The Scientific Adventures of Baron Münchausen

Four years after publishing Ralph 124C 41+ in the pages of his pop technology magazine Modern Electrics, Hugo Gernsback published a second, far less studied work in his second imprint, The Electrical Experimenter.  This novel, The Scientific Adventures of Baron Münchausen, ran from May 1915 to February 1917.

As a work of fiction, the novel is insufferable.  It reads as a series of lectures on physics, chemistry, and astronomy, all situated within a stock fantastic setting and strung together with the thinnest of narrative expositions.  But because this is a budding work of “scientifiction,” and beholden to the Gernsbackian tenets of scientific rationality, the narrative has to explain exactly how these lectures are transmitted from locations such as the Moon or Mars.

And here’s where things get interesting.  Münchausen, before leaving for Mars, sets up a relay station on the Moon capable of receiving his long distance audio transmissions and amplifying them for reception by the novel’s narrator, I.M. Alier, on Earth.  Gernsback selects the obscure recording device known as the telegraphone, patented by Valdemar Poulsen in 1898, to be the substrate on which Münchausen’s transmissions are recorded for rebroadcast in the form of serial fiction.

The telegraphone was the first device to demonstrate the principle of magnetic recording, in this case on a spool of tightly wound wire that rotated past a recording head.  The affordances of this gadget –– its recording capacity, its read/write ability –– determine the pulse of the novel.  Each monthly installment begins with a “shrill, high-pitched note” or a “piercing screech in my ‘phones” and ends with “an abrupt, sharp click” or a “snapping noise and a rhythmic low sizzling.”  Thinking like a magazine editor, the Baron keeps a close watch over the length of his transmission and cuts it off before it runs over his quota.

“But I note by my chronometer that the time is up and in a few seconds the telegraphone wire on my radiotomatic on the moon will be to full capacity.  So I must cut off short.”  (137)

Yes, this work is clunky as a piece of fiction.  But Gernsback’s “gadget stories” use narrative (or something like it…) to systematically work through the affordances of various devices, real and imagined.

Gadgets and Wrinkles

Part of my research right now is directed toward the idea that the word “gadget” denotes a completely different range of tools at different points throughout the twentieth century. Though today we usually associate gadgetry with portable electronics, the word has its roots in nineteenth century nautical jargon.  In use among sailors as early as the 1850s, the word first appears in print in Robert Brown’s 1887 memoir Spurnyarn and Spindrift: A Sailor Boy’s Log of a Voyage Out and Home in a China Tea-Clipper.  He writes, “the names of all the other things on board a ship!  I don’t know half of them yet; if the exact name of anything they want happens to slip from their memory, they call it a chicken-fixing, or a gadjet, or a gill-guy, or a timmey-noggy.”  In its seemingly simple and utilitarian origins, the word serves as a placeholder for the name of a tool that has been forgotten at the moment.

The functionality of the gadget in this nautical context receives a more sophisticated treatment in Harold Augustin Calahan’s wonderful Gadgets and Wrinkles: A Compendium of Man’s Ingenuity at Sea.  Calahan begins this book, a catalog of potential problems one might encounter sailing followed by a list of “gadgets” and “wrinkles” that serve as solutions, by encouraging the reader to think about the gadget in a much wider sense than has been commonly allowed.

Our lexicographers define a gadget as ‘anything the name of which cannot be recalled at the moment,’ and in parentheses, they add ‘(Slang, U.S. Navy)’.  But the name has a broader meaning and a riper antiquity than the dictionary credits.  I believe the term is older than the navy itself, and far too deeply imbedded in the language to merit the transitory stigma of slang.

Calahan clarifies that while “a gadget is a machine, an invention, a mechanical means of achieving a result, a wrinkle is a method of procedure.  […]  To the seaman, a gadget is a thing, and a wrinkle is a method, and both of them for the most part unusual and unstandardized.”  The problem that he encounters throughout the book, one that repeatedly causes him to go off on long digressions, is that the distance between a tool and a method is not readily identifiable.

