Frank A. Lonc. Photo found by Russ Pickett. A father-son pair of Forteans who thought they had discovered the universe’s secret unifying principle. An appropriate post for today, Pi day and Einstern’s birthday.
Frank S. Lonc was born 9 March 1884 in Berlin, Germany. He is difficult to find in official documents—probably because of his surname’s spelling, which is unusual and too-easily confused with Long. I do not know when he came to the United States, but it was likely after 1906. A later, brief biography by Thayer, based (presumably) on Lonc’s letters to him has Lonc still in Berlin then, beginning to study cosmology. According to Thayer, Lonc saw himself as in competition with Albert Einstein, who came to public attention in 1905 with four papers establishing the theory of relativity. He stands firmly in the tradition of outsider-science-as-folk-art outlined by Margaret Wertheim in her book “Physics on the Fringe.”
Lonc came to the U.S. sometime after that. It may have been 1908—there’s a man in the 1910 census, living in Baltimore, with Lonc’s name and who fits his description, except for being born in Bohemia rather than Berlin, who came over at that time. But it’s hard to say. At any rate, by September 1918, at which time he registered for World War I, Lonc was in Rochester, and married to a woman named Martha. (The man in Baltimore was married to someone named Anna—they may be different people, or Frank may have remarried in the interim.) He was working as an instrument maker at Bausch and Lomb. It would have been around this time that Martha gave birth to a son, Frank A. Lonc. The 1919 Rochester city directory has the two of them still there, though the name was “Lonce.” They were at 249 Michigan Avenue.
Frank S. Lonc was born 9 March 1884 in Berlin, Germany. He is difficult to find in official documents—probably because of his surname’s spelling, which is unusual and too-easily confused with Long. I do not know when he came to the United States, but it was likely after 1906. A later, brief biography by Thayer, based (presumably) on Lonc’s letters to him has Lonc still in Berlin then, beginning to study cosmology. According to Thayer, Lonc saw himself as in competition with Albert Einstein, who came to public attention in 1905 with four papers establishing the theory of relativity. He stands firmly in the tradition of outsider-science-as-folk-art outlined by Margaret Wertheim in her book “Physics on the Fringe.”
Lonc came to the U.S. sometime after that. It may have been 1908—there’s a man in the 1910 census, living in Baltimore, with Lonc’s name and who fits his description, except for being born in Bohemia rather than Berlin, who came over at that time. But it’s hard to say. At any rate, by September 1918, at which time he registered for World War I, Lonc was in Rochester, and married to a woman named Martha. (The man in Baltimore was married to someone named Anna—they may be different people, or Frank may have remarried in the interim.) He was working as an instrument maker at Bausch and Lomb. It would have been around this time that Martha gave birth to a son, Frank A. Lonc. The 1919 Rochester city directory has the two of them still there, though the name was “Lonce.” They were at 249 Michigan Avenue.
At some point, it seems, the family broke up. Later city directories had separate entries for Margaret J. Lonc alone. She was an inspector of some type. Later still, there were separate entries for Margaret and Frank A. Lonc, though they lived at the same address: 249 Michigan. Frank A. Lonc was listed as working for the USA—apparently meaning the military. (At the time, he was in the war.) I am not sure where Frank S. Lonc lived during these years during these years, but likely he was in New York City.
According to Thayer, Lonc was quite the renaissance man. He wrote, “Long Sr., is an artist, lithographer, mathematician, engineer, optimist, physicist, philosopher, gourmet, philologist, inventor, figure-skater—and if he is not Leonardo da Vinci, neither is the year 1494.” This polymathy fits with a copyright in 1928 for a magazine called “Fralon Studio,” which was being put out at 65 Irving Place in New York City. During the next decade, he started putting out pamphlets advertising his discovery.
I have not had a chance to see any of these—there are some in the Martin Gardner papers at Stanford University—and so I only understand his ideas through he writings, of others, but I think I’ve gotten enough of a sense for my purposes. Long was attempting to contradict Einstein by establishing his own cosmological constant, one arrived at through simple mathematics—he didn’t like the claim that only a few people could understand the esotericities of Relativity. Einstein derived his in a paper published in 1917. As far as I know, Lonc first proposed his in print in 1935. As Thayer reads him, there was no derivation of the constant from priors. Instead, he seems to have assumed it was the number 1.618, which he called phi. Those familiar with art and occult histories will recognize tis as the Golden Ratio, a number that recurs throughout mathematics and art over the course of history.
