 |
| The 1899 flashlight was a fiber tube with brass end caps and bulls-eye glass lens at one end. source |
There is a trivial but interesting example in the fiction of Robert Barr. He was a friend of Conan Doyle in spite of the fact that he once wrote two parodies of Sherlock Holmes. Look up Sherlaw Kombs on Google.
In the passage below Barr feels it necessary to describe the workings of an electric torch so one assumes that most of his readers would be unfamiliar with such new-fangled gadgets.
It was perhaps half-past ten or eleven o'clock when I began my investigations. I had taken the precaution to provide myself with half a dozen so-called electric torches before I left London. These give illumination for twenty or thirty hours steadily, and much longer if the flash is used only now and then.
The torch is a thick tube, perhaps a foot and a half long, with a bull's-eye of glass at one end. By pressing a spring the electric rays project like the illumination of an engine's headlight. A release of the spring causes instant darkness. I have found this invention useful in that it concentrates the light on any particular spot desired, leaving all the surroundings in gloom, so that the mind is not distracted, even unconsciously, by the eye beholding more than is necessary at the moment. One pours a white light over any particular substance as water is poured from the nozzle of a hose.
The invention of the dry cell and miniature incandescent electric light bulbs made the first battery-powered flashlights possible around 1899.
4 comments:
That's a lovely description. My Grandfather (born 1880s, died 1967) told a story of a night-time bike ride home from the pub when the cycle-lamp failed. It needed water to keep going (is that a carbide lamp?) and they were on a lonely country road with no ditches. Apparently piss worked just as well as water, and they made it safely home.
How utterly delightful!
I love the late Raymond Baxter-ish, Tomorrow’s World-ish naïve wonderment at what now seems to us, in all our unconsidered and ungrateful fatness, utterly mundane. I wonder who else here, apart from me, vaguely remembers earnest BBC programmes (back when it was dull and ploddingly honest by its smug lights, in black and white, I think, though that maybe my memory rather than the programme itself) with acrylically be-jumpered , hopelessly un-photogenically-dentitioned and mostly bespectacled hosts attempting with touchingly clunky and amateurish enthusiasm to explain how it might be possible one day to send a message or do a sum, provided you were prepared to wait, like, for a wholly impractical time while the machine clickety-clacked? The long vanished innocence of youth.
The trouble with adducing late 19th/early 20th century writings in support of your obvious misgivings is that they were actually substantially right. Visionary, actually. As of course, magnificently, was Orwell. I recommend Chekhov for subtler gloominess if it all gets too much.
Now, oddly, we have Google (sanctimonious mission statement as I vomitously recall Do No Evil) actually beginning to Do A Bit Of Said Same Evil.
Frankly, it’s difficult to gainsay the idea that people ‘in the round’ are of no special account or virtue. House odds favour the book maker over selfish and short sighted punters. If I were God the eternal bookie, I’d have given up on these unprepossessing idiots long ago. Lucky for you lot I’m not
I remember velcro being explained on Tomorrow's World. I wonder if it will eventually catch on . . . see what I did there?
Sam - yes it would be a carbide lamp and piss would work just as well as water although I'm not sure about the aroma.
Clacket - I loved the late Raymond Baxter-ish wonderment too, but I'm not so sure I'd love it now. I also suspect that many of this blog's readers remember those earnest BBC programmes. If only they had stuck the plodding honesty we might have ended up with something far more useful. Perhaps even respected.
Jannie - ha ha. I remember that too and I also recall thinking what a clever idea it was.
Post a Comment