I have been sore put to it to organize this book.  For I am dealing with concepts that have thus far resisted organization so well that they have avoided being tagged with names.  Also it is pretty hard to tell where a gadget begins and a wrinkle ends or vice versa.  Take a familiar example.  You are about to tie two lines together.  You tie them into a weaver’s knot.  Standard practice so far––no gadgets, no wrinkles.  Then realizing that there is going to be a terrific strain on that line and that the knot will be pulled so tight that you will never be able to untie it again, you decide to slip a toggle into the knot.  That’s a happy thought, for you can always take a hammer and drive out the toggle and the knot will be loose.  What is that toggle––a winkle or a gadget?  Now suppose we decide that the strain is going to be so great that it will be difficult to drive out an ordinary toggle.  So we use a large fid whose sloping shape assures us that the slightest driving with the hammer will loosen the knot.  Is the wrinkle now a gadget?  Or if the small end of the fid is greased to make it slip more easily through the tight turns of the knot, does it become a wrinkle again?  I don’t know and I don’t pretend to try to find out.  The line of demarcation is too indistinct.

Surveying the history of gadgetry at sea, Calahan gives the term a wide enough purchase to include not only the tools but the methods that emerge to accomplish certain tasks.  This relationship between the materials and styles of performing a task or solving a problem often surfaces in definitions of gadgetry, especially in patent law.  Court decisions over patent disputes usually end up defining a gadget as the solution that logically emerges out of a problem in material form as a tool or modification.  Any reasonable person given the same problem would independently come up with the same expedient.  An invention, on the other hand, is a truly original arrangement or innovation that warrants patent protection.

"Problem –– Gadget –– Solution!"

The deceivingly simple origins of the gadget as “a generic name for anything” in fact already contained some of the complexities that would provide the word such a wide applicability throughout the twentieth century.  As Virginia Sackville-West observes in Country Notes (1940), “What an odd little word ‘gadget’ is, almost a gadget in itself, so small and useful.”

Hand Crank Media: Proposal for an archaeology

The hand crank plays a supporting role throughout the history of media. However, from the kinescope to the portable smut viewer to the OLPC cloud computer, the hand crank has served to sync techniques of the body to the various media worlds it inhabits.

Much of early cinema was institutionalized by debating the slippages between the hand cranks of the projector and those of the camera. Theater managers would direct their projectionists to speed up or slow down a reel based on attendance numbers.  Producers would counter by instructing camera operators to shoot as fast as possible to avoid excessively frenetic motion at the point of reception. But for burgeoning cinephiles, only the hand of a virtuoso could discern the proper texture of a moving picture.  F.R. Richardson, in a 1911 issue of Moving Picture World: “The operator ‘renders’ a film, if he is a real operator, exactly as does the musician render a piece of music. … I have often changed speed half a dozen times on one film of 1000 feet.”

The common story is that with the advent of automation, the art of the hand crank and its associated cultural forms are lost.  A media archaeology of the hand crank could short circuit this commonly accepted trajectory of “the art of light and shadow” by constructing an alternate history of moving pictures in which the many half-lives of the hand crank take center stage.

A short list of historical gadgets that were either powered or operated by hand crank:  the graphophone; portable 8mm film viewers (widely marketed alongside porn reels); toys such as the Kenner Blow-a-Tune or Fisher-Price Movie Viewer (which played cartridges containing Loony Tunes, Sesame Street, and instructional films such as diaphragm insertion); the hand charged weather radio and LED flashlight; Kinora flip-book cartridges (German daumenkino = cinema of the thumb); Lyman “Easy Pour Media” for use in the “Hand-Crank Media Sifter” to clean bullet casings; and its close cousin, the 1940s Sarnoff television set colorized by Willemite powder which would be hand poured by the consumer into an ignition chamber at the top of the unit.

As if taking place within an alternate history of electrification in which power was never broadcast outward from centralized generators but produced by and stored within each individual consumer device, the operations uncovered by this archaeology––private viewing in public space, sifting and differentiating, the peep hole, backlighting––will outline a history of media that proceeds as if the standardization of a split second never happened. Read the rest of this entry »