The Strangest Man Page 3

  The school did not teach science but did give classes in freehand drawing and also technical drawing, a subject that provided Dirac with one of the foundations for his unique way of thinking about science. His mother later drew attention to his ‘most beautiful hands’, suggesting that his long and bony fingers equipped him well to be an artist.39 Technical drawing, used by engineers to render three-dimensional objects on a flat piece of paper, is now taught at very few English junior schools, and rarely at senior level. Yet, in the early twentieth century, it was a compulsory subject for half the pupils: for a few lessons each week, the class would split into two: the girls studied needlework, while the boys were taught technical drawing. In these classes, Dirac learned to make idealised visualisations of various manufactured products by showing them from three orthogonal points of view, making no allowance for the distortions of perspective.40

  Britain was among the slowest of the wealthier European countries to introduce technical drawing into its schools and did so only in the wake of the Great Exhibition in 1851. Although the Exhibition was a great popular success, the most perceptive of its 6.2 million visitors saw evidence that mass technical education in Britain would have to improve substantially if the country were to retain its economic hegemony against growing competition from the USA and Germany. The Government agreed, enabling the Great Exhibition’s prime mover Sir Henry ‘King’ Cole to change the technical curriculum of English schools so that boys were taught technical drawing and given an appreciation of the beauty of manufactured objects as well as natural forms.41 There was, however, a backlash to this practical notion of beauty in the form of the Aesthetic Movement, which flourished in England from the mid-1850s. The movement’s leader in France was the flamboyant poet and critic Théophile Gautier, a weight-lifting habitué of the Louvre’s Greek galleries.42 His phrase ‘Art for art’s sake’ became the motto of the English aesthetes, including Oscar Wilde, who shared Gautier’s belief that formal, aesthetic beauty is the sole purpose of a work of art. This view would later be distantly echoed in Dirac’s philosophy of science.

  Sir Henry Cole’s reforms endured: the guidelines set out by him and his associates were being used in Bishop Road School when Dirac began his formal schooling. In 1909, the educationist F. H. Hayward summarised the prevailing philosophy that underlies the contemporary teaching of art: ‘drawing aims at truth of conception and expression, love of beauty, facility in invention, and training in dexterity […] nature study and science lessons cannot proceed far without it.’43 Hayward urged that students should practise their drawing skills by trying to represent accurately both natural and manufactured objects, including flowers, insects, tables, garden sheds and penknives. In autumn 1912, Dirac was asked to draw a penknife, and he did it competently enough – like all his other drawings, it includes not a line of embellishment.44

  The school took pains to teach its pupils how to write legibly, according to textbook rules that Dirac and his brother apparently studied closely.45 They developed a similar style of handwriting – consistent with the rules set out in the books they studied – neat, easy to read and virtually devoid of flourishes, except for the unusual forming of D, with a characteristic curl at the top left. Dirac did not change this calligraphy one iota for the rest of his life.

  In the early summer of 1911, school inspectors noted that ‘the boys who are particularly bright and responsive are being carefully trained in habits of self-reliance and industry.’ Nearly three years later, when Dirac was in his final year at the school, the inspectors visited Bishop Road again and wrote warmly of this ‘progressive’ school and the practical education it offered: ‘a keen, vigorous and thoughtful head [teacher]. Staff [are] earnest, painstaking […] Drawing is well taught and handwork is resourceful, the boys make a number of useful models and are allowed considerable freedom in their choice while the work is so taken as to train them in habits of self reliance, observation and careful calculation and measurement.’46

  Bishop Road School wanted to give its pupils the skills they needed to get good jobs. But, for Dirac, the most important consequence of this practical approach was that it helped to shape his thinking about how the universe works. As he was sitting at his desk in his tiny Bristol classroom, producing an image of a simple wooden object, he had to think geometrically about the relationships between the points and lines that lie in a flat plane. In his mathematics classes, he also learnt about this type of Euclidean geometry, named after the ancient Greek mathematician who reputedly discovered it. So, Dirac studied geometry using both visual images and abstract mathematical symbols. Within a decade, he would transfer this geometric approach from concrete technological applications to the abstractions of theoretical physics – from an idealised, visual representation of a wooden fountain-pen stand to an idealised, mathematical description of the atom.

