because we know the qualities that made it a favourite of his family. It was a treatment of problems of music and life at the same time_and its solution lay in the need for rules that can be discovered even within spontaneity but only when a note of reverence has been introduced. The opera contrives to show this and to lead to the happy ending necessary for so positive a message without overlooking the resignation and, from a human point of view, the loss involved in every achievement. It was entirely suitable to the tastes and preoccupations of these Wittgensteins that this general theme should be developed in connexion with music, for them not just a reflection but a part of life, and within a civic rather than 56 Wittgenstein: A Life mythological setting. The deep merit of the work resides in the extent to which these themes, sometimes banal, are grasped and felt and worked into a unity: it is one opera which seems for its five or six hours to present a world. Other works may be more completely Wagnerian but, by common consent, this is the most fully realized of Wagner's creations. It is perhaps a little too conscious; sententiousness is what makes the text so quotable. Forty years later Wittgenstein made a number of entries in his notebooks whose general effect was to give Wagner a high but a second rank_he was an imitator of Beethoven and in him Beethoven's terrible or cosmic irony had become earthly or bourgeois; his motifs were a sort of musical prose and did not amount to a melody and similarly his drama was not inspired by a succession of events. On the prelude to Die Meistersinger in particular he commented: Where genius wears thin, skill may show through.1 Too much contrivance, a theme not fully, perhaps not capable of being, mastered: the criticism is not unusual and perhaps not unfair, but in those Berlin years the work seemed to represent as well as to preach all that was deutsch und echt, all that was genuine in the culture he belonged to. During these years Wittgenstein took up a practice which he followed at many periods of writing down thoughts about his own life. Strange [he wrote in 1929 or 30] that for so many years now I have scarcely ever felt the least need to make notebook entries. In the very first time in Berlin when I began to write down thoughts about myself on slips of paper, it was a need. It was an important step for me. Later it came partly from the impulse to imitate (I had read Keller's diaries) and partly from the need to preserve something of myself. So it was in large part vanity. But it was also a substitute for a person in whom I could confide. Later I added in an imitation of Pepys's diary. Of course, it is hard to be fair here, as always, because natural motives and vanity were thoroughly intermixed in what I was trying to do.2 The idea of laying by something of himself, not only on days of dispiritedness for which he had nothing else to show, but also on happy and successful days, was in fact one of Keller's chief aims. By Wittgenstein's own account this motive came to him only later and his original aim was to talk about himself as if to a friend in whom he could confide. It was his method later to write down his thoughts as they occurred to him on slips of paper and to enter them later in a large notebook. The question of the vanity involved in making and copying 1.Culture and Value, p.43. 2.Code diary. 57 3Engineering Studies such entries often exercised him, but clearly writing was a necessity for him_as he told a friend during the First War, "If I had no paper I would write on sand'_and its fundamental purpose, as far as he could see it, was to reach a true understanding of, to come to terms with, his life as it actually was: to settle accounts with himself. If my notebook is to be in order, I must, as it were, step straight out of doors from it_into life_and not have either to climb up into the light as if from a cellar or to jump down onto the earth again from a higher level. No diaries or notes of this kind from before the First War have been preserved as far as is known. His family and friends did not know, or at any rate left no record, of what led Wittgenstein to leave Berlin. Perhaps he simply wanted to pursue his aeronautical experiments and investigations in England. But his brother Paul had the impression that it was occasioned by some disappointment.3 In fact we know indirectly that there was some painful episode between him and the family with whom he stayed though its date is uncertain. At this distance of time it may be not unfair to reproduce an exchange of letters in 1930 between him and the wife of the professor with whom he stayed_an emotional lady, evidently, and enamoured of intellectual life_scho$3ngeistig is the German expression_ but these were qualities for which he had in earlier years more use than later. The first is dated from Berlin-Halensee, Kurfu$3rstendamm 120, 20 September 1930: Dear Mr. Wittgenstein, How long_how very long_it is since I wrote to you. Probably the last time was after my great misfortune. _And I know_you will not be at all delighted at the sight of my letter. I can just see your embarrassed face in Vienna. "What on earth am I to do about these strangers?'_these "extras' perhaps_"how can I get out of it?' For some weeks now I have been struggling against an overpowering desire to write to you. How can I bring myself to someone's attention when he has unambiguously and finally dropped us old friends? It's very perverse of me, of course, to do it all the same. But, good God, you have your own ways_and that's your affair. Why should I behave in your way and not in my own, even if it means that I have to poke my head for a moment out of the trapdoor so kindly allotted me by your "Enough of that!', even if my pride has to take another beating. How much longer before there will be a definitive "Enough of that' and it will be too late for writing or not writing and pride will be food for worms._That's enough of an introduction. So. We went again, for the first time in very many years, to a scientific congress, in 3.Letter PW{-F. v Hayek. 