Then an epiphany changed his life while he was serving as a fireman on a passenger ship. He lay upon a coil of rope at dawn one day as the sun came up, fiery red, with the moon showing silver against the last of the night sky. And he went off to art school in New York. Calder committed himself to sculpture, but the engineer in Calder had simply found its focus. His mobiles are studies of balance and kinetics.
Every piece is an exercise in materials science.
His stabiles are sophisticated steel construction. Down through the 1930s he honed his skills and forged his artistic maturity. So Calder returned to engineering through art just as T.S. Eliot arrived where he'd started out in his poem, Four Quartettes . And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time. Mechanical Engineering , December 1998, pp.