Scenography: Mariana Tilly
Performer: Laurie Mlodzik
Violin: Maria Jímenez
This is a story about care, purpose, luck, and imagination. This is the story of Father Himalaya, or Padre Himalaia, a really eccentric priest.
Its December of 1868, in Cendufe - a tiny rural village in the north of Portugal, close to the border with Galicia. In this village, a baby was born into a family of poor farmers. His parents named him Manuel António Gomes. As Baby Manuel got older he became a smart and inquisitive child. He was able to learn how to read and write and, at the time, poor children in such rural environments who did well in basic training had only one way to continue studying: to go to the seminar, a training college for Catholic priests paid for by the church.
Portugal was a deeply religious country, and even more so throughout the hundreds of inland villages; In cendufe, superstitions and myths were the basis of shared knowledge; predictions of good or bad crops were dictated by popular wisdom, by coded messages from the heavens or general bad omens. (It has been described as a place adverse to positivism or science, where superstitions and popular beliefs were generally the law).
So little Manuel (and his brother were)was sent to the Catholic seminar in the northern city of Braga, with good hopes all around that he would stop being too witty and instead focus on the fast track to become a Priest. Manuel knew that becoming a Priest would be a great honor to his family, a fair living and a great chance to become more knowledgeable. It wasn’t so bad. The catholic school had a big library, and he would perfect his reading and writing, and *who knows?*, he could even become a scientist.
But times were not easy for anyone in the country, and people’s livelihoods depended on good crops and strong kettle, these which in turn depended on winds, and sunshine, but most importantly good rains. Plenty of water, falling from the sky, filling up streams. And weather is a mystery to us humans; we can resort to guessing if tomorrow will be cloudy, or if a storm is coming in a few days; where the wind blows and how strong. But nobody in 19th century’s Portugal could state, with any certainty, how cooperative the weather was going to be that year. So there was, as always, a lot of praying.
Meanwhile, the student priest Manuel, now a teenager, had grown abnormally tall. He was so tall his schoolmates started calling him Himalaya, as in Himalaya mountain range. And nobody called him Manuel ever again.
So young Padre Himalaya developed an electric passion for the study of physics and natural sciences. He was well aware of the problems and burdens of agriculture, of the strenuous labor performed by his fellow people. He devoted himself to reading, taking in as much knowledge as he could; it would be through religious studies that he would find the means to be a scientist, a healer; or to use science for the benefit of the people, to apply his creativity and curiosity into concrete inventions. he was an eccentric character, and would usually get into arguments with his teachers in the Seminar, the old Padres and clergymen who had no patience for Himalaya’s many interests. Despite all this, at 18 years old he finished the Seminar and carried on to the final stage of studies to get ordered / ordained as a priest….
By this time, an older priest told him a story. It was about the popular belief that the more thunderstorms there were, the better the crops would go next spring; something about thunder made the ground very fertile and very rich.
Himalaia’s eyes sparked; he felt his heart pounding on his chest. He knew why!
Or at least he had formulated a scientific hypothesis. So he became obsessed with the warmth of the soils, and the power of thunder and electrification. He recognized what it was doing to the ground. It was generating a chemical reaction combining nitrogen with oxygen.
Himalaia, determined to use his knowledge and curiosity to help agriculture, became even more entranced by nature. How it renewed itself; how the vile of lightning and the peacefulness of the ground connected. How sunshine made things grow. By now, he spent most of his time conceiving of inventions, contraptions and machines; studying what would later be coined as “renewable energies”. He expanded his knowledge into medicine, ecology, and education. He became a member of the Academy of Sciences. His official occupation was that of a priest, of course, and for a while his curiosity and ingenuity were received in good faith by the instituition of the Catholic church.
At a time when the rest of the western world marveled at the feats of industrialization, such as the combustion engine and the oil race, Himalaia cared nothing for coal or oil. He didn’t think fossil fuels were the way for the future; on the contrary, he called for other types of energy, immediately available ones - such as solar, hydro, tidal or wave….
And so Padre Himalaia, in the processing of popular beliefs around thunder, set himself to extract nitrogen directly from the air in order to develop nitrogen based agricultural fertilizers. He patented several prototypes of what would become a massive solar oven. In France, he first experimented with huge Fresnel lenses (very thick ones) to concentrate the sunlight into one spot. He perfected the prototype and then did another experiment in the Pyrenées, and later in Lisbon. Himalaia called this device the Pyrheliophero.
All of these experiments flunked, in a sad fashion; either intended as a concentration of heat to separate nitrogen, or to use in the processing of industrial materials (such as melting iron, using just solar power), each one of the costly experiments ended up failing, or worse, melting themselves.
—
He never had much money to develop his work. He would ask for funding wherever he could, to royals and aristocrats, travelling to France, Germany and eventually the United States looking not just for funding but for peers — likeminded scientists and inventors. He found a crowd wherever he went; this is where his priestness would come in handy; he was extremely open to people, communicative and fun to be around.