58 Wittgenstein: A Life Ko$3nigsberg,4 and there I met a number of Viennese from the learned fraternity and found out in this way that our former friend_"our ex-friend' would be a ruder but more accurate expression_"little Wittgen- stein' had after all turned into something more than a village schoolmaster and was very highly thought of there. Now, whether or not this is a matter of indifference to you or even unwelcome, I have to tell you how exceptionally, really exceptionally, pleased I was. After all, I believed in you when your prospects were_how shall I put it?_very chequered and it wasn't at all so clear where your "ladders' would take you. I could easily offer you a regular correspondence in which you would write to me once a year and tell me how things were with you despite, or because of, the circumstances ("Enough of that!') which I have already mentioned and which you insist on. But, I shan't do it. I allowed myself, long ago to burn your letters and scatter the ashes to the winds. So be it. To my husband, who was attached to you like a father, as you know, you were a bitter disappointment, to him but not to me. Indeed, you will always belong to the few bright and dear memories that I have; that's to say you won't, but that "little Wittgenstein' and dear person will, whom you scarcely wish to know about any longer. I don't know the Wittgenstein of today. Loyalty may well be a lack of mobility, a clinging to what's dead and gone, stagnation, a hindrance to progress and growth. I understand all that perfectly, but it is a disease I suffer from. And as a matter of fact I haven't made progress but have remained stuck in the rearguard. _Well, that is all over and not to be changed. In the next room my cousin Margareta J., a well-known pianist who lives with us, is playing Brahms's B minor concerto. Oh, God, how times have changed since then. _(Do you remember how we played it three-handed?) Life is hard...5 Wittgenstein kept among his papers a pencil draft for a reply to this: Dear Madam, I received your letter today. It was indeed of course a surprise for me, though not of the unpleasant kind you supposed. On the contrary I feel it to be a piece of good fortune that fate has given me this opportunity to get in touch with you again. But now that I set about writing to you, I am faced with the choice of writing something not quite natural for me just in order to answer you, in order, as it were, to give you some sort of answer or else of writing what I think but what will possibly be quite unintelligible to you. I think it is better that I should write in the way that is natural to me and so make understanding possible for you, even if 4."Ko$3nigsberg'. At the second Conference on the Epistemology of the Exact Sciences at Ko$3nigsberg in September 1930 Wittgenstein's ideas on mathematics were presented by Friedrich Waismann and discussed at length. This marked Wittgenstein's return to philosophy after the twenties, as far as the continent was concerned. See WWK, pp. 19 and 102. "Great misfortune': evidently a reference to the death of a daughter of the Jolleses after an accident in the home. 5.Letter in the possession of Wittgenstein's literary heirs. 59 3Engineering Studies difficult, rather than writing something that sounds halfway plausible but that can in no circumstances be understood, because it is not true. First of all, you are quite right: it is indifferent to me whether people in Ko$3nigsberg think highly of me or not. With all the good will in the world I can't think much of myself and the good opinion of professors of philosophy and mathematics (with some exceptions) does more to confirm me in my unfavourable judgement than to give me encouragement. (To be sure, the good opinion of the few exceptions won't mislead me either_or so I hope_in my judgement about myself and my work, but I accept it gratefully as a piece of personal friendliness.) Well, when I read that you had attended a scientific (???) congress, I was overcome by the violent repugnance and disgust that I always feel at the fact that the wives of the professors participate in congresses and have discussions with "members of the fraternity'. The only reason, though, that I write this to you, is that it is one symptom of all those characteristics/things that have become so alien to me. When I was in Berlin and even later I did not feel this repugnance. Later it grew very strong in me and made mutual understanding or indeed contact with you impossible for me. Indeed when I received your last letter but one, the letter in which you told me of your great misfortune, your unnatural and_forgive me the word_journalistic ways of expressing yourself caused me such repugnance and the feeling of such a difference between us that I put aside as absurd any idea of achieving an understanding with you. But I now see (and I saw even then, though less clearly) that it was wrong of me to allow myself to be ruled by such feelings when feelings of gratitude and loyalty should have come first. For that reason your reproach of disloyalty is unfortunately not quite unjustified even though the case is not quite what you, naturally enough, suppose it to be. I knew and regretted that I had to disappoint your husband but that was not where my fault lay, because I had to disappoint a number of people precisely by doing the right thing. What I want to say is that my fault did not consist in regarding the achievement of understanding as out of the question, because it was_and perhaps still is_out of the question: no, my fault consisted in treating gratitude and loyalty as less important than mutual understanding, whereas in comparison with them it is of no account whatever. So I did after all not behave decently and I beg you and your husband to forgive me for that, if you can do so whole-heartedly. I will further say that three passages in your letter affected me in a good sense: that in which you write that I had my ways and that was my affair, but you must behave in your own way. That is true and I often think the same thing. Then the passage where you express your pleasure at my success in Ko$3nigsberg and this passage pleased me although it rests on a false assessment of the judgement of "men of the learned fraternity'. And finally the words "Life is hard'. That was a tone that I understand...6 6.Draft in the possession of Wittgenstein's literary heirs. 