MODERN LUDDITES
SKEPTICAL&ANTI-SCIENCE
SKEPTICAL&ANTI-SCIENCE
The forces against Tesla
resemble those ranged in ridicule
against Edison
Newspapers and magazines lampoon manned
moon bases
and the prospect of people on Mars is
seen as a one-way ticket.
We already have autonomous cars-but not
on our public highways
We already have drones-but not in our
high altitude skyways
Climate change is real and is really
denied.
When rockets fail,a public clamor
arises
Even when cars kill more than
wars
We want ours only
semi-autonomous.
Invention may be a perennial
impulse
so is denial,skepticism,cynicism and
satire
Captain Ludd might laugh @cell phones
and plastic -
might point out slave labor in the
fields of Apple and Amazon
but we use what we have,and project in
Light
a future that may seem robotic and
controlled
yet still echoes with a cynical
laughter of caustic delight!
Making Fun of Thomas Edison
At his peak, newspapers loved to tease the inventor. They also feared him.
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On March 25, 1878, in an
unsigned editorial, The New York Times spent a few column
inches dragging a public figure through the mud. “Something ought to be done,”
about this person, they began, “and there is a growing conviction that it had
better be done with a hemp rope.” Their subject, they alleged, was a public
figure “of the most deleterious character,” hell-bent on “the destruction of
human society”—all words fit for a true enemy. But the Times wasn’t skewering a corrupt
politician, or even a rival newsmaker. Their target was Thomas Edison, and the
provoking incident was his recent invention of the phonograph.
Looking back on Edison now, it’s
easy to see him as a perpetual hero. Although he had his fair share of
scandals—the War of
Currents, the Great
Phenol Plot, the patent
disputes—his modern reputation paints him as a man who single-handedly
invented the 20th century with an electric-light halo around his head. But a
trip back into the archives reveals that he was not always so revered. Although
Edison elicited reams of fawning and excited coverage, the publications of his
time also occasionally painted the great man and his inventions as creepy and
dangerous—or, more often, just plain laughable.
The late 1870s marked a time of
great inventiveness. In 1878 alone, the world was introduced to Alexander Graham
Bell’s telephone, Eadweard Muybridge’s stop-motion photography, and Gustav
Kessel’s espresso machine, to name just a few world-changing examples. In such a
competitive atmosphere, novelty, more than usefulness, was the order of the day.
Inventors were expected to prove how revolutionary their new gizmos were, and in
turn, publications rewarded them with breathless coverage. At times, to the
layperson, “progress seemed like an onslaught of newness for its own sake,”
writes the media scholar Ivy Roberts in a
new paper in Early Popular
Visual Culture.
Edison was a big player in this
era of discovery. Throughout the winter of 1877 and the spring of 1878, he
traveled the world demonstrating his newest invention, the phonograph. Scientific American describes
a typical show: Edison put the machine on a table and turned the crank, and the
phonograph proceeded to “talk,” introducing itself and exchanging various
pleasantries with gaping onlookers.
The news media responded swiftly
and variously. While plenty of outlets sung the praises of this new
techno-talker, others took the opportunity to poke fun. The aforementioned New York Times editorial leans
equally on scaremongering and humor, switching between over-the-top mockery and
genuine fear. “He has been addicted to electricity for many years,” the
editorial posits, tongue firmly in cheek, before more seriously alleging that
the phonograph, with its ability to record speech, “will eventually destroy all
confidence between man and man.”
Cartoonists had an especially good
time with the phonograph. On March 21, 1878, the front page of the illustrated
newspaper The Daily Graphic featured ten
separate sketches of ways phonographic technology might go wrong: greedy
thieves might trick elderly millionaires into vocally amending their wills;
sketchy neighbors might use opera recordings to lure women out of their homes;
and wives might frighten their husbands out of sleep by playing a tape that
yells “POLICE! FIRE!” over and over again.
Puck, a New York-based humor
magazine, published several illustrations suggesting alternate uses for the
technology. In one
of them, an angry wife records herself lecturing her absent husband, so that
when he finally returns from the bar, he can simply press play and let her
sleep. Another cartoon, by George Du Maurier in London’s Punch weekly, shows a demure,
well-dressed woman on a street corner, silently cranking her own voice out of a
phonograph. “How much better if, instead of hirsute Italian organ-grinders
parading our streets, we could have fair female phonographers playing… their
original voices!” the caption jokes.
Needless to say, this mockery
failed to stop Edison, who continued to put out earth-shaking inventions. By the
summer of 1878, he had introduced the megaphone, an instrument which, he
promised, would vastly expand the scope of what the average human could hear.
