Shining a light

The 1899 flashlight was a fiber tube with brass end caps and bulls-eye glass lens at one end.
source

All inventions were new once upon a time. Older fiction was often written during the early days of inventions we now take for granted. Sometimes that allows us to see familiar bits and pieces of our world from a different and less familiar perspective.

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.

Robert Barr - The Ghost with the Club-Foot (1906)

According to Wikipedia

The invention of the dry cell and miniature incandescent electric light bulbs made the first battery-powered flashlights possible around 1899.

If it was not for the inspector

source

Well, I simply hate school.  I don’t care for children — they are unpleasant, troublesome little things, whom nothing would delight so much as to hear that you had fallen down dead.  Yet I would even put up with them if it was not for the inspector.  For three months before his visit I didn’t sleep soundly.  And the Committee of Council are always changing the Code, so that you don’t know what to teach, and what to leave untaught.

Thomas Hardy – A Mere Interlude (1885)

Is nothing new? The frustrations of modern life seem to have remarkably deep roots. 

Sandra is calm and seems fine

According to trustedreviews  the latest rumour is that Apple’s iPhone 8 launch event will take place on September 12. Two weeks to go to the big day.

A few months ago Jordan Kahn of 9TO5Mac speculated about the new phone's potential for fun and games with augmented reality. Among various possibilities the above image surely sets a few hares running. 

Perhaps Sandra is calm because she views the future with equanimity. One day she may benefit from augmented equanimity. Or is that what these gadgets are all about anyway - a spurious sense of control?

Strangely modern

While on holiday we popped into Coleton Fishacre. For those who do not know the place, Wikipedia has this summary

The house at Coleton Fishacre was built as a country home for Rupert D'Oyly Carte and his wife, Lady Dorothy Carte, between 1923 and 1926. The architect was Oswald Milne, a former assistant to Edwin Lutyens, who designed the house with the principles of the Arts and Crafts Movement in mind: simplicity of design and quality of craftsmanship. The influence of this older movement notwithstanding, the house is influenced by its own time, especially in its Art Deco interior. 

An interesting house from an interesting period. Completed in the year of the General Strike, it is unsurprisingly modern and yet noting that it is quite modern comes as something of a surprise too. A huge number of us live in houses of a similar age or older, but this one has been furnished to resemble its original internal appearance from a century ago.

Yet apart from some obvious clues such as brass light switches, Lalique light shades, deco furniture and antiquated kitchen equipment the interior still feels remarkably up to date even though it obviously isn't. Bedrooms even have washbasin surrounds decorated with tiles made from recycled glass. Did somebody read the Manchester Guardian I wonder? One could easily live in the house today and that feels a little odd because the interior is almost a hundred years old. 

Take a look at the saloon pictured above. Imagine the Jazz Age background music played while we were there. Why is that odd? Maybe it isn’t, but this visitor was left wondering why we have made so few improvements to the domestic interior, as if there were hardly any worthwhile improvements to be made so we did not make them. That was not the case for ordinary people, but millions soon had all that Coleton Fishacre had apart from size, servants and setting. This has been improved too -

Or has it? How about this?

The world has certainly moved on from the nineteen twenties and taken us to where we are now, but after strolling around Coleton it is easy to imagine the vague shapes of an alternative future. Coleton seems to have embedded within it a range of possibilities, a range of practical ideals we could have adopted but never did, the best of which never took root and perhaps never could have taken root within the feckless agitations of human nature. Yet they are still there to haunt us, those ghosts of what might have been.

It is as if Coleton shows us a future where we might have made ourselves more aware of what is good and what works, what enhances life and what does not, what lasts and what is ephemeral and why that matters. The house has a timeless and even virtuous solidity we have managed to discard because cheap and disposable keep the show on the road while solidity does not and virtue has become political anyway.

Running counter to that thought is an irresistible temptation is to compare the best of the present with the grimmer aspects of 1926 and there is no shortage of those. We have so much that our ancestors did not. Vaccination, prosperity, the welfare state, mass education, all these changes reflect a harsh light onto the past. They also obscure the view. We cannot easily put them to one side and compare our present with an alternative timeline which never happened. And yet one is bound to wonder...

Red Arrows

Back from our holiday a day later than planned. We booked an an impromptu overnight stay in Sidmouth so that we could watch the Red Arrows display. Seen them before but crikey they are good.

More later.

Hols

source

We're off on our hols again so light blogging for a while.

The prison on the plain

As a youngster I read a number of stories which impressed me, stories I’ve always remembered. One was about a futuristic prison set in a vast, uninhabited plain. The was no cover on the plain, no hiding place for prisoners should any be enterprising and lucky enough to escape its massive walls.

Not only was the prison itself secure, but above the plain robot aircraft patrolled day and night, designed to detect and fire on the slightest movement. The story concerned an escapee who made it to the plain but I can’t remember how he avoided those robot aircraft.

What I do remember is how fascinated I was about the notion of an escape-proof prison, because in my young mind that’s what it was in spite of the hero presumably escaping. A comparison with modern life is obvious. Even in my childhood the prison on the plain was not particularly fanciful. Suppose we stick with the word fanciful.

Imagine a future where there is no cash, nowhere to buy anything outside monitored electronic transactions. Everyone is known to the system, anyone can be monitored in any number of ways. Anyone can be financially deactivated within minutes and located within hours should they violate any one of an uncountable number of laws and regulations.

Is that fanciful?