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optical effect at a particular frequency determined by the distance between said lines and the speed of said shifting, photoelectric means responsive to said variations in optical effect to produce electrical signals at said particular frequency of occurrence corresponding to said variations, circuit means responsive to said signals, and tuned to said frequency to produce a control signal at a predetermined amplitude of said signal frequency.” Also known as “The Dollar Bill Changing Machine.” Filed April 26, 1957.

      IV.

      The Building

       Bethel, Connecticut, 1970

      ON THE WAY HOME FROM THE TEACHER’S COTTAGE THAT day you stopped at the Building, the converted barn structure that was your father’s laboratory. During WWII it had been a black market farm and bookie joint. Nesting boxes for chickens, industrial incubators, and piles of dusty old-fashioned telephones had filled its abandoned rooms. The man your father hired to renovate it, an Italo-Frenchman named Serge, did a shitty job. Within months the new floors rotted. Gaping holes appeared where chair legs and people’s shoes broke through it. The roof leaked. Snakes, rodents, birds, and other forms of wildlife built nests between the wall joists. You could see daylight through the cracks in the stucco. Your father had trouble insuring the place, it was in such bad shape.

      This was where your father conceived, designed, and built his inventions, his Color Coders, his Thickness Gauges, his Rotary Motors and Mercury Switches, his Shoe Sole and Blue Jean Machine. He didn’t mind the leaky roof, the rotten floors, the spider webs. He liked sharing his workspace with all kinds of creatures, the lowlier the better.

      One day, the president of a big manufacturing firm drove up from New York in his Cadillac to talk with your father about an idea for an invention. At the time a five-foot black snake was living in the vestibule, so your father made the executive and his three-piece suit climb through a side window. Later that day, the businessman watched in horror as your doting Saint Francis of a father fed the snake a whole loaf of Wonder Bread.

      Your father worked from dawn till dusk. He’d rise in the morning gloom, shave in the downstairs bathroom (the one with plum-colored fixtures), make and eat his breakfast of two soft-boiled eggs with toast and tea, then walk down the hill to the Building, where he’d work until eight-thirty, when the post office opened. If the weather was good he’d pedal his rusty Raleigh there and back, then work on until noon, when he’d walk back up to the house for a lunch of leftovers or canned soup.

      Occasionally, feeling the urge for humanity, he’d walk into town and sit on a stool at the Doughboy diner, joining truck drivers and factory workers there. But despite his protests (Don’t spend your life among machines, Peter, my boy. Annoying though they can be, you’re better off with people. At least with people you can kick them and get a response.), he preferred his solitude and his inventions.

      If he had other errands to run your father would typically run them in the afternoon, setting off by car to Danbury or Newtown to see the tool and die man, the sheet metal worker, the welding expert, the anodization man. Sometimes you’d go with him and watch, with uneasy fascination, him interacting with these grimy artisans in their loud, cavernous, dingy lairs. The other men were taller than your papa, who stood five foot seven, their faces tough and leathery, eyes bloodshot, skin dark with grunge. Compared to them your father looked timid and slight, as out of place amid the clamor and grime of their work places as a rose in a coalscuttle.

      Your father always smiled when he worked, his face a mask of blissful concentration. Walking up the driveway to the house, you’d see him through the window as you passed by, at his workbench or typing away at his typewriter, grinning from ear to ear. Other times, when a solder joint wouldn’t take or when he stripped the thread of an obstinate screw, his oaths would resound off the Building’s crumbling walls. His flamboyant curses and Promethean farts were legendary among the neighborhood kids, whom he would hire occasionally to sort screws and other salvageable parts from obsolete inventions, and who did so as much to hear them as to earn twenty-five cents per hour.

      YOUR PAPA WAS a genius. He spoke six languages fluently and had a PhD from Harvard, so you’d been given to believe. He belonged to a society of geniuses called Mensa. Occasionally the society held gatherings. Once he took you and George to one, a picnic in Westchester. During it an argument broke out between two geniuses. They were debating whether or not a can of baked beans placed unopened on the barbeque grill would explode. As your brother, your father, and you looked on, the two geniuses advanced their competing theories, supported by principles of molecular structure, gas and fluid dynamics, and particle physics. Their colorful debate might have continued forever had it not been interrupted by a considerable explosion. The two geniuses along with a dozen bystanders spent the next half-hour picking hot beans out of their hair and clothes.

      Idiots, said your father under his breath.

      He held over fifty patents, mostly for machines that measured and analyzed things. Among them was one for a machine that could distinguish a real dollar bill from a counterfeit one, making it possible to get change for coin-operated vending machines. Called the Nomoscope, it should have made your papa a very wealthy man, but for reasons obscure to you having something to do with a shady patent attorney, your father (as he was wont to joke at dinner parties) never got a nickel from it.

      The patents were illustrated with drawings like this one:

       ^{4. 4.}

      Should this drawing not speak for itself, the following explication attends the patent application: “Referring now to FIG. 3, the control circuit includes transducers 31 and 41 connected in opposition by resistors 43 and 44 and supplied with current from a source of direct current power 35 which may be a battery. The transducer ends of resistors 43 and 44 are connected respectively to the control electrode, in series with resistor 43A, and cathode of a vacuum tube triode 46. It is obvious that one or more transistors may be used in place of the triode. The control electrode of triode 46 is coupled to a saw-tooth generator 49 by means of series capacitor 39. The saw-tooth wave modulates whatever signal is received from the transducers 31, 41, and even when no signal is received from the transducers, the anode-cathode current is modulated in accordance with a saw-tooth wave. The anode of triode 46 is connected in series with a relay winding 47 and a direct current source of potential 48. The relay winding operates two armatures 50 and 51, each of which in turn operates two pairs of contacts. Armature 50 is connected to one terminal 52 of motor 15 while the other terminal 53 is connected through another pair of contacts 54 to a ground or common conductor 55. Conductor 55 is also connected to the terminals of two sources of potential 57 and 57. The contacts on armature 50 are arranged so that, when the relay winding 47 does not pass current, the motor 15 is connected through one pair of contacts 50 to battery 57. If the relay is actuated, contacts 58 are broken and a second pair of contacts 60 is closed, thereby sending current from the second source of electric power 50 to motor 15 to cause it to turn in the opposite direction. In this manner the direction of the motor is controlled to turn so that portion 22 may be lowered, or when the contacts are operated to turn in the reverse direction, to raise portion 22 and move it away from the object being measured.”

      YOU LOVED TO visit your father in the Building. You couldn’t wait to jump off the bus after school and run down the long dirt driveway, under the drooping branches of the weeping willow trees lining it. You would enter through the main door and – provided no snakes were living there – cross the vestibule and knock softly on the inner door. To your father’s Is that you, Peter, my boy? Come in, come in! you would enter, forgetting to shut the inner door behind you.

      Close the door, your father would say, and you’d close it.

      The Building had five rooms, including the empty vestibule that was home to occasional serpents, the bathroom (with a toilet that didn’t work), the study where your papa kept his shelves of books and a trundle bed that he’d sleep in sometimes after especially bad fights with your mother.

      Then there was the main room, where he did his inventing. It held the drill press, a table-mounted sander, a grinding wheel,

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