Although he marketed this as a wholesome device—one that could help the hearing
impaired, surveyors, and opera-goers—the press once again latched onto its more
scandalous and ridiculous possibilities. As Roberts details, publications from
Scientific American to Scribners put out illustrated
covers in which gentry are using the megaphone to spy on their faraway rural
neighbors. (It didn’t help that Edison originally called the megaphone “the
telephonoscope”—a name which, as the New York Sun quickly pointed out,
is “incongruous and absurd,” because “a voice cannot be seen.”)
Later that July, Edison traveled
west to view a rare solar eclipse, prompting a wave of send-ups from regional
papers. In the July 27, 1878, issue of the Denver Tribune, a satirical writer
known only as “Gnorts” devoted
his column to making fun of Edison. “He is going to accomplish something in
a short time more wonderful than all the rest of his grand achievements, and
which will greatly astonish all mankind,” wrote Gnorts, before detailing this
supposed venture: Edison planned to use the unique properties of the eclipse to
lasso the sun and pull it closer to Earth, melting the ice caps, enabling the
discovery of the North Pole, and ensuring that all of the world’s population
would have to pay him for heat and light.
“Should the plan above not be
satisfactory,” concludes Gnorts, “Mr. Edison will then divide the sun into many
millions of small ones and lease them out to all who desire suns, upon the same
conditions that he at present leases his telephones and phonographs.” The
inventor was also a boon to advertisers: “Not even Edison, with all his
inventive genius and extensive research, can find a fat person that Allen’s
Anti-Fat will not reduce at a rate of from two to five pounds per week,” read
one clip in the Cheyenne Daily
Leader. And as Edison made his way across the country, the Mercury and the Daily Sun, two rival Wyoming
papers, quickly took to comparing
each other to his more ridiculous inventions as a form of
ribbing.
Even after this journey, Edison
didn’t rest, and neither did his critics. In September of 1878, he began talking
about his plans for the electric lightbulb. Now so canonical it has become the
literal symbol
of inventiveness, electric light, too, was viewed with some skepticism.
According to Roberts, news of its impending arrival was greeted in the London Times with a spirited
debate. One October letter to the editor warned that electric lightbulbs would
lend a grayish cast to ladies’ faces, making them unattractive. “Anything more
ghastly and unnatural than the blue-white of the new illumination could scarcely
be,” agreed another, warning
that its “weird blueness” would turn people into “an assemblage of ghosts.” “The
effect may be poetical if you please,” this letter concludes, “But it is the
poetry of… mortal decay.”
A few months later, George Du
Maurier, the cartoonist at Punch, followed his phonograph
sendup with an entire Edison-themed series. In one caricature, a mother and
father in England watch and speak with their vacationing children, who are far
away in the Antipodes, almost as though they’re using a 19th century version of
Skype. Du Maurier calls this invention “Edison’s Telephonoscope”—which, as
Roberts points out, hearkens back to to the megaphone’s earlier, much-satirized
name. In another three-part cartoon, gentlefolk of all ages fly through city
streets, hover above country fields, and tumble around a well-appointed parlor,
all thanks to “Edison’s Anti-Gravitation Underclothing.”
“From the perspective of the
Victorian reader, ‘Edison’s Telephonoscope’ satirised the inventor’s misplaced
confidence,” writes Roberts. “It encouraged readers to examine both the benefits
and drawbacks of technological progress and supersession.” As she points out,
much of the worry and satire surrounding Edison taps into anxieties about
wealth, social class, and access. Who could afford the telephonoscope, if it
existed? Would the megaphone truly help everyone, or would rich people use it to
spy on their poorer neighbors? And is it so far-fetched to think that—if he
could—Edison might privatize the sun? A slightly later cover, from a July 1879
issue of the New York Daily
Graphic, continues in that vein: it shows Edison, who at that point was
looking for a new way to mine iron ore, as a
pointy-hatted wizard searching for precious metals in his backyard.
Today—when the pace of discovery
has, if anything, accelerated—new inventions, and their inventors, inspire
similar fears and feelings. Smart fridges and private moon journeys are seen as
megaphone-esque playthings of the errant rich. Facebook algorithms and cell
phone cameras are, like the phonograph, greeted as the likely tools of the
coming surveillance state. Although the question of whether any of these
perpetual fears will come to fruition—whether this constant influx of technology
will bind us, rather than free us—depends on your perspective, one enduring
tragedy is clear: after all these decades, we still don’t have anti-gravitation
underclothing. Perhaps Elon Musk will take that on next.
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