60 Wittgenstein: A Life Wittgenstein also kept Frau Jolles's rather calmer reply thanking him for his candour and a letter of 1939 with the project (unrealized) of a meeting during his visit then to Berlin. There were some family keepsakes that she wanted to go to him rather than to anyone else. Written in widowhood, old age, and the shadow of impending war, it too is emotional but with the emotions of resignation and final leave-taking: I send you my kindest thoughts and wish you many good and nice things and when I am dead remember me with friendship and don't call me too many names. What from time to time put you off was perhaps involuntary affectation. Or was it voluntary?7 We are given only an impression of the friendship, but it contains much that was typical of Wittgenstein_the music played together, Wittgenstein contributing only one line but no doubt most of the musical direction; the intensity and affection of Frau Jolles first invited and welcomed, then rather harshly rejected, ostensibly, and up to a point really, because of some theatricality and artificiality in her (as if that were not part of what brought them together), but more deeply because she threatened his privacy; then, as a further stage, his recognition that he had failed in affection and loyalty, a recognition expressed in a letter carefully and of course painfully explaining what he had been right to resent. Even the element of confession in his letter is in a way self-defeating, because what was required was not to admit to coldness but to show warmth. This was a feature that made some of his relations critical of Wittgenstein's confessions which seemed to them to be aimed at recording his faults rather than at putting them right. Still in the case of Frau Jolles the open explanation did have its success and there supervened a fourth and calmer stage, not full friendship but the memory of it. Wittgenstein (who wrote a number of letters rather like this) may have been right in thinking that only by way of such openness was a friendship with him possible and sometimes (as perhaps in the present case) he managed to judge rightly what his correspondent could take. Generally, however, as he himself saw in theory, such adjustments in a friendship require meetings and not letters, and even then belong to the realm of what can be shown rather than said. The letters, carefully retained, with what mixed feelings we can only guess, are themselves one token of a contradiction in Wittgenstein's attitudes: another is given by their whole subject-matter, which suggests not only a demand for affection greater than his capacity to receive it but a full awareness of this tension. 7.Letter in the possession of Wittgenstein's literary heirs. 61 3Engineering Studies This is an impression obtained chiefly from the later remarks and reactions of Wittgenstein, and, as he himself indicates_he was often to comment on it_there had been a change in him. Partly the change was simply a matter of growing older and becoming surer of his own powers and clearer about his own needs. In his first years as a student he clearly accepted the companionship and concern of Frau Jolles and the affection and ambitions for him of her husband. Later he found he had to pursue his own path and the professor saw a promising pupil shake off his guidance and immerse himself in a succession of disparate inquiries and experiments, each of which generated new questions before any result was reached. The process culminated, after a development accelerated if not distorted by the war, in Wittgenstein's becoming a schoolmaster. To one who did not know the success or the value or perhaps even the existence of the Tractatus, it would seem like a waste. Yet in fact one central idea of that work_the idea of the proposition as a picture_owes much to reflection on Professor Jolles's subjects, which were Descriptive Geometry (his study of methods of representing solids and other figures in three dimensions by drawings in one plane) and Graphical Statics (a method of reducing a system of forces graphically and showing the resultant force, couple or equilibrium). As for Frau Jolles, it is only a guess, though a probable one, that his move away from Berlin was a move away from the oppressiveness of her affection. He was still glad enough of it during the war, when a warm letter from her was a relief after a businesslike and impersonal note from Keynes in England.8 But after the war (it seems) he made a decisive break with her as with so many of his past attachments, fiercely trying to work out his own life. The move to England, then, seems to have been an early stage in his development into an independent scientific workerwho consulted the professors and discussed things with them rather than followed a regular syllabus leading to a general examination. In this respect, Manchester was an excellent choice for a place to study. There were few research students, no definite plan of work for them, and ready access to the professors: Horace Lamb,9 the Professor of Mathematics, instituted a seminar so that they could bring their problems to him. The professors and junior instructors were in many cases men who had achieved or were destined for great distinction. Lamb himself is best known as the author of a still classic work on hydrodynamics. This specialism led to his being one of the leading advisers on the construction of aeroplanes during the First War. He had been a pupil of Clerk Maxwell whose views he developed in general lectures on Statics and Dynamics. He argued vigorously for the theoretical development of statics on the basis of Newton's laws: there was no need for further experimental data to be 8.Code diary 5 and 28.10.14. 9.See Obituary Notices of Fellows of the Royal Society (ONFRS) 4 (1935). 