And finally, in 1904, he brings the final version of the Pyrheliophero to the St. Louis Fair, in Missouri, in the United States. The Pyrheliophero had transformed; It now consisted of a monumental parabolical structure covered in 6117 tiny crystal mirrors to focus the solar radiation in the center. It was mounted on a clockwork structure which rotated the apparatus according to the sun.
It is very hard to imagine how Padre Himalaia managed to take the massive contraption to Missouri. Remember: Portugal was extremely poor, there was political chaos, and funding was very scarce. But indeed he made it; once he got there, the Pyrheliophero got scorned by the fair’s organization — which in retrospect makes a lot of sense, for it was the time of the oil race and coal worship. This poor priest tried to bring a massive oven running on solar power! They didn’t even include the solar oven in the Fair’s official catalogue. BUT AHAHAHAHA, they didn’t laugh for long, for the Pyrheliophero succeeded in reaching the World Record temperature of 3800 degrees celsius at the fair and quickly became a media sensation, winning the Grand Prix of the Louisianna Purchase Exhibition and two gold medals. 3800 degrees celsius is enough to melt iron or any type of metal. He became famous during this time, travelling and studying through the United States and connecting to other inventors and scientists. He was stalked by business people who wanted to get the patent or to replicate the device to show it around in fairs. He didn’t care for any of that; he wanted the device to be used, perfected, either in industries or applied to scientific studies. By the end of the fair, the Pyrheliophero got lost; due to poor management, it may have been stolen piece by piece, or destroyed. Himalaia didn’t have the means to bring it back to Europe, and Universities in America didn’t accept it as a gift.
But no problem; Padre Himalaia continued his journey.
What he continuously strived for was a global vision for life on earth. A projection, a speculation, a hypothesis for how renewable energies of all sorts could change the course of industrial action. A massive ecosystem with circular water systems, reuse of waste, solar power, tidal energy; things touching each other, affecting each other, changing each other organically. Several devices and inventions aimed at the resolution of different types of issues, all connected towards an imagined balance.
But Padre Himalaia was a curious character and a somewhat inconvenient member to the Catholic Church: he was a Republican, and Republicans wanted a separation between State and Church, and Himalaia was ok with that. And he lived through the end of the Portuguese Monarchy when the King was murdered in a public square and through the implementation of the Republic in 1910, and its turmoiled violence for the next 20 years.
Around 1913, he developed a type of stabilized gun-powder used for explosives and fireworks that attracted attention from investors. This was complicated because Padre Himalaia was a pacifist - and let’s not forget he was a priest. An eccentric and free-spirited one, but still a priest. He patented it and called it Himalaíte. This gave him some financial security, but the only reason for his experiments into pyrotechnics was because of one of his most prized inventions - a Rain-making system that would help agriculture during droughts. This invention consisted of a large polygonous-shaped arrangement of cannons pointed towards the sky that ought to be all fired simultaneously to create air-suppression — creating a mist, and then rain.
I would like to focus on this for a moment. Canons. Large cannons. Arranged on the ground. Pointed at the sky. Mist. And rain.
It’s a messy, confusing, beautiful vision.
Padre Himalaia’s interest in the making of rain seeked to respond to the ongoing problem of drought in his country. In the same way, his huge solar oven was intended as a beginning of something much bigger, something global: the normalisation of technologies which we now call “ecological”,
employed in the way we now speak of them: as the only way to build the planet’s future.
And he was disappointed at the lack of support he got during his life, and how his inventions hadn’t (that he knew of) had such a big impact on industrialisation processes he still witnessed. Nonetheless, he remained inspired and talkative and active in his work, travelling all over Europe and Portugal, until his death, in 1933.
For many years, Padre Himalaia’s story was forgotten, or left out of narratives about technological and scientific achievements in Portuguese History. It’s now often said that “Padre Himalaia was a century ahead of his time”, since he cared so deeply about things which are now concerns to all of us. But I have the feeling this wasn’t his problem; I think he was alone in his time. His concerns were fair and important to the time in which he lived, and a lot of things could’ve been radically different if he had a bit more stage to share his ideas, or a more solid community.
I have read several accounts on how, in mine and Padre Himalaia’s country, it is the poets who make a mark in history; the writers; the story-tellers; the politicians. The “big-talk” people, not the scientists; “it is not in the fabric of Portuguese culture to value science”, I heard a science history professor say in an interview about Padre Himalaia, when asked to explain why had Padre Himalaia been forgotten and his research not continued, when it was so clearly fantastic, groundbreaking work, done through a generous and unique perspective towards nature and life. “He was extraordinary, but a lot of his patents and inventions didn’t work”, he continued.
I offer a new perspective now, here. I suggest that we look at this speculative narrative of Padre Himalaia’s life and ask: must his life, or the significance of his accomplishments, be measured by the success of his inventions? Can we not, instead, measure it on the creativity, curiosity, poetry, artistry, enchantment he gifted the world? By the relentless activity of trying, and communicating, and making things happen in totally adverse conditions? I think we can, and should,
And next to the poets,
And the writers,
And the story-tellers
As he wasn’t anything less than such.
I love Padre Himalaia and hope you will now, too, love Padre Himalaia