The Fool on the Hill

Every day the 'Fool on the Hill' shuffled down from his ramshackle old house pushing a shopping trolley and wandered the streets picking up stuff. We all knew that it was stuff because whenever he was asked what he was collecting he would mumble "Stuff". Most of the time he collected aluminum soft drink cans.

That wasn't his only eccentricity, as he shuffled about picking up stuff he would mumble to himself and to his friend. Sometimes he and his friend would argue and there were occasions when he would shout at his friend to leave him alone. The problem with that was that his friend existed only in his mind.

He was always dressed in a threadbare suit and collar and tie and he wore a black bowler hat that had a pink plastic rose stuck in the hat band. His clothes, while old and worn, were always clean and his shoes had a spit and polish shine to them.

One day a police car stopped beside him and he was asked where he had gotten the trolley from, to which he replied in his usual mumbling voice, "I found it and told the supermarket that I had it and they should come and collect it, but they never did, so I figured that they didn't want it." The funny thing about the trolley, and you had to look closely at it, was that it didn't, like all trolleys, have a mind of its own and wander haphazardly about, it tracked straight. This could have been because the wheels were not normal trolley wheels but some that he had obviously found while collecting stuff.

We kids used to give him a hard time following him as he shuffled through the streets imitating as best we could his shuffling walk until one day my mother explained to me that this wasn't a nice thing to do and also explaining to us something of his story.

It seems that some fifteen years ago, I was eight at the time, Thomas Halifax Breckinridge the third, or was it fourth, was someone of importance in the town, a little eccentric granted but important. His family was well to do and he was well educated, he had an aeronautical engineering degree, and things were looking good for his future until two events shattered his life.

The first was the loss of both parents in the space of six months. His father who, to the disgust of his family who thought that he should follow family tradition and live a life of luxurious indolence, was a pilot in the Air Force and was on a training mission when his plane crashed killing all on board. This was followed a short time later by his mother succumbing to cancer. He withdrew into himself and it was not long after that his fiancée of three years left him, weeks before they were due to marry.

He became a recluse after that and withdrew to his house to emerge each day to continue in his search for stuff.

There was one change to this schedule. One day each month he would leave his trolley at home and walk to the railway station where he would catch the first train of the day to the city, at least that's where we thought that he was going, to return on the last train of the day. No-one knew exactly where he was going and what he was doing there although there were many rumours, some very fanciful, usually involving certain establishments inhabited by a certain type of young lady that catered for sad and lonely men. It was noticed by those that noticed these things that the day after these trips a truck would drive up to his house and several crates would be unloaded and carried into a large barn behind the main house.

This went on for years and was still happening when I returned home to see my parents during my third year at university. I had news that I was sure that my parents would be interested in and that concerned the 'Fool on the Hill'.

One day during a lecture it just happened to be mentioned that one of the truly great aeronautical engineers that the university had ever seen was our 'Fool on the Hill', the lecturer didn't actually call him that but by his proper name and that he'd dropped out of sight and no-one knew where he was. It seemed that he had been working on a radical new construction method for light weight airframes when he lost the plot. The lecturer commented that it was a crying shame that this had happened and wondered out loud that no-one seemed to know or was interested in his whereabouts. I kept my silence figuring to myself that he might not be interested in his old life.

The more that I learned about this man the more that I was determined that something should be done for him, it was a pity that a man of such talent and who had a brilliant life ahead of him should have come to this sad and solitary life.

The next morning I followed him as he shuffled up the hill with his load of stuff. I followed him through what remained of the once magnificent stone gate and down the overgrown gravel drive. I waited for several minutes after I saw him wheel his trolley to the barn before I knocked on the door. "Hello, is anybody home?"

"Go away!" Strangely the voice didn't have the same mumble that I was used to.

"Sorry to bother you but could I just have a quick word with you, I want to discuss a problem I have."

"It's your problem, you fix it. Leave me alone."

"Look, I'm studying aeronautical engineering at university and I know, I've been told, that you are something of an expert in the area that I'm interested in. I won't take up much of your time." I figured that flattery might just get him interested.

"And what makes you think that I'm interested in your problem?"

At least he didn't tell me to go away this time. "My lecturer has told me that he can't or won't help me, he reckons that it's because he doesn't know the answer, and he did tell me that the only person he knew that just might have an answer would be you."

"What fool have you been talking to?"

"Professor Hartley, Jeremy Hartley."

"I'm not surprised that he can't help you, but that doesn't mean that I can, or even want to."

Again he hadn't asked me to leave. My hopes buoyed I pressed on. "Can I at least explain my problem to you? If you decide that you can't help me then I'll leave you in peace."

"Do you promise that if I can't help you'll leave me alone?"

"Yes."

"Then I can't help, leave me alone."

"That's not fair. I haven't even told you what my problem is."

"One day you'll learn that not everything in this world is fair."

"I know something of your problems and I really am sorry that you feel that the world has treated you badly, and if I was in your position I'd probably be just as pissed off with the world as you are. Please, just give me five minutes of your time, and if at the end of that time you decide not to help then I'll leave you alone."