Lonc’s first publication applied this constant to the relative distance of the planets. (Though, as Patrick Moore and Bob Forrest note, he was forced to special pleading to explain the absence of some planets and the distance of others.) In 1939, he applied it to the elements and their cosmic weights, seemingly creating his own periodic table. Another pamphlet took on relativity, called “Relativity, 1.618.”
I don’t have an address for Lonc at this time, but his draft card places him at 225 East 54th Street, in Brooklyn. This was an apartment building, and an interesting one, too. The astrologer—and Fortean—Myra Kinglsey lived here in 1936. (She wrote to the psychic Edgar Cayce from this address.) Louise Zemlinsky, widow of composer Alexander, moved her win 1945; she was a voice teacher. The artist Junius Allen lived here in 1960, at least, and possibly before. It was, in short, an artists’ colony, and Lonc had artistic pretensions. His World War II draft card listed him as a freelance lithographer (though noted he belonged to the lithographer’s union).
If their had been rancor over the family splitting, the anger seems to have subsided by 1940, at least between pater and fils. In June of that year, while he was still in Rochester, Frank A. Lonc revised the Relativity pamphlet as “Key to the Cosmos: An Introduction.” Also in 1940 the elder Lonc published a pamphlet showing how pi could be derived from the cosmic key (pi equals the key squared, times 6, all of that divided by five.) In the same or another pamphlet he applied the cosmic constant to the bands of the spectrum, as he had to the planets before.
Two years later, his mathematics became more abstruse, and he reconciled the constant with the logarithmms related to the circumference and arcs of circles. Sometime during this period, he also measured 60 (or 65) women, comparing their height to the height of their navels, and showing that the proportion was often 1.618—which fit wit the theorizing of others who had been interested in the Golden Ratio. Long explained away those who did not meet that ratio as suffering from hip problems: their bodies did not work because they did not follow the standard.
On 18 July 1944, Second Lieutenant Frank A. Lonc was shot down and killed in action, either over Italy or Germany. His next of kin was given as Magdalene J. Lonc, of Rochester, which must have been the full name of his mother. She was still at 249 Michigan Street. The younger Frank was buried in Lorraine, France. His father had a monument built to him in Berlin in the shape of a triangle with a base 1.618 times longer than the height.
Lonc seems to have spent some time in Berlin thereafter, or at least maintained strong connections. In the ate 1940s and early 1950s, a series of copyrights were taken out in New York and Berlin by him, some under the name Fralon, for songs: “I think, I Need a Change Wherever I Go” (1947, Lonc and Marjorie Walker [his wife?]); “Hildegarde’s Swing-Waltz” (1947, Lonc and R. Küssel); “Blue Moon Ice-Polka” (Fralon, 1953); “Lamento” (Fralon, 1953); Sometimes I’m Very Lonely” (Fralon, 1953). By 1953, he could be found at the same New York City apartment. That was the time when he finally became a naturalized citizen.
Martin Gardner wrote about Lonc at least once in his mathematical puzzles column for Scientific American, having apparently been turned on to him by reading Doubt. He got the names a bit confused, though, referring to only a single Lonc, Frank A. His article was collected in “The Second Scientific American Book of Mathematical Puzzles & Diversions.” published in 1961.
By this time, both Loncs had passed on. The elder Lonc, Frank S. Lonc, died in late 1956 or early 1957.
**********
I do not think that either of the Loncs were very interested in Fort at all. Rather, it seems that they saw the Fortean Society as a way to promote their views. And while Thayer was happy to do so, he was also happy to poke fun at them. It is impossible from this vantage to say how they happened across the Fortean Society. There were a lot of ways, certainly, but it is hard to escape—even while being impossible to prove—the speculation that the elder Lonc heard about the Society from someone in his apartment building, perhaps even Myra Kingsley.
Whatever the case, Lonc pere approached the Society in the early to mid-1940s, and Thayer trumpeted their cause in The Fortean Society Magazine 10, 1944. This was the issue before the magazine switched its name to Doubt. Thayer wrote, under the title “The Loncs Have the Key”:
“While all the world else was seeking—overturning Newtown, kicking Einstein down the backstairs, stumbling after Planck and a thousand more—seeking that universal yardstick, the Cosmic Constant, Frank S. Lonc knew what it was the whole time, and he had passed the word along to his son, Frank A. Lonc.