  Later in life, Dirac would say that he never had a childhood. He knew nothing of the rites of passage of most other young boys – long weekend afternoons spent stealing eggs from birds’ nests, scrumping from nearby orchards, dashing out in front of trams. In many ways, as a child he seems to have behaved much as Newton had done. ‘A sober, silent, thinking lad […] never was known scarce to play with the boys abroad’ was how one of Newton’s friends described him: the description applies equally well to Dirac as an infant.47

  Dirac was not interested in sport, with the exception of ice-skating, which he learned with Betty and Felix at the nearby Coliseum rink, the talk of Bristol when it opened in 1910.48 Decades later, his mother recalled that he would sit quietly, reading books that he had placed neatly around him and learning long poems that he would recite to his family.49 She shed some light on his sheltered childhood when she spoke to reporters in 1933: ‘[his father’s] motto has always been to work, work, work, and if the boy had showed any other tendencies, then they would have been stifled. But that was not necessary. The boy was not interested in anything else.’50 There is little doubt that Charles Dirac impressed his sedulous work ethic on his younger son, who later wrote admiringly of his father’s conscientiousness:

  One day while cycling [to school, my father fell off his bike], trying to avoid a child who ran out in front of him, and broke his arm. He was very conscientious, so he continued to the school and continued with his teaching, in spite of the broken arm. Eventually, the head master found out about it and sent him home, and told him not to come back until he was better.51

  Paul was also aware that his father was exceptionally careful with money. In April 1913, Charles took the biggest financial decision of his life by purchasing a more expensive and more spacious home. The family moved from the cramped terrace of Monk Road to a neat semi-detached residence a few minutes’ walk away in a slightly more salubrious part of Bristol, at 6 Julius Road. The Diracs now had a home befitting Charles’s status in the community, with separate rooms for their two boys so that Dirac now had a place to escape, a private place where he could work alone. The family still kept themselves to themselves, inviting no visitors into their home, apart from Flo’s family, her guests – all female – at a monthly afternoon tea party and the steady stream of pupils who took private language lessons from her husband.52

  Like many parents, Charles entered all his children for scholarship exams.53 When Felix was nine years old, he failed one of these exams, leading his father to demand an explanation from his teachers; Betty also failed the exam a few years later. Paul had no such problems: he passed every scholarship exam with flying colours and, thus, unlike Felix and Betty, ensured he was educated at minimal expense to his parents.

  Dirac could see new technology making its imprint on Bristol. The city centre was a patchwork of centuries-old buildings and brand-new ones, many of them emblazoned with advertisements for new services and products.54 Open-topped motor cars vied for space on the roads with horse-drawn carriages, bone-shaking bicycles and the trams that made their jerky way round the city. When a programme of road construction began, in the early ye
ars of the century, cars began to dominate the city. In late 1910, Dirac had witnessed the beginnings of the Bristol aviation industry, one of the first and largest in Britain. The leading figure in this new Bristol industry was the local entrepreneur Sir George White, who founded the British and Colonial Aeroplane Company and supervised the building of some of the earliest aircraft in a tram shed in Filton, a few miles north of the Diracs’ home. Long afterwards, Dirac told his children that he would rush out into the back garden to see aeroplanes precariously taking off from the new airfield less than a mile away.55 It seems that he wanted to find out more about this new technology: among the papers he kept from his youth were details of a programme at a local technical college, beginning in December 1917: ‘Ten Educational Lectures on Aeronautics’.56

  Dirac and his brother stood out among the boys in Bishopston as they both spoke good French even before they started school. According to one report, local boys would stop the Dirac brothers on the streets and ask them to speak a few sentences of French.57 This knowledge of French was also obvious to the students at their next school, where the language was taught by the school’s most feared disciplinarian – their father.

  Notes - Chapter one

  1 Letter from André Mercier to Dirac and his wife, 27 August 1963, Dirac Papers 2/5/10 (FSU).

  2 Interview with Dirac, AHQP, 1 April 1962, p. 5.

  3 Dirac Papers 1/1/5 (FSU), see also the records of the Merchant Venturers’ School in BRISTRO.

  4 See, for example Jones (2000: Chapter 5).

  5 Pratten (1991: 8–14).

  6 Although Flo lived in Cornwall only briefly, she would later insist that she was not English but Cornish. Source: interview with Christine Teszler, 22 January 2004.

