The letters “i” and “f” appeared in the clear blue sky over Fort Wayne, Indiana, during the fall of 1921, inscribed there by Art Smith, The Bird Boy of Fort Wayne, using his patented device to generate the fog for skywriting. Smith often commented that he wished he could find a way to produce the messages he wrote in the sky instantaneously instead of the slow sequences produced, one after the other, as his machine, flying a kind of aerial ballet, moved from point A to point B through time and space. While Art Smith was able to solve many physical problems presented by the invention of flight, he was unable to overcome the linear constraints seemingly built into the act of writing in this manner. In this case the “i” appeared first in the sky followed then by the “f” creating, with every pitch change and sputter of the engine’s report, a kind of suspense suspended above the literate observers down below. And then…
In the summer of 1921, Art Smith, The Bird Boy of Fort Wayne, read for the first time the writings of the mathematician Daniel Bernoulli as he convalesced after his crash into a cornfield near Lima, Ohio. He had been flying and crashing now for more than a dozen years, doing so, as it appeared to him, with only the instinct of the avian species and the tinkerer’s knack for having a go, never fully realizing the physical laws of nature that he and other pioneers of flying were employing in, what seemed to be, the miracle of heavier than air powered flight as well as their death-defying stunts and maneuvers. Only a week before writing “lift” above, Art Smith was moved to inscribe the equation
over Lake Wawasee near Syracuse, Indiana, its waters congested by the Labor Day boating populace mystified by the formula floating overhead.
“The duration of space in space” was how Art Smith, The Bird Boy of Fort Wayne, described it, the punctuation of the fading letters accentuating the empty empty distance between those letters that remained temporarily suspended in the cold cold stratosphere. After completing another composition, Art Smith would often cut the power to his noisy engine, and he and his aircraft would descend, gliding earthward on the wings of a welcome silence. A silence composed of the static frequency of the wind flowing over all the surfaces of his body as he waded into the altitudes of denser air and the solid grasp of invisible gravity.