I could hear someone coming towards me, but it wasn't the shuffling step that I'd been expecting and the man that stood before me wasn't anything like the man I was expecting. He stood erect, not the hunched figure that I'd seen minutes before. He was wearing a blue boiler suit and had a pair of welding goggles pushed back onto his head. The hair wasn't what I'd expected either. When he ventured forth on his daily shuffle his hair was hidden by the bowler hat which he was not wearing now and while there were a couple of grey streaks in the black wavy hair, it was clean and shiny. I'd somehow expected it to be untidy and greasy from lack of attention, but the opposite was the case, it was neatly combed and shined from recent shampooing. He was clean shaven and his eyes were a clear, one could say piercing, blue. I stood there with my mouth open.

"You've just wasted thirty seconds."

"Sorry, forgive me, I'm just surprised that's all. What my problem is that we've been asked to design a light fixed wing aircraft with the view to mass production so that more people can afford to take up flying. My problem is that I want to use a different type of material for the outer skin, something that is very light, very strong and easily worked, while being cheap. That leaves out carbon fibre because of its high cost and expensive production methods. I had thought of aluminium but again the cost of production is expensive and there could be a problem with fatigue after several years in service. What do you suggest?"

"Have you considered a composite material?"

"All of the composites that are available are either too expensive or are too difficult to work."

"Maybe you'll just have to invent a composite that is cheap and easy to work."

"But where do I start? Time is an important factor as well, I have to have this project well into the prototype phase in six months."

"Well you don't have a lot of time, do you?"

"That's why I came to see you. Professor Hartley told me that one area that you were very good at was lateral solutions to problems."

"Next time you see him you can tell him from me that if he ever thinks of sending someone to see me for help I'll personally come to his place of work and pull his scrotum up over his head." There was a smile on his face when he said this. This was one strange man. "Come in, let me show you something." He led the way into the barn that wasn't a barn at all. It was an aircraft hangar. The whole of the back wall was a massive sliding door which was open letting light into the interior. There in the middle of the hangar was an almost completed aircraft the like of which I had never seen.

When I looked closely at the fuselage I noticed printing showing through the layer of glass reinforced plastic that coated it. I could just make out the words "Coca Cola" This plane was made of drink cans. "How have you done that?"

"Come with me." He led me to a workbench and picked up a straightened out aluminium can, and clamped it on two blocks of wood. "Hit that." He handed me a ball peen hammer and I hit it and, as expected, it distorted badly and a crack appeared in the stretched metal. He then took a sheet of fibreglass and instructed me to do the same to it. The ball peen went through the material and the integrity of the sheet was compromised. He then gave me a sheet of the material that he had used on the fuselage of the plane. I whacked it as hard as I could and, while a small dent appeared in the centre of the sheet, its integrity remained intact.

"How?" I was speechless; I'd never seen anything like this, two materials that separately didn't hold up under the force of the impact but combined withstood it, and it wasn't just the extra thickness of the two materials because he gave me pieces of each that were the same thickness and the result was pretty much the same.

"When you bond aluminium with something like fibreglass, or Kevlar reinforced resin, or even carbon fibre, it can flex to a certain extent before its integrity is compromised and the aluminium is protected by the other material from distorting to the point where it too is compromised, so you see that the sum of the two is considerably greater than the strength of the same thickness of the individual materials."

"But how have you fixed the cans to the airframe, there are no rivets or welds?"

"That's the breakthrough that I've been working on for years. Let me show you." He led me to a work bench and picked up a small cross section of a wing. It had a foam core into which were cut grooves, fixed into these grooves was a single layer of aluminium, some of them contained conduits for controls, lighting and fuel lines, then the whole section was sheathed with his outer layer. "It is all to do with the method of bonding the aluminium to the foam and then the fibreglass to the aluminium so that they all become so tightly bonded together that they cannot be pulled apart." It was light weight but exceptionally strong. "I have load tested a whole wing and it can support much more than that required for certification."

He then showed me a cross section of the fuselage, it again had a foam core and the thing that I noticed was the shape. He saw my puzzled expression. "One of the strongest shapes in nature is the egg so the outer skin is egg shaped, slightly narrower at the top than the bottom, the inner shape is round, the curvature of the inner shape gives greater rigidity to the horizontal axis while the egg shape gives strength to the vertical axis. You'll also notice that the space under the floor is an ellipse, again for strength and rigidity. With this I have achieved immense strength and rigidity in a light weight structure."

To demonstrate this he took the cross section and placed it in a cradle that did little more than preventing it from rolling over. "Stand on top." I climbed the step ladder and stepped gingerly onto it. Even with my full weight on it the section had not distorted. "Don't be afraid, jump up and down." I did, at first a small jump and then, as my confidence grew bigger jumps, still with no effect on the section.

"That's amazing! I wish that I'd thought of this."

"Who's to say you didn't?"

"What do you mean?"

"What is to stop you from working with me to finish this project and then we can present it as your project for your assignment."

"No I couldn't, that's stealing your intellectual property and I wouldn't do that."

"Good, that's what I thought you'd say, so I have another suggestion."

"And that is?" I was interested and intrigued at the same time.