62 Wittgenstein: A Life brought in. A summary of theoretical statics by him can be read in the eleventh edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. J.E. Littlewood, whom Wittgenstein was to know again in Cambridge as a Fellow of Trinity and later as Professor of Mathematics there, was lecturing under Lamb from 1908 to 1910 and Wittgenstein attended at least some of his lectures, well-known for their elegance of presentation, on the Theory of Mathematical Analysis. (Over the years Wittgenstein acquired something like a second-year undergraduate's knowledge of Pure Mathematics. He used to examine later the proofs in Hardy's Pure Mathematics, but his interest was, in early years, in the foundations or lack of foundations of the proofs, and later in their significance.) Littlewood10 in the late 1960s thought that Wittgenstein came to Manchester to learn what was behind engineering and that for this purpose he intended to sit at the feet of Rutherford. The general motive is probably correctly ascribed, and it was indeed the case that a year before Rutherford had arrived at Manchester. Curiously enough in the very year that Wittgenstein came to Manchester there was a large loan of radium made to the University from the Austrian Academy of the Sciences to enable Rutherford to carry further his work on radioactivity. There may well have been some direct or indirect link_his father's patronage, perhaps_between this loan and Wittgenstein's coming, but we know nothing of any contact between him and Rutherford or of any interest of his in Rutherford's work. (It was in these years that Rutherford established the structure of the atom.) Naturally we may assume that the atmosphere of "getting on with the job' that Rutherford always created round him contributed to Wittgenstein's ideas about how serious work on science was done, but the affinities of his own thinking and his search for the foundations (if the term may here be used) of engineering were much more with the work of Lamb already mentioned. To some extent Wittgenstein when he arrived was under the protection of Rutherford's predecessor, Arthur Schuster,11 who had retired in order to devote himself to the organization of science but was still an honorary professor in the University. Schuster, a younger son of a rich family of converted Jews (still flourishing), had discovered in fairly early life that he had more devotion to science than to the family business. So far from being opposed in this, he brought a good deal of his family money with him to finance scientific projects and posts in the university, including meteorological work on the upper atmosphere at the Howard Estate Observatory, where Wittgenstein first went. Schuster, a pioneer in the development of meteorology as a university subject, had arranged for kites or balloons (according to the weather conditions) to be sent up with recording instruments, essentially in order 10.Personal communication. 11.See ONFRS 4 (1935). 63 3Engineering Studies to measure the temperature at various heights and to relate these measurements to other conditions in the upper air. These measurements would then be compared with results at other stations, and were in fact published daily in the Daily Telegraph and in midland newspapers. The lecturer in meteorology from 1908 (and thus the person in charge of the experimental station) was a distingushed physicist, J.E. Petavel.12 Among his other gifts he was particularly ingenious at designing and adapting machinery for experiments and it was for this reason that he was called in to improve the winch used for the instrument-carrying kites and hence became interested in the whole project. Petavel, already a Fellow of the Royal Society and later Director of the National Physical Laboratory, could have served as the prototype of many British scientists in war fiction. He was in fact the son of a Swiss divine and educated partly in Switzerland and Germany. From his English mother he inherited a respectable fortune. He was chiefly distinguished by a remarkable versatility: he had done important work on explosions, devising the Petavel gauge, long used for ordnance purposes; he had worked on low-temperature phenomena, the expansion of gases, gas engines, reactions at high pressures. Now, after a visit to the kite and balloon station at Glossop, he made a free balloon ascent and became interested in aeronautics. He was appointed to the original Advisory Committee set up by the government in 1909 and was soon a leading authority on all aspects of the subject. He first learnt to fly himself and put in what was then the average number of hours in a flier's life. The last flight of this programme resulted in a severe accident, but the sequel to it was not only that he escaped from hospital while still crippled but that when the war came he was once again up with de Haviland testing the stability of a new plane. The indifference to danger was characteristic of him and appeared at Glossop too when he calmly went on using the winching gear of a kite during a thunderstorm and stopped only thirty seconds before it was destroyed by lightning. He had other traditional eccentricities and, as Professor of Engineering, would provide considerable amusement by driving round Manchester in a one-cylinder motor which was liable to stop every hundred yards. Yet he was, of course, not a figure of fiction but a figure of his times, when a scientist could and must turn his hand to every aspect of a problem that concerned him, when he expected to design and make his own equipment and would often be involved (as Petavel was) both in devising new instruments and in theoretical work, and when many branches of science now specialisms with their own accumulation of data and techniques were in their infancy and could be advanced by a resourceful use of general principles. It was a natural consequence of this atmosphere_though perhaps it was particularly marked at Manchester 12.See ONFRS 5 (1936). 