“Lonc Sr., is an artist, lithographer, mathematician, engineer, optimist, physicist, philosopher, gourmet, philologist, inventor, figure-skater—and if he is not Leonardo da Vinci, neither is the year 1494.
“Lonc Jr., according to his father, is an amateur astronomer, and he intends to set up an observatory of his own in Rochester, N.Y., when his present occupation terminates. At the time of writing he is in Italy.
“The elder Lonc’s cosmical studies began about 1905 or 1906 when he was a young man in Berlin, but the discovery of the Cosmic Constant did not come until the all the hullabaloo about Einstein made Lonc good and sore. In the first place, Lonc resented fiercely the allegation that there was anything he couldn’t understand, and he set out to show the world not only that the idol Einstein was a figure of straw but also that Physics itself was little if anything more than a secret society which perpetuated its prestige by mumbo-jumbo and rigamarole.
“To accomplish his purpose, Lonc determined to _find_ the Cosmic Constant, to express it in simple arithmetic which all could understand, and by that means deprive ‘Relativity’ of its horrendous mystery. Just HOW this was accomplished is still the elder Lonc’s secret, although he may have told his son, and he promises to prepare a paper for the Fortean Society at a later date explaining own detail.”
Thayer went on to explain that the cosmic constant was 1.618, to show its relationship with Pi and to list the various pamphlets that the Society now sold. But he himself was clearly not sold on the Loncs’s ideas. There was the bit about them not showing their work; he also admitted to not being able to follow the logic of their pamphlet on circles; and he said he had no idea what their writing on pi meant at all. At the end of the list of pamphlets, he also offered for sale coffee—a suggestion that working through the Lonc’s ideas wasn’t going to be easy.
The Loncs appeared in Doubt nine more times over the next thirteen or so years. Most of those were Thayer mentioning them, but in a few cases the elder Lonc sent clippings. His contributions don’t make the case that he was interested in Forteanism, but rather than he was trying to support his own ideas. One wonders about the context of these clippings: were they sent in by themselves, or were they packaged with arguments and then separated by Thayer for his own uses. The two clippings showed up in Doubts from the early 1950s. The first (Doubt 30, October 1950) was tagged to a column involving several stories. Thayer began with the tale of a woman committed to an insane asylum for claiming that some scientific apparatus could read and interpret human brain waves; Thayer connected this story with reports of unusual hums in England and Denmark, and then added mention of an experiment that showed certain vibrations could drive mice insane. “Hello, Brother Mouse!,” he concluded. “How are you feeling—so far?”
There’s reason to believe that Lonc’s contribution had to do with concerns over brain waves—and that reason is his next contribution did deal with brain waves. Life magazine and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution both showed graphs of Einstein’s brain waves while he thought about relativity—and comparison graphs of so-called normal people thinking of nothing. Thayer noted that to his eyes the graphs looked about the same. No doubt, Lonc would have agreed with this assessment. However, if it is true that his earlier contribution was about the woman claiming brain waves could be interpreted—minds read—it is not clear what his point would have been.
Other mentions dealt with the death of the two Lonc men. Doubt 26, from October 1949, mentioned that Frank A. had been killed in action and that his father had erected the monument in his honor. Doubt 53, from February 1957, mentioned that the elder Lonc had passed some time recently; it was only a brief note, though.
The remainder of the mentions constitute the meat of the Fortean Society’s dealings with the Lonc’s beyond the triumphal note of their arrival. It’s clear that the Loncs both fascinated and confounded. Indeed, Thayer had much the same reaction to the Loncs as did the seminal skeptic (and mathematical guru) Martin Gardener, impressed by their diligence and love for the abstruse practice of mathematics, bemused by their claims: Gardner because he could see that the Loncs’s constant was arbitrary, Thayer because he refused to believe in any unifying concept, and both because the Loncs seemed incapable to recognizing the special pleading in which the indulged to explain away contrary data.
Thayer came back to the Loncs the very issue after he introduced them, reporting on their attempts to apply the constant to the spacing of electrons in an atom. He noted that (the elder) Lonc had to work hard to explain why there weren’t bands at certain places where there should have been—according to their theory—and why other bands appeared in places they shouldn’t. Thayer went on to note that the elder Lonc was now studying snails—presumably the spiraling of their shells—to see if the could find the constant their; meanwhile, Forteans trapped in wartime service were applying the constant to pin-ups. Nonetheless, the Society continued to sell the pamphlets: the entire collection could be had for 75 cents.