"How would you like to be my research assistant on this project, I can pay you, and when it's completed we can present it as a sort of joint effort."

"I'd love to work with you but I won't accept any of the glory for your work."

"But I insist that you get credit for your ideas, I will not, not like some that I know, take credit for the work of others." I sensed a note of sadness in this statement, as if he had personal experience of this situation. "What I want you to do is to bring up your project as far as you've got with it and I'll have a look at it and see if you have any ideas that can be incorporated in my designs."

I walked around his aircraft, it was a truly beautiful design, sleek and smooth, the windows seemed to be an integral part of the fuselage not something cut into it and where the high mounted wings were moulded into the fuselage there were no seams or anything to indicate that they were a separate entity.

The engine cowlings were on the floor beneath the wings and I could see that not only were they moulded to fit seamlessly into the wing structure but that they had sound deadening material on the inner surface. I was guess that there would be little if any noise inside the passenger compartment when it was flying.

"Are you hungry?" His voice interrupted my awe.

"I don't want to put you to any trouble."

"No trouble, come." He led the way to his house. I don't know what I really expected but it certainly wasn't this. The house was spotless, the kitchen wasn't the rustic wooden style that I expected to see in this centuries old house, the work surfaces were all stainless steel as were the appliances. In contrast the cupboard doors were stark and white. This did not come from IKEA. "Sit down." He indicated a chair so I sat and watched as he set about producing a meal to die for, thinly sliced ham off the bone on crusty bread cut from a loaf that had been cooling on a rack, sliced tomatoes picked from a bush in a pot on the window sill, and topped with a farmhouse cheese cut from a block that sat under a cover on the bench. He placed these under a griller until the cheese was melted and golden brown on top.

There was no flourish that you come to expect from TV chefs as he placed the plate in front of me. "Wine?" He asked

"Yes." He produced a bottle and pulled a soft plastic stopper from it. He poured us each a glass.

"Don't worry, I only opened this last night and the stopper is part of a system where I pump the air out of the bottle so that it doesn't go off too quickly, there won't be much difference between this and last night's."

I took a sip, if this was better last night it must have been brilliant because it was still very good. I took a mouthful of my grilled sandwich and sat there with my mouth shut as my taste buds went to work identifying the individual flavours. They weren't used to this experience having survived on a diet of hamburgers and other junk food. This man never ceased to surprise and amaze, he had effortlessly produced a simple, rustic even, meal that had so much flavour.

After lunch we went back to the barn where I helped him install and test the rudder controls. It was fiddly and exacting work and it was some time before he was satisfied. He allowed me to sit in the pilot's seat while he checked the system and I imagined what this would be like to fly, the visibility on all sides was brilliant because of the high wing configuration, I had a clear view of both engines and there were rear pointing video cameras on both side so that the pilot had a real time view of what was behind him. All the controls were placed within easy reach and instruments were located where they could be seen easily with the most important in direct line of sight. This was an extremely well thought out aircraft and I had the urge to ask if I could be the one to test fly it but suppressed that urge, at least for the time being.

It was getting dark when I left. "I'll bring my stuff up in the morning." I caught his quick glance at me when I called it 'stuff' and there was a smile on his face. "Do you want me to follow you up after you collect your cans or whatever?"

"I have no need for more cans or whatever so you may as well come straight up, don't wait for me."

"Fine, I'll see you in the morning."

"Where have you been all day?" My mother asked as I let myself in.

"Up the hill."

"Don't tell me you've been talking to that strange man up there?" She was concerned.

"Alright I won't."

"All day?" She obviously couldn't believe that I could have spent the whole day talking to the 'Fool on the Hill'.

I didn't sleep well, the thoughts that galloped back and forth through my brain kept me awake most of the night. Most of them concerned aeronautical engineering and what I had seen and was going to be working on tomorrow, and part of that was whether he would accept any on my ideas. But now and then my thoughts took a more personal turn, I was somehow attracted to this man on a personal level.

To say that I was confused would be something of an understatement. It wasn't all that long ago that he was an object of derision for my friends and I, this hunched, shuffling 'Fool on the Hill', but now I knew him to be a totally different person, a tall, straight backed man, not conventionally handsome but his looks could grow on you. He was obviously intelligent, definitely articulate, had good taste in food and wine and could even cook. His house was derelict on the outside but modern and functional on the inside, at least the parts of it that I have seen. It was as if he allowed his public persona to protect his private persona from public scrutiny. There was much more to this man than met the eye and I was determined to find the real Thomas Halifax Breckinridge the whatever.

So, armed with my portfolio of my work thus far I trudged up the hill. People I passed looked at me as if I was weird or something but I didn't care. I found Thomas, I can hardly call him the 'Fool on the Hill' any more can I, at work in the barn. He looked up as I let myself in and beckoned me over to his drafting table. I opened my portfolio and spread my work on the table. He turned on a bright light and looked closely at my work, commenting briefly on most of it until he came to my design for wing flaps. He looked at it for several minutes before moving the design to one side. Then he stopped at my design for winglets. He moved that to one side as well.

Several minutes later he had completed his scrutiny of my work and placed most of it back into the portfolio, all except the flap and winglet designs. "Tell me about these."