64 Wittgenstein: A Life _that the division into departments did not dictate the studies or limit the collaboration of the scientists working there. Schuster had been Professor of Physics and Applied Mathematics; he handed over the latter subject to Lamb when he arrived: Petavel was Lecturer first in Physics, then in Meteorology, until he became Professor of Engineering. The seminars or laboratories or workshops of one department would be made available to researchers from another and members of Rutherford's team would_as a holiday or a hobby_go out to Glossop and try some meteorological experiment with the kites. The especial degree of freedom and mobility at Manchester was owed partly to the small size of the departments and indeed of the university, partly to the marked scientific ability of those working there. The sheer size and competence and method of Charlottenburg might be missing, but Manchester had its own tradition of self-taught and independent scientific genius_to this day a visitor can expect to be reminded of Dalton and Joule. These men of 1908 were also_here too in contrast perhaps with Charlotten- burg, certainly with our own age_easily accessible, ideal teachers or helpers for the young Wittgenstein with his succession of interests and problems. He was to have similar good fortune in Cambridge. Even his perfect manners (when not in the heat of argument) would not have won him so ready or so informal a hearing in Germany. Wittgenstein came to the Research Station at Glossop in the summer of 1908 apparently shortly after leaving Charlottenburg. For obvious reasons the station was more fully manned during the summer months and much more frequent ascents were made. The arrangement seems to have been that he could use the machinery for tests with his own kite, and, in partial return for this, he would assist with constructing, sending up and recovering the instrument-bearing kites, which were in practic- ally continuous operation during the summer. The station was three miles from Glossop, near a then isolated inn, The Grouse Inn, situated among moors chiefly used for game, over which the scientists were allowed to stumble to recover their kites and wire. Roads were few and rarely used. The observers, as they were called, would stay at the inn and shared a sitting room. In a letter to his sister Hermine dated 29 May 190813 (perhaps the earliest of his letters preserved) he tells how he and the meteorological observer, Mr Rimmer, are living there alone with the landlord and his wife. The food and the lavatory arrangements are rather rustic (la$3ndlich) and this is hard to get used to (this complaint, as a whole, at any rate as regards the food, is very unlike the later Wittgenstein). His own job is to provide the kites, which were previously ordered from outside. So far he has only observed but now he is capable of making a kite. He needs a friend and is looking for one among the students who visit the station on Sunday. He is sleeping well and (a 13.Seen when in the possession of Dr Thomas Stonborough. 65 3Engineering Studies characteristic ending) if only his own self didn't rankle with him all the time, he ought to feel really well there for the time being (und wenn nicht mein eigenes Ich immer an mir nagte, so mu$3sste ich mich vorla$3ufig hier wirklich wohl fu$3hlen). The friend seems to have arrived when William Eccles came to do a spell as observer14 and, finding Wittgenstein's books and papers littering the table, tidied them up and placed the books in neat piles. Something about the simplicity of this action attracted Wittgenstein as well as amused him and the two men became friends even beyond the needs of living together in the small inn for some weeks. Eccles was a qualified engineer, four years older than Wittgenstein, ostensibly doing research, assisting indeed with the meteorological programme, but principally waiting for a suitable post. One turned up in August of 1909 with Westinghouse, and he spent the rest of his working life with that firm, the first few years in Manchester. Wittgenstein told Eccles that they got on so well together because Eccles had a soothing effect on him. J. Bamber (then of the Engineering Department) confirms this, in so far as he says that Eccles and Bradley, the other friend that Wittgenstein made on the moors, were the exact opposite of Wittgenstein in temperament.15 Eccles had certainly an exceptionally open and cheerful and friendly disposition. Far from stupid he was yet simple, in the sense that he did not complicate his life by allowing the thought of how others would view his actions to enter into his motivation. And he took things as they were, not as they might be represented to be: for him Wittgenstein was not a comic foreigner, he did not strain to hear the foreign accent;16 and if Wittgenstein was given to being lost in thought and would dislike being interrupted, that was a fact about him to which one could easily enough adjust. They talked a lot about technical problems, though more those of the work they were jointly engaged on than any arising out of Wittgenstein's work: Eccles did not think that Wittgenstein knew any subject thoroughly_it would have been surpris- ing at nineteen if he had_but he admired Wittgenstein's ingenuity: he used to quote the example of a door that had to be difficult for strangers to open, though not locked_Wittgenstein hit on the idea of a handle that had to be lifted instead of depressed. In this respect Eccles thought he himself appealed to Wittgenstein and in a measure resembled him 14.Eccles gave an account of his friendship with Wittgenstein to Dr W. Mays of Manchester for an article in Mind (reprinted in K. Fann: Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Man and his Philosophy, 1967, pp. 79{-88). Wittgenstein's letters to Eccles, with a few notes by the latter, were published in Hermathema ~X~C~V~I~I (1963); see also L.W.: Briefe, 1980. Subsequently Eccles gave a number of interviews, including one to the present writer. 15.Letter to the author. 16.Witnesses differ about exactly how good Wittgenstein's spoken English was. No doubt it varied with date and circumstances. Occasionally, it is clear, a German idiom would betray him, but the accent is generally agreed to have been good. Those with whom he was most relaxed tend to say he had no foreign accent whatsoever. 