The cryptic comment about the Golden Ratio and pin-ups came clear elsewhere in that issue. The Fortean Donn Brazier had written in from the Marianas, where he was was stationed. He seems to have studied Lonc’s various publications in great detail, and took time to poke fun at the supercilious attitude they embodied—enhanced, it seems, by a correspondence between Brazier and Lonc. Brazier pointed out that Lonc’s constant was, indeed, just the Golden Ratio, and that an American named Jay Hambridge had been promoting its importance for a number of years. (Indeed, interest in the ration dates back to Pythagoras, as both Brazier and Hambridge acknowledged.) But Lonc seemed to dismiss that history and was more fascinated by what has come to be known as the Fibonacci series of numbers—1,2,3,5,8,13 (each number the sum of the two before it). Brazier also noted that scientists have spent a lot of time and money—in true Fortean fashion he suggested they actually wasted the money—weighing atomic elements, and though their numbers are not the same, they are close, and actually involve something more than mere arithmetic:
“”But none of this phases Mr. Lonc. Cadmium may weigh 112.048 in the scales of Mr. Smith and 111.947 in the balances of Morse, Jones, Larimer, Handin and another Smith, nevertheless, the true weight is 125.6656, arrived at with no scales _and no cadmium_.”
Brazier also measured the woman’s figure from Lonc’s pamphlet that had been reproduced in Thayer’s magazine, and found the ratio to be 1.556. “Then I measured some pin-ups scattered around the camp” and found values ranging from 1.35 to 1.72. These measurements were “not made under rigid laboratory conditions,” he admitted, “and so, of course, did not cause its inventor undue consternation. In fact, nothing whatsoever can disturb the author’s faith in his works.”
And yet . . . and yet. Something about the Loncs’s ideas got to Thayer. He was drawn, despite himself, to such abstruse theorizing. He had his own idea, that the earth was growing, first as a sphere, then as a cube, then a sphere again. He continually came back to the idea of squaring the circle, which seems somehow related. And he could not quit the Loncs. When he developed the idea for a Fortean University, he wanted one department devoted to “Lonc.” It was the Fortean University equivalent of relativity, he said, and comprised the search for 1.618 in nature, math, and art. He named the department after Lonc even though there were others who were also absorbed by the idea of phi and the Golden Ratio. (Probably influenced by Brazier, Thayer noted Hambridge’s books and magazine, “The Diagonal”; Gardner also cited Hambridge.) In 1949, Lonc created a slide rule, with a leather carrying case, that was “standard in every way” except that “to all standard features has been added the Lonc Cosmic Constant.” It was made in Germany—more evidence that Lonc was living there then—and the Society advertised and sold it, at the non-trivial $7.50 a-pop (Doubt 25).
And in 1954, when Thayer was feeling testy toward the Society’s membership, it was to Lonc that he turned. Thayer was upset that so few Forteans were putting Fortean ideas into practice. Yes, there was science fiction, but that hardly constituted the limits of the Fortean arts. There were so many other opportunities. He demanded, “Let us have Fortean music, folk-song or symphony. We tried to induce MFS Lonc to apply his ‘cosmic constant’ of 1.618 to a new musical scale but he never got around to it. Suppose you tuned your piano on that basis, using the numerical value of vibrations for the necessary arithmetic. What would Old Black Joe sound like on an instrument so tuned? What new compositions could be written specially for it?”
I wonder if Lonc didn’t ever actually do this? After all, he seems to have published a number of songs, though their scores are held only at the German National Library. Did they follow conventional musical arrangement? Or did he do something a bit more Fortean, reinventing the mathematical relationship between notes? Is there a Fortean music, buried away? Forgotten? Damned?
According to Thayer, Lonc was quite the renaissance man. He wrote, “Long Sr., is an artist, lithographer, mathematician, engineer, optimist, physicist, philosopher, gourmet, philologist, inventor, figure-skater—and if he is not Leonardo da Vinci, neither is the year 1494.” This polymathy fits with a copyright in 1928 for a magazine called “Fralon Studio,” which was being put out at 65 Irving Place in New York City. During the next decade, he started putting out pamphlets advertising his discovery.
