“Building a machine to blow my pumpkin-picking brains out,” Albert shouted. “I’m too yellow to do it myself.”
“Boss, I got a hunch there’s something better to do. Let’s have some fun.”
“Don’t believe I know how to,” Albert said thoughtfully. “I built a fun machine once to do it for me. He had a real revel till he flew apart, but he never seemed to do anything for me.”
“This fun will be for you and me, boss. Consider the world spread out. What is it?”
“It’s a world too fine for me to live in any longer,” Albert said. “Everything and all the people are perfect, and all alike. They’re at the top of the heap. They’ve won it all and arranged it all neatly. There’s no place for a clutter-up like me in the world. So I get out.”
“Boss, I’ve got a hunch that you’re seeing it wrong. You’ve got better eyes than that. Look again, real canny, at it. Now what do you see?”
“Hunchy, Hunchy, is that possible? Is that really what it is? I wonder why I never noticed it before. That’s the way of it, though, now that I look closer.
“Six billion patsies waiting to be took! Six billion patsies without a defense of any kind! A couple of guys out for some fun, man, they could mow them down like fields of Albert-Improved Concho Wheat!”
“Boss, I’ve got a hunch that this is what I was made for. The world sure had been getting stuffy. Let’s tie into it and eat off the top layer. Man, we can cut a swath.”
“We’ll inaugurate a new era!” Albert gloated. “We’ll call it the Turning of the Worm. We’ll have fun, Hunchy. We’ll gobble them up like goobers. How come I never saw it like that before? Six billion patsies!”
The Twenty-First Century began on this rather odd note.
SELENIUM GHOSTS OF THE EIGHTEEN SEVENTIES
Introduction by Kelly Robson
I live in the future.
In 1978, when “Selenium Ghosts of the Eighteen Seventies” was first published, I was ten years old. My family lived in the forest-fire-prone foothills of the Canadian Rockies, in the echo path of wolf howls and coyote yips. That close to the mountains, radio signals aren’t reliable. Aside from the telephone, our only connection to the outside world was the TV. And oh boy, did we love it.
We had one channel, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. The CBC’s programming wasn’t particularly inspiring—mostly homegrown shows like The Beachcombers and Front Page Challenge, with a few American shows like M.A.S.H. scattered like jewels across prime time. We were always disappointed when the shows went into repeats because we had no alternative. But we were kids. We would watch anything. My brother earned the nickname pattern-watcher because when the channel got knocked off the air, he would literally stare at the static pattern.
I would too, from time to time. Occasionally, if I stared long enough, I’d see things in there.
“Selenium Ghosts of the Eighteen Seventies” is an alternate history of television. The narrator is an unnamed historian (probably amateur) who describes the television shows produced by Aurelian Bentley in 1873. These selenium “slow light” dramas are transmitted to television receivers that will repeat anything they receive. Thrillingly, because of the quirks of slow light, the more the receivers repeat the dramas, the better they become. They evolve and grow. The picture becomes clearer. The once-silent productions begin to develop sound. They also develop metacommentary, breaking the fourth wall and letting us into the inner workings of The Wonderful World of Aurelian Bentley.
What a thrilling science fictional concept. My brothers and sisters and I would have embraced this technology in 1978. We would have watched those “slow light” dramas until they became so real we could have walked into their world.
This is Lafferty at his most delightful, playing with words and images to build a multilayered story within a story (within a story) that seems real despite its stylized, melodramatic trappings. I try to forgive Lafferty the use of troubling racial epithets (should I?) even though they throw me out of the story (in 1978, no, there was no excuse), because he touches my world to his. Lafferty makes me remember my entertainment-starved youth, where we would have done anything for a TV show that changed and even got better in repeat. And he makes me appreciate anew the wonder of this future I live in, where I carry in my pocket a receiver that will bring me, at a moment’s notice, all the television anyone could ever want.
Selenium Ghosts of the Eighteen Seventies
Even today, the “invention” of television is usually ascribed to Paul Nipkow of Germany, and the year is given as 1884. Nipkow used the principle of the variation in the electrical conductivity of selenium when exposed to light, and he used scanning discs as mechanical effectors. What else was there for him to use before the development of the phototube and the current-amplifying electron tube? The resolution of Nipkow’s television was very poor due to the “slow light” characteristics of selenium response and the lack of amplification. There were, however, several men in the United States who transmitted a sort of television before Nipkow did so in Germany.
Resolution of the images of these even earlier experimenters in the field (Aurelian Bentley, Jessy Polk, Samuel J. Perry, Gifford Hudgeons) was even poorer than was the case with Nipkow. Indeed, none of these pre-Nipkow inventors in the television field is worthy of much attention, except Bentley. And the interest in Bentley is in the content of his transmissions and not in his technical ineptitude.
It is not our object to enter into the argument of who really did first “invent” television (it was not Paul Nipkow, and it probably was not Aurelian Bentley or Jessy Polk either); our object is to examine some of the earliest true television dramas in their own queer “slow light” context. And the first of those “slow light” or selenium (“moonshine”) dramas were put together by Aurelian Bentley in the year 1873.
The earliest art in a new field is always the freshest and is often the best. Homer composed the first and freshest, and probably the best, epic poetry. Whatever caveman did the first painting, it remains among the freshest as well as the best paintings ever done. Aeschylus composed the first and best tragic dramas, Euclid invented the first and best of the artful mathematics (we speak here of mathematics as an art without being concerned with its accuracy or practicality). And it may be that Aurelian Bentley produced the best of all television dramas in spite of their primitive aspect.
Bentley’s television enterprise was not very successful despite his fee of one thousand dollars per day for each subscriber. In his heyday (or his hey-month, November of 1873), Bentley had fifty-nine subscribers in New York City, seventeen in Boston, fourteen in Philadelphia, and one in Hoboken. This gave him an income of ninety-one thousand dollars a day (which would be the equivalent of about a million dollars a day in today’s terms), but Bentley was extravagant and prodigal, and he always insisted that he had expenses that the world wotted not of. In any case, Bentley was broke and out of business by the beginning of the year 1874. He was also dead by that time.
The only things surviving from The Wonderful World of Aurelian Bentley are thirteen of the “slow light” dramas, the master projector, and nineteen of the old television receivers. There are probably others of the receivers around somewhere, and persons coming onto them might not know what they are for. They do not look much like the television sets of later years.