The Birthday Cake

Konstantin Tsiolkovsky was a deaf arithmetic teacher in a log cabin in Kaluga who, between marking schoolboys' sums, derived the rocket equation, designed the first space elevator, and proposed liquid hydrogen and oxygen as the propellants that would eventually carry humans off the planet.

He bought his first bicycle at forty-five and tore through Kaluga while the town agreed he was mad. In winter he ice-skated holding an open umbrella to catch the wind. Upstairs, past a trapdoor his family was forbidden to open, his workshop bristled with sparking apparatus and a homemade "electric octopus" that drifted from room to room on the air currents and zapped whoever it found. Higher still, a second trapdoor opened onto the roof. His family called it the door to outer space. He would climb out on clear nights and stand on his own shingles, looking up.

He died in 1935. In September 1957, the Soviet space program tried to launch the world's first satellite on his hundredth birthday. They missed by seventeen days.

On the evening of the 17th, the chief designer of Sputnik was not at the launch site. He was in Moscow, at the birthday party.

The man being celebrated had been dead for twenty-two years.