  7 Flo Dirac mentions this in an undated letter to Manci Dirac, written in early February 1940 (DDOCS). By 1889, when Richard Holten was fifty, he was captain of the 547-ton Augusta.

  8 Richard Holten was aware that official documents often name his wife as the head of the family. His sailing record is in ‘They Sailed Out of the “Mouth”’ by Ken and Megan Edwards, microfiche 2001, BRISTRO, FCI/CL/2/3. See also Holten’s Master’s certificates, stored in the archives at the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London, UK.

  9 The details of Charles and Flo’s early life together are in Charles’s documents in Dirac Papers 1/1/8 (FSU).

  10 Louis Dirac was the illegitimate son of the recently widowed Annette Vieux, who gave him her maiden name Giroud. Only later, when the baby’s parents settled down together, did he take the surname of his father, Dirac; otherwise, his physicist grandson would have been called not Paul Dirac but Paul Giroud. Source: civil records in St Maurice, Switzerland. Louis Dirac’s paeans to the beauty of the Alpine countryside are still in print, though rarely read. His poetry is published in Bioley (1903).

  11 Dalitz and Peierls (1986: 140).

  12 The pine cones are against a blue background; the leopard and clover are against a silver background (http://www.dirac.ch/diracwappen.html). After the first member of the Dirac family obtained citizenship in the town of Saint Maurice, Swiss law accorded the same rights of citizenship to succeeding generations.

  13 This letter was written from Flo to Charles on 27 August 1897. This and the other extant letters from their correspondence are in Dirac Papers 1/1/8 (FSU). I am taking the arrival of e-mail for the UK public to be c. 1995.

  14 Felix’s full name was Reginald Charles Félix. His mother always anglicised his name, so I shall use that version of it here.

  15 The Diracs’ address was 15 Monk Road, Bishopston, Bristol. The house still stands. The date of the Diracs’ move are in UKNATARCHI HO/144/1509/374920.

  16 The details of Dirac’s birth are given in a letter from Flo to Paul and Manci, 18 December 1939, Dirac Papers, 1/5/1 (FSU). The description of Dirac as ‘rather small’ and the colour of his eyes is given in the poem ‘Paul’, Dirac Papers, 1/2/12 (FSU). Charles gave his children names used in his mother’s family, the Pottiers. The origins of his children’s names are as follows: Reginald Charles Felix was named after himself and after his grandfather Felix Jean Adrien Pottier; Paul Adrien Maurice’s second name was that of Charles’s maternal grandfather Pottier, and Maurice is probably in memory of his native town, Saint Maurice; Beatrice Isabelle Marguerite Walla’s last name came from Charles’s mother Julie Antoinette Walla Pottier, and she was probably named after Flo’s sister Beatrice.

  17 Letter to Dirac from his mother, 18 December 1939, Dirac Papers, 1/4/9 (FSU).

  18 Sunday Dispatch, 19 November 1933 (p. 17).

  19 On 16 May 1856, the Bristol Times and Mirror called the area ‘the people’s park’ soon after the council had taken the popular step in the early 1860s of acquiring it from its owners, who included the Merchant Venturers’ Society.

  20 Mehra and Rechenberg (1982: 7n). The authors point out that Dirac checked the information they included about his early life.

  21 Dirac Papers, 1/1/12 (FSU).

  22 Dirac Papers, 1/1/9 (FSU).

  23In the Dirac family archive, there is a copy of one of these postcards, marked by Charles Dirac on the back with the date 3 September 1907, presumably the date on which the photograph was taken (DDOCS).

  24The friends were Esther and Myer Salaman, see Salaman and Salaman (1986: 69). The Salamans comment that Dirac read their account of his memories and verified them. For the earlier interview with AHQP on 4 April 1962, see p. 6.

  25Interview with Dirac, AHQP, 4 April 1962; Salaman and Salaman (1986).