I have not had a chance to see any of these—there are some in the Martin Gardner papers at Stanford University—and so I only understand his ideas through he writings, of others, but I think I’ve gotten enough of a sense for my purposes. Long was attempting to contradict Einstein by establishing his own cosmological constant, one arrived at through simple mathematics—he didn’t like the claim that only a few people could understand the esotericities of Relativity. Einstein derived his in a paper published in 1917. As far as I know, Lonc first proposed his in print in 1935. As Thayer reads him, there was no derivation of the constant from priors. Instead, he seems to have assumed it was the number 1.618, which he called phi. Those familiar with art and occult histories will recognize tis as the Golden Ratio, a number that recurs throughout mathematics and art over the course of history.
Lonc’s first publication applied this constant to the relative distance of the planets. (Though, as Patrick Moore and Bob Forrest note, he was forced to special pleading to explain the absence of some planets and the distance of others.) In 1939, he applied it to the elements and their cosmic weights, seemingly creating his own periodic table. Another pamphlet took on relativity, called “Relativity, 1.618.”
I don’t have an address for Lonc at this time, but his draft card places him at 225 East 54th Street, in Brooklyn. This was an apartment building, and an interesting one, too. The astrologer—and Fortean—Myra Kinglsey lived here in 1936. (She wrote to the psychic Edgar Cayce from this address.) Louise Zemlinsky, widow of composer Alexander, moved her win 1945; she was a voice teacher. The artist Junius Allen lived here in 1960, at least, and possibly before. It was, in short, an artists’ colony, and Lonc had artistic pretensions. His World War II draft card listed him as a freelance lithographer (though noted he belonged to the lithographer’s union).
If their had been rancor over the family splitting, the anger seems to have subsided by 1940, at least between pater and fils. In June of that year, while he was still in Rochester, Frank A. Lonc revised the Relativity pamphlet as “Key to the Cosmos: An Introduction.” Also in 1940 the elder Lonc published a pamphlet showing how pi could be derived from the cosmic key (pi equals the key squared, times 6, all of that divided by five.) In the same or another pamphlet he applied the cosmic constant to the bands of the spectrum, as he had to the planets before.
Two years later, his mathematics became more abstruse, and he reconciled the constant with the logarithmms related to the circumference and arcs of circles. Sometime during this period, he also measured 60 (or 65) women, comparing their height to the height of their navels, and showing that the proportion was often 1.618—which fit wit the theorizing of others who had been interested in the Golden Ratio. Long explained away those who did not meet that ratio as suffering from hip problems: their bodies did not work because they did not follow the standard.
On 18 July 1944, Second Lieutenant Frank A. Lonc was shot down and killed in action, either over Italy or Germany. His next of kin was given as Magdalene J. Lonc, of Rochester, which must have been the full name of his mother. She was still at 249 Michigan Street. The younger Frank was buried in Lorraine, France. His father had a monument built to him in Berlin in the shape of a triangle with a base 1.618 times longer than the height.
Lonc seems to have spent some time in Berlin thereafter, or at least maintained strong connections. In the ate 1940s and early 1950s, a series of copyrights were taken out in New York and Berlin by him, some under the name Fralon, for songs: “I think, I Need a Change Wherever I Go” (1947, Lonc and Marjorie Walker [his wife?]); “Hildegarde’s Swing-Waltz” (1947, Lonc and R. Küssel); “Blue Moon Ice-Polka” (Fralon, 1953); “Lamento” (Fralon, 1953); Sometimes I’m Very Lonely” (Fralon, 1953). By 1953, he could be found at the same New York City apartment. That was the time when he finally became a naturalized citizen.
Martin Gardner wrote about Lonc at least once in his mathematical puzzles column for Scientific American, having apparently been turned on to him by reading Doubt. He got the names a bit confused, though, referring to only a single Lonc, Frank A. His article was collected in “The Second Scientific American Book of Mathematical Puzzles & Diversions.” published in 1961.
By this time, both Loncs had passed on. The elder Lonc, Frank S. Lonc, died in late 1956 or early 1957.
**********
I do not think that either of the Loncs were very interested in Fort at all. Rather, it seems that they saw the Fortean Society as a way to promote their views. And while Thayer was happy to do so, he was also happy to poke fun at them. It is impossible from this vantage to say how they happened across the Fortean Society. There were a lot of ways, certainly, but it is hard to escape—even while being impossible to prove—the speculation that the elder Lonc heard about the Society from someone in his apartment building, perhaps even Myra Kingsley.
