JF Ptak Science Books Post 1635
“The most ignorant person at a reasonable charge, and with little bodily labor, may write books in philosophy, poetry, law, mathematics, and theology, without the least assistance from genius or study.” Jonathan Swift, in Gulliver’s Travels (actually called Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World, in Four Parts. By Lemuel Gulliver, First a Surgeon, and then a Captain of Several Ships, printed 1726).
Every age, every generation has a calling to the future that once that particular future arrives looks sometimes strangely like a past that was much further away than it was. Such is the case here, in September, 1867. in the pages of London’s Punch Magazine, when Mr. Punch rhapsodized on the future possibilities of the new invention, the typewriter. [Related items are available at our blog bookstore, here.]
“Good News for Bad Writers” announced to the readership:
“Writing Superseded.—Mr. Pratt, of Alabama, is the inventor of a typewriting machine, lately exhibited to tho London Society of Arts, which is said to print a man’s thoughts twice as fast as he can write them with the present process. By a sort of piano arrangement the letters are brought in contact with carbonised paper, which is moved by tho same manipulation,”
The editor of Punch sniffed out a deeper deal in the typewriter than simple legibility:
“Every author his own printer! What a happy state of things! No more struggles to write legibly with nibless tavern-pens: no more labour in deciphering the hieroglyphs of hasty writers. Literary work will be in future merely play—on the piano. The future Locke may write his essays by a touch upon the keys.”
But the disappointments of the possible future wouldn’t stop there, and would or could or should go screaming into the dark night, the invention marking time in the brain of the writer, making able for him or her to compose without thinking, pillows taking over for the mind:
“In this inventive age there really is no saying where discovery will stop. Now that authors are to put their thoughts in print with twice the pace that they can write them, perhaps ere long they will be able to put their works in type without so much as taking the trouble to compose them. A thought-hatching easy chair may very likely be invented, by the help of which an author may sit down at his ease before his thought-printing piano, and play away ad libitum whatever may occur to him. Different cushions may be used for different kinds of composition, some stuffed with serious thoughts, fit for sermons or reviews, and others with light fancies, fit for works of fiction, poetry, or fun. By a judicious choice of cushions an author will be able to sit down to his piano, and play a novel in three volumes twice or thrice a week, besides knocking off a leader every morning for a newspaper, anil issuing every fortnight a bulky epic poem, or a whole encyclopaedia complete within a month.”
This is not too terribly off the mark from the conversation/writing machine from Swift’s Gulliver in Laputa, except of course that this device (that I wrote about
here) came 161 years ealrier. But then again even the framework for this machine didn’t exist; the typewriter did, which at least got the science fiction aspect of its prospective powers going in the right direction in the real, three-dimensional very mentally High Victorian world.
The typewriter was just another in a series of “robots” from antiquity, of the creation of moveable type printing taking over the job of scribes and scribes over the jobs of story tellers, of fabrications of automata, of rudimentary calculating machines of the 17th century, of the creation of the lighted semaphore, of the electric telegraph, of the telephone, of the wireless, of the radio, television, computer, internet. Each offered a similar challenge to the people of their day and a similar challenge to their future–some of which came true, some didn’t. I know that Punch was kidding–mostly.
[Claes Oldenburg’s “Soft Typeewriter, 1963.]
George Orwell’s description of the underground work-life of a miner is extraordinary, as were those workers and the work that they did under grave conditions and for a long period of time. The first extract from his The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), chapter three, describes the world of the miner. Another extract2 is a blistering description of how the miners got to the coal face after their 60 m.p.h. decent in their tiny elevator, walking like crabs for a half-mile or longer in hot and dusty conditions, in near blackness, with a roof four feet over the ground. I read this many years ago and the image painted by Orwell remains a vivid and haunting one. Orwell’s work was superb in describing the conditions and efforts of these outstanding men.
