C. Edward Whitman

Enterprise

A founder of ventures — and, at the heart of it all, the quiet hand others rely upon.

From boyhood I was seized by the engineering of the age — less by the engines of computation than by the traffic between them: that one might be made to speak to another across a wire was the nearest thing to magic I had come upon.

The walled gardens of the hour — America's AOL, France's ubiquitous Minitel, China's Yinghaiwei (瀛海威) — rationed their content; and even the amateur networks of the bulletin boards, FidoNet foremost, moved their mail by nightly relay rather than a living connection. The flaw was plain to me at once: it was the open internet — immediate and entire, not the enclosure — that would remake the century.

I was sixteen, and raised in remote countryside, where the wires carried voices and nothing more — so, after a campaign waged chiefly upon my father, I had a frame relay circuit run to the house, terminated on a Livingston PortMaster 2E-R that sat on a bookshelf above my bed: fifty-six kilobits, in an internet still made of FTP, NNTP, Gopher, and plain text, before Mosaic had taught the web to render itself in pictures.

A preposterous quantity of bandwidth for a boy’s bedroom. But sufficiency has never been my measure.

What I had built, others wanted, and could not build for themselves. I hung five US Robotics Courier 14.4 modems on the PortMaster, ordered an equal number of copper lines from the local exchange, and my curated friends became my first customers; word travelled, and demand soon outran the room.

Where others still answered at twenty-four hundred baud — where they answered at all — I held the key to access in territory no one else served. It took flight just before my seventeenth birthday — an enterprise in all but name — and I incorporated the moment the law would allow it, on turning eighteen, in 1995.

The uplink to the wider internet grew from frame relay to a full megabit; the bank that answered the town grew with it — a PortMaster 3 now, sixty digital modems running at once and forever saturated. We took offices near the railway — and the railways, in those years, carried the long-haul fibre. We drew our feed straight off it, and became the first local carrier on glass rather than copper.

Nearby stood a military intelligence installation, whose tenants became our earliest government accounts — and my telecommunications interests have leaned to enterprise and the state ever since.

The ventures multiplied from there — the ground no spade turns without my leave, capital deployed as others cannot, a quiet word in the right room, the border their cargo cannot cross without my nod — though a man who lives by staying hidden will name no more of them than he must. All trace to that first circuit — each only another wire, run where others would not, and held where others must cross. And the whole of it bought the only thing worth buying: the freedom to be privately, variously occupied.

Pursuits

Jurisprudence

A lifelong student of the law. My present study is the legal order of Ukraine — a civil-law system of Roman descent, nurtured by the German Pandectist tradition, now shedding its Soviet overlay as it converges on the law of the European Union. My admiration, though, runs to the practitioners: to Clarence Darrow and Thomas More, who made of the law a matter of conscience; to Sir William Blackstone, who gave the common law its architecture; and, more singularly, to Edward Bennett Williams, whose genius lay past the statute books, in solving for a client what the law alone never could.

Aviation

A love of flight inherited from my father, himself a pilot. First solo at thirteen; a private pilot’s certificate on my seventeenth birthday, the check-ride flown in a Mooney 231 (M20K). But the deeper pull has always been the engineering — the fluid dynamics that lets a wing hold the air and, more peculiar still, flutter and harmonics: the aeroelastic physics by which a structure’s own resonance, fed by the airflow, can disintegrate an airframe in an instant — and, above all, how it is foreseen and forestalled. The whole art lies in keeping the aircraft on the safe side of that margin.

Motor Racing

A driver through the 1990s until 2006, in the SCCA and in IMSA — whose GT championship has since passed into other hands and other names. My strength lay in the GT classes: road cars made savage and taught to race. But my deepest love is kept for true endurance — the 24 Hours of Daytona, the jewel of the world of GT racing, and the 24 Hours of Le Mans, older and grander still. A day and a night in which speed must do more than dazzle: it must last, while car, crew, and driver are tried as one, from the dark into the dawn, and the smallest frailty is the one that undoes everything. And, ever since, a devoted student of Formula 1 — the sprint at its summit, where a season turns on tenths and a corner on centimetres. The flying lap is speed perfected; the long night, speed proven.

Antiquarian Books

A keeper of rare and early books, from the fifteenth century to the present — as taken with the scent age lends them as with their contents: old parchment, paper softened by time, the faint sweetness only the years confer. To open one is the nearest I come to breathing in the formation of knowledge itself. Among them an early Don Quixote from the Madrid press of Juan de la Cuesta; and, dearest of all, a Book of Hours from Ghent, about 1460, for the Use of Rome — its parchment carrying miniatures by the Master of the Beady Eyes, its blind-stamped cover surviving into a later binding. Burgundian refinement that asks for no explanation.

Music

A patron of the opera house, and the keeper of a wider ear. My affections begin with the pillars of the repertoire — Mozart, Verdi, Wagner — and extend to the warmth of Puccini, whose Turandot I adore above all the rest, and the fire of Bizet’s Carmen. The voice that settles the matter is Pavarotti’s: his Nessun dorma, drawn from that same Turandot, is the tenor’s art at its summit. Past the opera house the ear follows still — Ravel’s Boléro and its single, mounting idea; Barber’s Adagio for Strings; and Tchaikovsky, who never mistook feeling for excess.

Sculpture

An admirer of sculpture, and of Frederick Hart above all. He gave Washington National Cathedral its Ex Nihilo — the Creation surging out of the bare stone of the west front — then did what no sculptor had before: cast the human figure in clear acrylic resin, light passing clean through the form, a craft he called sculpting with light. In that medium my dearest are Appassionata, Destiny, and Firebird. And nearest of all, his Daughters of Odessa — an elegy for the last Tsar’s four girls, and for every child the century took.

Horology — The Atmos

A clock that asks nothing. The Jaeger-LeCoultre Atmos, conceived in 1928 by Jean-Léon Reutter, is the nearest thing mechanism has come to perpetual motion — wound by the air alone, a sealed capsule breathing with the faintest shift in temperature, one degree good for two days, no hand ever laid to it. The version I most admire is the rhodium-plated Atmos du Millénaire Atlantis, its perpetual calendar running, untouched, to the year 3000. Yet the machine only sharpens the thought beneath it — time is the one resource that cannot be made more of, and so the only truly invaluable one. To give another your time is to give the irreplaceable — and that must be cherished.