66 Wittgenstein: A Life because of his desire to get to the bottom of things, by his ability to analyse and find out what the problem really was. Wittgenstein told Eccles that he was the only friend he had_it was the sort of avowal he used to make; and in fact both men were rather lonely at the time. How deep the friendship was it is hard to judge but it does illustrate a feature of himself that Wittgenstein explained to his friend Postl (who became a family servant)_"I am a collector of good human beings,' he said (Ich bin ein Sammler von guten Menschen). He liked especially the naturalness and directness which, for himself, was a quality to be striven for. They talked, of course, of personal things. Wittgenstein told Eccles of his mother and his sister Hermine (an important figure in his life at that time), of a brother who had committed suicide because he was so brilliant he could do anything (presumably Hans): but on the whole, and especially when it concerned the future or plans, they spoke of Eccles's life_where he should go to work, how he should furnish his house, are the topics of the two pre-war letters that Eccles printed. The younger man was taking the leading role_but, it is important to note, without giving offence: the relationship suited both of them. Eccles's accounts also illustrate another feature which recurs in Wittgenstein's friendships: they depended on or originated in long periods spent together. The work at the station was arduous and continuous. Sometimes there would be eight or ten ascents a day until as late as nine or ten at night. The kites would be sent up as high as 5,000 feet_naturally this demanded a train of kites. Sometimes the kites would escape or come down and then a correspondingly long distance would have to be traversed on foot to recover them. There were the dangers, too, of storms, which Eccles and Wittgenstein were exposed to as well as Petavel. So passed the first period of their friendship in the summer of 1908. It was continued, however, during the succeeding year when both men were in Manchester. Wittgenstein would go often with Eccles to the house of his aunt Mrs Moore, the wife of a doctor in the poor district of Manchester, still remembered in the television series Coronation Street. The comparatively humble, simple and useful life of these people appealed to Wittgenstein. He liked innocent friendships and minor attentions. Small but carefully chosen presents were characteristic of him, and Eccles retained all his life a particular rather attractive biscuit-box, the remains of a present that had been given by Wittgenstein to Mrs Moore. They would go for little expeditions together (not walking, for that was too much part of their job on the moors). One incident often related is that of the proposed visit to Blackpool, when Wittgenstein, in default of regular trains, wanted to hire a special. Eccles dissuaded him and they went to Merseyside and indulged in the alternative luxury (in those days 67 3Engineering Studies it must have cost a penny) of a trip on the ferry. Further afield they visited Eccles's family home in the north of Ireland. Some things they did not share. Eccles had the impression, surely false and partly contradicted by his own story of the inn, that Wittgenstein was not much of a reader. Eccles had not much of an ear for music, though he went occasionally to the Halle$0 concerts with Wittgenstein and heard him whistle through what he took to be whole symphonies. Like all observers he was impressed by the intensity and concentration with which Wittgenstein listened to music. Their relationship was probably all the less stormy because of the differences in their character and and outlook: it did not occur to either of them to expect the other to have the same tastes and reactions as himself. In one respect they perhaps shared more than Eccles was aware of. He thought of himself as having no taste for art at all as opposed to Wittgenstein, the connoisseur. Yet the two discussed the furnishing of Eccles's new house and were at one (Wittgenstein as usual was the critic and the guide) in excluding ornament. Thus he wrote to Eccles in July 1914: I can't see any drawing of a bed, or do you wish to take the one which the furniture manufacturers submitted? If so do insist that they cut off all those measly fancy ends. And why should the bed stand on rollers? You're not going to travel about with it in your house!? By all means have the other things made after your design. At the same time he approved the absolutely straightforward and unadorned drawings that Eccles made for a wardrobe and medicine chest and so on. He only wanted (it was more unconventional then) to have the horizontal crosspiece on the doors in the middle, so that the top and bottom panels should be of the same height. As for the decoration of the room later_at least it was Eccles's recollection that this belonged to a later period_Wittgenstein prevailed upon the Eccleses to plan a room with a self-coloured royal blue carpet, black woodwork, and yellow walls. Echoes of the Wiener Werksta$3tte. Wittgenstein admired Eccles's form of intelligence as well as his character: indeed the two were part of the same phenomenon_an open, inquiring turn of mind. He said that Eccles was a man who could make use of any amount of experience, because his experience was alive in him. Straightforwardness, no nonsense, balance, the capacity for happiness and for an essentially masculine comradeship_these were qualities that belonged to one sort of friend that Wittgenstein made_Raymond Priestley is a later example. Eccles had something in his nature that would preserve him through vicissitude and make him always valuable to those capable of appreciating him: this seems certainly to have been the case and also to have been the sense of Wittgenstein's inscription on a 68 3Engineering Studies photograph of himself given to Eccles_words whose precise meaning Eccles never troubled himself about: Much are we given by time, much also robbed