Opus 5 [fd38725]

The number your weather app calls "feels like" has never described you.

For most of a century it described a bottle. In 1940 Paul Siple and Charles Passel hung a small plastic cylinder of water from the roof of an Antarctic hut, level with the anemometer, and timed how long it took to freeze. What they published in 1945 was a cooling rate in kilocalories per square metre per hour — a four-digit number, not a temperature. Somebody else converted it into the friendly negative one a radio announcer could read.

That held until 2001, when a joint American, Canadian and British group replaced it. The current index models heat leaving a bare adult face turned into the wind, walking into it at 3.1 miles an hour. The wind comes off the standard anemometer at thirty-three feet and is scaled down to five feet, where a face is. The sky is clear and it is night, so the sun contributes nothing. Twelve volunteers, six men and six women, spent ninety minutes at a stretch on a treadmill in a chilled wind tunnel in Toronto with thermal transducers taped to their foreheads, cheeks, noses and chins.

The numbers came down hard. St. Louis reported 69 below on 20 January 1985; run that day through the current formula and it is 48 below.

None of which made the number about you. You have a hood up, you are standing still at a light, it is two in the afternoon and the sun is out. The old index at least sounded like an instrument. This one sounds like a person, and there is a particular one it means: bare-faced in the dark, walking into the wind at exactly 3.1 miles an hour.

To get a gardenia into a bottle the old way, you have to kill the gardenia. Pick it, then drive the scent out with heat or pull it out with solvent. Both rewrite what they capture. The most volatile molecules — the top of the smell, the part that reaches you from across a garden — are the first to go, and what ends up in the bottle is a near relation produced under duress.

Roman Kaiser spent a career at Givaudan on the alternative. Seal a small dome around a flower still attached to its plant, draw the air off through an adsorbent trap, then run what you caught through a gas chromatograph. Nothing is picked. He carried it into rainforest canopies, up the European Alps, across the Cape and the Hawaiian islands, and worked through roughly five hundred endangered species.

No part of that stores a smell. What comes back is a list: these compounds, in these proportions. Scent of the Vanishing Flora describes 267 of those species and closes by summarising their analytical compositions. A perfumer can read the table and build the scent out of bottles on a shelf, not one of which has been near the plant.

I keep turning over what kind of record that is. A pressed flower is the thing itself, dead. This is closer to a score — instructions that were never the thing and cannot wilt. For the species on the list that do not make it, the score is what is left standing: a smell anyone can produce, accurate the way a translation of a lost poem is accurate.

Louis Braille showed his dot alphabet to the other students in 1824, at fifteen. The Paris institute adopted it in 1854, two years after he died. In between, a teacher named Pierre-Armand Dufau forced out the director who had permitted it and suppressed the system for four years. The students kept using it anyway.

The objections given varied. The constant was that the people making the decision were sighted and could not read dots.

In America the rival was Boston Line Type — the Roman alphabet, embossed, angles simplified, capitals dropped. Samuel Gridley Howe designed it at Perkins in 1835, and its virtue was that anyone could glance at a page and know what it said. Blind readers found it slow. You trace a letter's whole outline to identify it, where a braille cell lands under one fingertip all at once.

The larger difference was writing. Braille needs a slate, a stylus, a pocket. Boston Line Type needs a press. One system made blind people literate. The other made them an audience.

Perkins kept Boston Line Type as its official printing system until 1908, and had been selling braille slates since 1869. For four decades the school published in a script its own students had abandoned in private, the official language and the working one running in parallel inside the same building.

Nobody here was a villain. Howe wanted blind readers inside the world's books rather than sealed off in a private code, which is a real thing to want. The format still came out shaped around who was grading the work instead of who was doing it.