The Fly Between the Panes

Back from their first spring break at an almost brand-new student dorm in Budapest, Dr. George Egely and his roommate found a big dead fly between the two sealed panes of their window. In the summer of 1969 he found another, inside a lamp globe screwed on tight.

Dr. György (George) Egely tells both cases in a short section of his book Vízautók… antigravitáció (“Water cars… antigravity”, 2008), “Döglött légy a 854-es szoba ablakában” (“A dead fly in the window of room 854”), pp. 138 and 140. He gives no explanation for either fly. What makes the story worth a closer look is where he put it: in the part of the book on antigravity, as one of the reasons he did not dismiss a Russian insect researcher's claim to have flown.

THE RECORDA box nobody could open

The window. In 1968 Egely became a resident student of the Technical University (the Műegyetem); the building is called the Kármán Tódor Kollégium today. It had been built in honour of the Gymnastics European Championship, so he and the others got it almost brand-new. Its windows were insulating units: two panes of glass set in a thick aluminium frame, with nitrogen rather than air between them, “as far as I know”, he adds. He and his roommate, Karcsi, looked out of the window of room 854 a thousand times and saw nothing special. Then they came back from the first spring break and found a big dead fly between the two panes.

They showed the fly to their neighbours. Everyone stared, everyone was astonished, and one of them closed the matter with: “You're idiots.” Nobody could offer a rational explanation.

The lamp. He had almost forgotten the fly when, one summer, he had to change a burnt-out bulb on his parents' balcony. It sat under a spherical milk-glass globe that fitted tightly and had to be unscrewed first. That summer, in 1969, he found a big dead fly in the globe, together with some dust.

This time he gives his reasons. Besides the missing food and the heat (his parents used the balcony lamp often), he adds two details: between the socket and the milk glass there could have been a gap of one or two tenths of a millimetre at most, and the socket had no crack where a fly could have crept in. He often saw bugs buzzing round the lamp in the evenings, he adds, but they could not have bored through the globe.

EGELY'S NOTESOthers had stories too

He closes the case without a theory of his own. The listeners who later told him of similar experiences stay anonymous in the book, and he does not retell their stories, so we cannot either.

“The oddities did not end there,” he goes on, and turns from flies in boxes to flies in the air. As a student of thermal power engineering he often calculated lift in his fluid-mechanics classes, for steam, gas and water turbines, around single blades and rows of blades. He often wondered whether one could also calculate the circulation, lift and drag around a bird's wing. Of one thing he was sure: for his favourite flies, it could not be done. The mathematics of the time did not allow it.

His next section, “Repülhetnek-e a rovarok?” (“Can insects fly?”, pp. 141–142), recalls the early calculations that gave a bumblebee less lift than its weight, the start of the legend that it should not be able to fly.

EGELY'S LENSWhy a fly belongs in a chapter on antigravity

The section opens part VIII of the book, “Antigravitáció”, directly after his chapters on Viktor Grebennikov, a Russian entomologist who died in 2001. In his book My World, Grebennikov wrote that he had built a small flying platform from the wings of an insect he would not name, and Egely retells that account at length (pp. 129–136). He does not claim to know that it is true. “Everyone thinks what they want,” he writes; he himself does not rule out that Grebennikov wrote the truth (p. 136). The fly story is how he begins his own part of the argument.

Setting the two flies beside Grebennikov's platform is Egely's choice, and the link he draws is a parallel, not a mechanism: two insects where, as far as he could see, they had no way to be. He does not say the flies passed through glass, and neither do we. Grebennikov's platform remains his own account; we know of no independent test or public demonstration of it.

TODAYWhat stays open

The globe was opened. Neither case can be examined now, and the book gives no measurement beyond Egely's own estimates, so ordinary explanations stay open. The plainest one concerns the lamp: Egely took the globe off to change the bulb almost every year (p. 140). A fly that got in while it was off would not have needed the narrow gap at all. For the window, a fly shut in when the unit was made or fitted, or an opening nobody looked for, remain possible; the book does not say whether anyone examined the frame. These are possibilities, not findings.

How insects fly. In 1999 Michael Dickinson, Fritz-Olaf Lehmann and Sanjay Sane flapped a scaled-up model of a fruit fly's wings in a tank of oil, the kind of experiment Egely describes, and traced the lift the old calculations missed to effects of the flapping stroke itself.

EGELY'S OTHER WORKPaying attention to odd things

Egely's curiosity about odd observations runs through his work. His vitality meter, still made today as the Egely Wheel, is a small wheel designed to make the connection between a person's inner state and the wheel's movement observable through direct experience. If the files in this series make you want to try it, the wheel is made and sold by us.

Sources

1. György Egely, Vízautók… antigravitáció, Egely Kft., Budapest, 2008.
2. V. S. Grebennikov, Мой мир (“My World”), Novosibirsk, 1997 (as cited by Egely; we have not seen the book).
3. M. H. Dickinson, F.-O. Lehmann, S. P. Sane, “Wing rotation and the aerodynamic basis of insect flight”, Science 284, 1954–1960 (1999), doi:10.1126/science.284.5422.1954. doi.org
4. Insecticide Resistance Action Committee, “Musca domestica” (adults usually 6–7 mm long). irac-online.org
5. egelywheel.com: “Invented in 1994 by Dr. George Egely and refined over decades.” egelywheel.com

AI-assisted research, writing and illustration. Edited by Egely Wheel.