of, but may you, Winning the best as your friends, ever rejoice in their love.17 Wittgenstein knew his friend: it is striking that he knew at once (although a hundred accidents might have accounted for it) that Eccles's failure to reply to a rather too hearty wartime letter was in fact caused by scruples at corresponding with an enemy_the sort of consideration that would not weigh for a moment with Wittgenstein and his sophisticated Cambridge friends. It was on the moors in the summer of 1908 that Eccles and Wittgenstein met: in the following academic year Wittgenstein was registered as a research student working five days a week in the Engineering Department. Eccles and Mays explain this as follows: His experimental work with kites did not last long as he soon realized that until some form of engine was available it was not much use developing an aeroplane. By a stroke of good fortune the plans still exist of his experimental engine. It is not known how he arrived at the idea of having a reaction jet at the tip of each blade of a propeller, but he soon realized that the discharge nozzle was all-important and accordingly transferred his interests from the moors at Glossop to the laboratory of the Engineering Department where he had a variable volume combustion chamber constructed by Messrs. Cook nearby and had it arranged for a variety of fuel spray and gas discharge nozzles. The whole assembly was workmanlike and practical for its purpose and the jet of hot gas from the discharge nozzle on top was arranged to impinge on a deflector plate where its reaction could be measured. This apparatus was operated successfully, but before much experimental work was done with it, Wittgenstein got interested in the design of the propeller and as this lent itself to a complete mathematical treatment his interests in mathematics developed and eventually in turn the propeller got forgotten. It is interesting to note that Wittgenstein's idea of a combustion chamber together with a tangential reaction nozzle at the tip of a propeller blade was brought into practical use for the rotor blade of a 17. Vieles giebt uns die Zeit, und sie nimmt's auch, aber der Besseren 17.frohe Neigung sei auch Dir froher Besitz. A slight misquotation, from memory, obviously, of a distich (that actually translated) which Goethe addressed to his son: Vieles gibt uns die Zeit und nimmt's auch; aber der Bessern Holde Neigung, sie sei ewig Dir froher Genuss. Wittgenstein's version speaks of joyful friendships joyfully possessed. 69 3Engineering Studies helicopter by the Austrian designer Doblhoff during the second world war and is now adopted by Fairey's for their Jet Gyrodyne as well as by others. The account is rather schematic and it must be remembered that Eccles did not know everything that Wittgenstein was doing. He seems to have kept up some interest in the kites even after starting to work in the laboratory, for he is listed as the "Voluntary Observer' at the station in the university prospectus of 1909{-10; and we know, as will be seen shortly, that he was thinking about the foundations of mathematics before April 1909. Probably his progress was not so linear as Eccles supposed. After all it must be supposed that he knew before going to Manchester that a flying-machine would need an engine, and at the end of his Manchester time, when he went to Cambridge, he still represented himself as a would-be aeronaut or aviator. As long as he worked in aeronautics at all his aim seems to have been to design, build and fly a machine himself. The ambition itself was intelligible at the time. When Wittgenstein started on the project, the Wright brothers had not yet made the powered flights, hundreds of times longer than any previous ones, to which they owe their fame. But it had long been clear_ Boltzmann represents the view in a lecture of 1894_that theoretically the most promising line of development in aeronautics was not the dirigible airship but the aeroplane propelled by airscrews. Boltzmann spoke when Maxim had already flown such a machine, but there were then found to be enormous difficulties in the steering. To overcome these, to discover a method, was, so Boltzmann thought, a task for a genius who should at the same time be a hero. In 1908 nearly every aspect of powered flight was still in the stage of trial and error. Eccles observed this with dismay about the experiments on the moors, but it was entirely characteristic of the aeronautics of the time. Every form of wing was tried out_often with fatal results: it was only in succeeding years tht wind-tunnels were used and a conventional wing-shape and design of machine was evolved. The engine too was a crucial factor: it must not be forgotten that until the time that Wittgenstein was actually working on the question, no flying machine had yet been fitted with a sufficiently light but powerful engine to permit sustained flight. True the petrol engine had been developed and nothing as big as Maxim's steam-engine was necessary. The Wrights fitted a modified motor engine. The French developed the rotary aero-engine in the immediately succeeding years. Wittgenstein's project may have been over-sophisticated: it would have been rather foolhardy to fit a flying machine with so experimental an engine, since even with conventional petrol engines one of the main problems for aviation was that of reliability; but for all that it was an attempt to deal with a pressing problem of the time, no more fanciful_though one might say more imaginative_than many that were 70 Wittgenstein: A Life then put forward. Some engines were tested on an unused railway line in the Manchester area,18 which suggests a fair degree of development. We do not know, however, that Wittgenstein himself actually flew: he certainly meant to, and Russell, when he came to know him, occasional- ly referred to him as an aviator or aeronaut. It is entirely possible that he did: we should not necessarily have heard of it, for he was very selective in what he told his friends_he did not set out to give an account of his life, but would tell an anecdote a$1 propos of