Last year I had a blog post called "
125". That was a celebration of having made 125 posts to the wikifiction blog, with 2 months still remaining in that calendar year.
This year, I've reached 125 blog posts with one month remaining in 2016.
By The Numbers
During 2016 I have been looking back at several temporal landmarks of the past:
200. I blogged about
Mary Shelley's Frankenstein from the perspective of 2016.
100. During 2016, I've been celebrating the first 100 years of the
Vance Era.
75. I looked back to
1941 and the origins of
Isaac Asimov's positronic robot saga.
50. I
celebrated the first 50 years of the
Star Trek Era.
25. In anticipation of the 25th year since
Asimov's death, I looked back at the science fiction writing career of
Arkady Strugatsky, who died in 1991.
Steam Men
Continuing this year's efforts aimed at gazing into the past, let's get into our time machine and go back 125 years, to 1891... back into the murky origins of the
science fiction genre and stories about
artificial life.....
When I started this blog post, I already had one mention of the year 1891 in the wikifiction blog:
a post that shows an image of Albert Einstein in 1891. In my thinking,
Einstein is emblematic of the transition from the classical world into the Atomic Age. Here, I want to explore the period of transition between
1) fantasy mechanical men and beasts of the pre-atomic age
and
2) science fiction robots such as Asimov's
positronic robots.
Tin Man
When I was a young boy, my mother was careful to protect me from the more disturbing parts of
The Wizard of Oz. For many years, I was only allowed to watch first few minutes of that movie on T.V. before I was sent off to bed.
The
Tin Man was almost certainly my first introduction to a (bio)mechanical man. Even as a small child, I was unable to make sense of the depicted sensitivity of the Tin Man to rusting and his ability to generate steam. This kind of confusion marked the beginning of my inability to make sense of fantasy stories and my dismay at the folks in Hollywood for their willingness to do anything, no matter how unreasonable, to create a dramatic scene.
As far as I can tell, the Tin Man originally had no connection to steam. His origin was as a normal human being. To convert the man, Nick Chopper, into an artificial life form, body parts such as arms were cut off and replaced, one by one, with metal parts. The Tin Man fantasy seems to have been part of a long tradition of stories that explored the mysterious boundary between life and artificial life (see
The Brazen Android, below).
However, in the 1800s there was another stream of fiction that did involve steam-powered mechanical men...
1868
Reuben Hoggett has a website describing his research into the origins of "steam men". According to
Hoggett's account, the origin of metalic steam men can be traced back to
Zadoc P. Dederick, in New Jersey.
Dederick's steam man was a coal-powered three-horse power steam engine, dressed like a man in order to not scare skittish horses on the street. The original model (and the only one ever built) of this contraption apparently did not really work, but it inspired fictional accounts of "steam men".
Soon after Dederick's prototype steam man was described in published journalistic accounts,
Edward Ellis published a story about a steam-powered engine in the shape of a man that could pull a wagon across the plains of the American West (see "
The Huge Hunter; OR, The Steam Man of the Prairies"). Sadly, Ellis' poor steam man was destroyed in an explosion.
Later, Harry Enton expanded on the idea, creating a series of stories about the
Frank Reade family and their
robot-like mechanisms powered by steam. Eventually,
Electric Man was produced by Frank Reade Jr. as a successor to steam man.
1891
125 years ago, steam-powered devices were becoming old-fashioned and being replaced by electric devices. A sub-genre of proto-science fiction adventure stories of the late 1800s that included as plot elements various "high-tech" devices became known as
Edisonades.
Then
In the 1880s, much popular interest in electric devices was generated by the work of
Frank Sprague. In practical terms, street cars with electric motors that could draw electric power from wires provided the first practical application of electricity to transportation. It was left to story writers to depict fanciful self-powered electric devices.
Now
Here, 125 years later, battery technology is finally catching up with the old electric device fantasies of the late 1800s.
"
Philip Reade" is apparently an invented name, used by the author of a series of
gizmo invention stories, the first of which were published in
1891. Among these gizmo stories was
Tom Edison Jr's Electric Mule.
Weird Westerns
These "Philip Reade" stories remind me of the
Rocky Horror Picture Show and
The Wild, Wild West. I suspect that some people can never suspend disbelief and take science fiction seriously. For such folks, the best entertainment to be had from science fiction is to make fun of the genre.
I find many
gizmo stories from the 1800s to be almost unreadable, but full of plot elements that seem to have inspired later science fiction authors such as
Jack Vance. "Tom Edison Jr's Electric Mule" begins in the camp of some bandits who are led by Captain Karl (A.K.A. Karl the Cougar) who is eager to study the new '
Electric Mule' (named 'Snorter') that has gained renown as an "
Injun-killin' invention", crafted by Captain Tom Edison, Jr.
Captain Karl is building a Steam Centipede and he wants to gain access some of Edison's technological secrets, so the bandits try to capture Snorter, without success.
By No Means
Captain Tom explains that the Electric Mule is battery powered. Apparently, when in need of an electric charge, "spontaneously generated" power is put into the Mule's power system by means of a set of "cranks" on the Mule's back. Thus, the Mule is apparently a
perpetual motion machine!
After an epic battle between Mule and Centipede, both are destroyed by explosives. The evil Captain Karl is dead and Captain Tom survives and is expected to devise another fantastic invention.
Artificial Mind
Beyond the technical problem of power sources and the mechanics of robotic mobility, a true robot in the science fiction sense must also think and speak.
The Brazen Android by William Douglas O'Connor, 1891 (
Part 2) is an old story that confronts the challenge of creating a device that can speak. O'Connor's story provides an example of pre-scientific tales that included the idea of some inanimate object (such as a statue) that becomes endowed with human-like cognitive abilities.
This ancient idea (which
can be traced back into ancient Greek and Egyptian writings) is of interest to me because in the
Exode saga, there are very tiny agents of artificial intelligence (
zeptites) that can inhabit both inanimate objects and living beings (either biologicals such as humans or artificial life forms such as robots or the sentient spaceship,
Many Sails).
"The Brazen Android" is proto-science fiction only in that it involves a proto-scientist,
Roger Bacon. Sadly, written several decades after
Frankenstein, O'Connor can add nothing new to the question of how a scientist might go about endowing inanimate matter with life-like behavior. O'Connor depicts a spirit being magically introduced into the brazen android, but sadly, this only results in the destruction of the carefully crafted object. True robot stories would have to await the development of the science fiction genre in the next century.
Next:
investigating the tryp'At Overseers
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