  26 Dirac told his daughter Mary that his parents always denied him a glass of water at the dinner table: interview with Mary Dirac, 21 February 2003.

  27 Letter from Dirac to Manci Balázs, 7 March 1936 (DDOCS).

  28 Letter from Dirac to Manci Balázs, 9 April 1935 (DDOCS).

  29 The school-starting age of five was introduced in the 1870 Education Act. Dirac’s mother was in the first generation to benefit from compulsory education in England. Woodhead (1989: 5).

  30 Detail about the late serving of breakfast from Manci Dirac to Gisela Dirac in August 1988 in caslano, Ticino. Interview with Mary Dirac, 21 February 2003.

  31 Details of the Bishop Road School in this period are available in the Head Teacher’s report, in the BRISTRO archive: ‘Bishop Road School Log Book’ (21131/SC/BIR/L/2/1).

  32 The source of these comments is family photos of the Dirac brothers and data on the boys’ heights obtained when they were at school (see Felix’s records in Dirac Papers, 1/6/1, FSU). In November 1914, Felix’s height was five feet four inches, and his weight was one hundred and ten pounds, whereas Paul’s height was four feet ten inches and his weight was sixty-six and a half pounds. Two years earlier, when Felix had the same age as Paul in late 1914, he was about the same height as his brother but was some twenty pounds heavier.

  33 Felix’s school reports (1908–12) are in Dirac Papers, 1/6/1 (FSU).

  34 The description of Dirac as ‘a cheerful little schoolboy’ is given in his mother’s poem ‘Paul’ in Dirac Papers, 1/2/12 (FSU).

  35 See ‘Report cards’ in Dirac Papers, 1/10/2 (FSU).

  36 Quoted in Wells (1982: 344). As an adult, Dirac did not add a letter L to the ends of words that end in the letter A, but he did have the characteristic practice among Bristolians of warmly accentuating the letter R; for example, in his pronunciation of ‘universe’.

  37 Dirac’s school reports are in Dirac Papers, 1/10/2 (FSU).

  38 Interview with Mary Dirac, 21 February 2003.

  39 Interview with Flo Dirac, Svenska Dagbladet, 10 December 1933.

  40 The technique, applied to engineering, became popular in Renaissance Florence. The architect ‘Pipo’ Brunelleschi used such drawings to help his clients visualise the buildings and artefacts and to give his assistants a set of instructions so that they could do their work in his absence.

  41 In 1853, the first report of Sir Henry Cole’s Department of Practical Art urged teachers to give the students exer
cises that ‘contain some of the choicest elements of beauty, such as elegance of line, proportion and symmetry’ (minutes of the Committee of the Council of Education [1852–3], HMSO, pp. 24–6). Aesthetic recommendations like this continued unabated in reports and guides to teaching for decades. In 1905, the Government’s Board of Education stressed to junior schoolteachers that ‘the scholar should be taught to perceive and appreciate beauty of form and colour. The feeling for beauty should be cherished, and treated as a serious school matter.’ See Board of Education (1905).

  42 Gaunt (1945: Chapters 1 and 2). The Aesthetic Movement was not the first flowering of the importance of beauty in British cultural life. For example, in the eighteenth century, it was important for people of taste to refer to the concept of beauty to demonstrate that they were cultured and intellectually distinguished. See Jones (1998). In 1835, Gautier defined the essence of aestheticism in the preface to one of his novels: ‘Nothing is beautiful unless it is useless; everything useful is ugly, for it expresses a need and the needs of a man are ignoble and disgusting, like his poor and weak nature. The most useful place in the house is the lavatory.’ Quoted in Lambourne (1996: 10).

  43 Hayward (1909: 226–7).

  44 Examples of Dirac’s early technical drawings are in Dirac Papers, 1/10/2 (FSU). In one drawing, he gives an idealised image of a small building, showing two of its four vertical sides, this time taking full account of the perspective. Dirac underlines his understanding of perspective by showing that parallel lines on each side all meet at a single point in the far distance.

  45 The Government’s Board of Education had recommended: ‘No angular system of handwriting

  should be taught and all systems which sacrifice legibility and a reasonable

  degree of speed to supposed beauty should be eschewed,’ Board of Education (1905: 69).