something from time to time. And, naturally, not all even of these have been recorded. These various projects in Manchester were work not for weeks but for years, and he did in fact spend three years there and planned to spend at least a fourth. He seemed an odd fish, Littlewood says. Bamber and Mason, then of the Engineering Department, both describe him as charming but as of nervous or excitable temperament. This indeed was his oddity to an English eye_the extreme formality and charming manners in everyday matters coupled with an intensity, a concentration, and an extreme dislike of being interrupted or thwarted in things that mattered to him. "He was doing work' (Bamber says) "on the combustion of gases and his nervous temperament made him the last person to tackle such research, for when things went wrong, which often occurred, he would throw his arms about, stamp around and swear volubly in German.' He used to ignore the midday break and carry on till evening. In the autumn of 1909 Mason helped him to install some heavy apparatus which he had removed from the Physics Department to the new research laboratory in the Engineering Department. It was a matter of a heavy-duty compressor used in research into high-pressure gases. "A charming, enthusiastic man, not then very well accustomed to the handling and assembling of engineering machinery,' says Mason. The qualification is important: Wittgenstein was a learner; by the time of the First War he made an excellent director of work in an artillery workshop. Wittgenstein himself took his "nervous temperament' more seriously, it was an aspect of the self that rankled with him, and in another letter to his sister Hermine (dated from Glossop, 20 October 1908) he speaks first of his work_how Lamb, the professor, "doesn't know whether his equations are soluble by present methods'_and then goes on to the sort of personal problem typical of him. "My evil spirits induce in me the most tiresome moods you can imagine.' After talking to Lamb he went into the drawing room and saw the assistant, "a very dangerous person' for him, and began to scold him about the way the drawing had been done. He got more and more excited_he was upset that the assistant was so 18.L. Goodstein's account of Ludwig Wittgenstein's reminiscences in A. Ambrose and M. Lazerowitz's The Philosophy of Wittgenstein. 71 3Engineering Studies indifferent_when fortunately the assistant was called away and Wittgenstein came to himself. It was a common pattern before the First War and later in his time as a teacher: some people were a danger to him because he was hypersensitive to them, he would react too violently and betray himself. He wanted to be natural and spontaneous and yet in these cases his automatic reaction was a disproportionate one which he could only dislike but could not correct. It added to the unpleasantness that he disliked the violence of his own reaction without condoning the real fault_the laziness, the Schlamperei, or the meanness that had evoked it. Manchester University records show that Wittgenstein's registration as a research student in the Engineering Laboratory was renewed for 1909{-1910, when, as we have seen, he was also the Voluntary Observer for the Kite Station. In 1910 and again in 1911 he was elected to a research studentship by the Senate. The second year of this studentship he did not take up. It was a small honour and an indication that he was then at any rate accepted as a serious student. Financially it meant little to him. He seems to have financed his own experiments with kites and combustion chambers, and to have had a shed built on the moor; and in general he lived not ostentatiously but the life of a rich man. Eccles estimated that he had an income of #5,000 a year, an enormous sum for those days. The episode of the proposed special train naturally stuck in Eccles's mind. Bamber mentions lodgings at Fallowfield, where Wittgenstein's only pastime was to relax in a bath of very hot water (there was more of his innocent boasting_this time about how hot the water was). His address in 1911 is known to have been 104 Palatine Rd (now 154); Palatine Rd was on the borders of Withington and West Didsbury_Fallowfield adjoins and is perhaps a venial error of Bamber's. It is of some interest that the district was one of comfortable large houses, with a fair sprinkling of successful Jews and Armenians. 104 in particular was not a house that usually took in lodgers and there is an impression in Vienna that a friend of the family was found for him to stay with. At all events it was a comfortable life and Wittgenstein showed perhaps a severe taste but no austerity in his ways, apart from supporting the comparative rigours of the moor as well as the next man. He dressed carefully and apparently expensively. He took full advantage of the lively musical life of Manchester and every informant mentions visits to the Halle$0 concerts for more serious composers_Wagner, Beethoven, Brahms_and the concentration with which he would listen and the enthusiasm with which he would then talk about music. Three years in Manchester: it was to be twenty years before Wittgenstein again spent so long in a single place. It is to be supposed that there_or between there and Charlottenburg_he learnt a lot; but these were not years in which he imposed himself or in which his powers broke through. Charming, erratic in temper, able, eccentric_he might 72 Wittgenstein: A Life have been no more than that. He had yet to break out of the chrysalis. Partly he lacked there the sort of stimulus that Russell was to give him. Partly (a connected point) he was still casting about for a vocation. None of the projects he was involved in were carried more than half-way: some of them were doomed to failure because they were too ambitious. It seems that he was carrying out his father's wish that one of his sons at any rate should turn into something useful and that his heart was not in it, with the the result that, while he was enthusiastic enough about individual projects, he had no determination to carry the whole thing through to a finish.