Whatever the case, Lonc pere approached the Society in the early to mid-1940s, and Thayer trumpeted their cause in The Fortean Society Magazine 10, 1944. This was the issue before the magazine switched its name to Doubt. Thayer wrote, under the title “The Loncs Have the Key”:
“While all the world else was seeking—overturning Newtown, kicking Einstein down the backstairs, stumbling after Planck and a thousand more—seeking that universal yardstick, the Cosmic Constant, Frank S. Lonc knew what it was the whole time, and he had passed the word along to his son, Frank A. Lonc.
“Lonc Sr., is an artist, lithographer, mathematician, engineer, optimist, physicist, philosopher, gourmet, philologist, inventor, figure-skater—and if he is not Leonardo da Vinci, neither is the year 1494.
“Lonc Jr., according to his father, is an amateur astronomer, and he intends to set up an observatory of his own in Rochester, N.Y., when his present occupation terminates. At the time of writing he is in Italy.
“The elder Lonc’s cosmical studies began about 1905 or 1906 when he was a young man in Berlin, but the discovery of the Cosmic Constant did not come until the all the hullabaloo about Einstein made Lonc good and sore. In the first place, Lonc resented fiercely the allegation that there was anything he couldn’t understand, and he set out to show the world not only that the idol Einstein was a figure of straw but also that Physics itself was little if anything more than a secret society which perpetuated its prestige by mumbo-jumbo and rigamarole.
“To accomplish his purpose, Lonc determined to _find_ the Cosmic Constant, to express it in simple arithmetic which all could understand, and by that means deprive ‘Relativity’ of its horrendous mystery. Just HOW this was accomplished is still the elder Lonc’s secret, although he may have told his son, and he promises to prepare a paper for the Fortean Society at a later date explaining own detail.”
Thayer went on to explain that the cosmic constant was 1.618, to show its relationship with Pi and to list the various pamphlets that the Society now sold. But he himself was clearly not sold on the Loncs’s ideas. There was the bit about them not showing their work; he also admitted to not being able to follow the logic of their pamphlet on circles; and he said he had no idea what their writing on pi meant at all. At the end of the list of pamphlets, he also offered for sale coffee—a suggestion that working through the Lonc’s ideas wasn’t going to be easy.
The Loncs appeared in Doubt nine more times over the next thirteen or so years. Most of those were Thayer mentioning them, but in a few cases the elder Lonc sent clippings. His contributions don’t make the case that he was interested in Forteanism, but rather than he was trying to support his own ideas. One wonders about the context of these clippings: were they sent in by themselves, or were they packaged with arguments and then separated by Thayer for his own uses. The two clippings showed up in Doubts from the early 1950s. The first (Doubt 30, October 1950) was tagged to a column involving several stories. Thayer began with the tale of a woman committed to an insane asylum for claiming that some scientific apparatus could read and interpret human brain waves; Thayer connected this story with reports of unusual hums in England and Denmark, and then added mention of an experiment that showed certain vibrations could drive mice insane. “Hello, Brother Mouse!,” he concluded. “How are you feeling—so far?”
There’s reason to believe that Lonc’s contribution had to do with concerns over brain waves—and that reason is his next contribution did deal with brain waves. Life magazine and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution both showed graphs of Einstein’s brain waves while he thought about relativity—and comparison graphs of so-called normal people thinking of nothing. Thayer noted that to his eyes the graphs looked about the same. No doubt, Lonc would have agreed with this assessment. However, if it is true that his earlier contribution was about the woman claiming brain waves could be interpreted—minds read—it is not clear what his point would have been.
Other mentions dealt with the death of the two Lonc men. Doubt 26, from October 1949, mentioned that Frank A. had been killed in action and that his father had erected the monument in his honor. Doubt 53, from February 1957, mentioned that the elder Lonc had passed some time recently; it was only a brief note, though.
The remainder of the mentions constitute the meat of the Fortean Society’s dealings with the Lonc’s beyond the triumphal note of their arrival. It’s clear that the Loncs both fascinated and confounded. Indeed, Thayer had much the same reaction to the Loncs as did the seminal skeptic (and mathematical guru) Martin Gardener, impressed by their diligence and love for the abstruse practice of mathematics, bemused by their claims: Gardner because he could see that the Loncs’s constant was arbitrary, Thayer because he refused to believe in any unifying concept, and both because the Loncs seemed incapable to recognizing the special pleading in which the indulged to explain away contrary data.
Thayer came back to the Loncs the very issue after he introduced them, reporting on their attempts to apply the constant to the spacing of electrons in an atom. He noted that (the elder) Lonc had to work hard to explain why there weren’t bands at certain places where there should have been—according to their theory—and why other bands appeared in places they shouldn’t. Thayer went on to note that the elder Lonc was now studying snails—presumably the spiraling of their shells—to see if the could find the constant their; meanwhile, Forteans trapped in wartime service were applying the constant to pin-ups. Nonetheless, the Society continued to sell the pamphlets: the entire collection could be had for 75 cents.
The cryptic comment about the Golden Ratio and pin-ups came clear elsewhere in that issue. The Fortean Donn Brazier had written in from the Marianas, where he was was stationed. He seems to have studied Lonc’s various publications in great detail, and took time to poke fun at the supercilious attitude they embodied—enhanced, it seems, by a correspondence between Brazier and Lonc. Brazier pointed out that Lonc’s constant was, indeed, just the Golden Ratio, and that an American named Jay Hambridge had been promoting its importance for a number of years. (Indeed, interest in the ration dates back to Pythagoras, as both Brazier and Hambridge acknowledged.) But Lonc seemed to dismiss that history and was more fascinated by what has come to be known as the Fibonacci series of numbers—1,2,3,5,8,13 (each number the sum of the two before it). Brazier also noted that scientists have spent a lot of time and money—in true Fortean fashion he suggested they actually wasted the money—weighing atomic elements, and though their numbers are not the same, they are close, and actually involve something more than mere arithmetic:
“”But none of this phases Mr. Lonc. Cadmium may weigh 112.048 in the scales of Mr. Smith and 111.947 in the balances of Morse, Jones, Larimer, Handin and another Smith, nevertheless, the true weight is 125.6656, arrived at with no scales _and no cadmium_.”
Brazier also measured the woman’s figure from Lonc’s pamphlet that had been reproduced in Thayer’s magazine, and found the ratio to be 1.556. “Then I measured some pin-ups scattered around the camp” and found values ranging from 1.35 to 1.72. These measurements were “not made under rigid laboratory conditions,” he admitted, “and so, of course, did not cause its inventor undue consternation. In fact, nothing whatsoever can disturb the author’s faith in his works.”
And yet . . . and yet. Something about the Loncs’s ideas got to Thayer. He was drawn, despite himself, to such abstruse theorizing. He had his own idea, that the earth was growing, first as a sphere, then as a cube, then a sphere again. He continually came back to the idea of squaring the circle, which seems somehow related. And he could not quit the Loncs. When he developed the idea for a Fortean University, he wanted one department devoted to “Lonc.” It was the Fortean University equivalent of relativity, he said, and comprised the search for 1.618 in nature, math, and art. He named the department after Lonc even though there were others who were also absorbed by the idea of phi and the Golden Ratio. (Probably influenced by Brazier, Thayer noted Hambridge’s books and magazine, “The Diagonal”; Gardner also cited Hambridge.) In 1949, Lonc created a slide rule, with a leather carrying case, that was “standard in every way” except that “to all standard features has been added the Lonc Cosmic Constant.” It was made in Germany—more evidence that Lonc was living there then—and the Society advertised and sold it, at the non-trivial $7.50 a-pop (Doubt 25).
And in 1954, when Thayer was feeling testy toward the Society’s membership, it was to Lonc that he turned. Thayer was upset that so few Forteans were putting Fortean ideas into practice. Yes, there was science fiction, but that hardly constituted the limits of the Fortean arts. There were so many other opportunities. He demanded, “Let us have Fortean music, folk-song or symphony. We tried to induce MFS Lonc to apply his ‘cosmic constant’ of 1.618 to a new musical scale but he never got around to it. Suppose you tuned your piano on that basis, using the numerical value of vibrations for the necessary arithmetic. What would Old Black Joe sound like on an instrument so tuned? What new compositions could be written specially for it?”
I wonder if Lonc didn’t ever actually do this? After all, he seems to have published a number of songs, though their scores are held only at the German National Library. Did they follow conventional musical arrangement? Or did he do something a bit more Fortean, reinventing the mathematical relationship between notes? Is there a Fortean music, buried away? Forgotten? Damned?
