do you believe in the telectroscope?

Coming Home (via the Tunnel!)

Paul St George is coming home after his much feted trip to America. But did anyone out there actually see him on site at the Brooklyn end? If you have any photographs of the great man in the Big Apple please do share them with us. Here he is in London (thanks cowfish!):

I am still unclear BTW as to whether Paul travels via the Tunnel or takes the plane like the rest of us. One has to assume there is some rudimentary form of transport down there.

Just a few weeks ago I might have thought of Paul as Charles Bronson in The Great Escape, tap-tapping with his trowel and being tugged to and fro on a trolley hundreds of metres below the ground. But given the grand scale and fine workmanship of the Telectroscopes, I now see in my mind’s eye a motorised carriage – the kind of thing owners of the early Wild West railways used to live in while the navvies banged out the track in front of them.

Or does Paul travel more ‘Lenin-style’ in something steel plated, fortified with blacked out windows, chuntering along slowly beneath the Atlantic, plotting and co-ordinating his own curious revolution?

But I digress. On a more practical level, it must be assumed that the doorway to the side of the Telectroscope is where Paul will once again surface. My daughter and I tried to open said door the other day, if only to see to see what lay on the other side, but it was firmly sealed.

The pressure gauge upon the door did twitch a bit as we tugged, deviating slightly from its typical range of 2 to 4 bar. Which begs more questions: how is Paul managing the extraordinary fluctuations in pressure that must occur in his subterranean world?   And how is the light, being squeezed, travelling and bending its way across the Atlantic, still producing such fine images?

Experimental Broadband Setup

Stephen Herbert wrote:

"I was amused by The Times' journalist's idea that the Telectroscope would perhaps use the 'modern version of the telegraph, broadband internet cable'. Despite such popular books as The Victorian Internet (Tom Standage 1998), there is still a conception of the internet as 'new'. Somewhere around here I have a picture of an experimental broadband webcam setup, c.1890 - I'll see if I can find it........."

I'm delighted to say that Stephen was as good as his word, and has sent an engraving (see right).  Interesting to see that the Victorians had much the same idea as us about what webcams might be for...

Isambard Kingdom Brunel

Paul St George writes:

Tim. You ask about funding and about Alexander Stanhope… This is just a quick reply because the final stages of construction are throwing up new and surprisingly time-consuming problems. I wish you could see some of the experiments and tests. In fact, why don’t we meet again?

makyoh topography

[I have invited Paul to be an author of the blog so that he can directly answer your queries and comments should he so wish. I will mark them in rusty red so that they're easy to spot.]

Paul St George replies :

Ah Stephen, you invoke Makyoh topography. I could stay silent no longer. An arcane science but there are exciting links and coincidences (sufficient to drive one mad). My friends at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences have told me all about the magic mirrors and the pigtailed LEDs. Makyoh topography also uses a rather suspect semiconductor (you also know about the red Selenium herring!). Have we met?  

Odd optics and tiny tunnels

Stephen Herbert is back again with an extraordinary story:

Probably time to come clean - there's been some deception here.

When we say "tunnel" we tend to think of a wide tube - like the Channel Tunnel. A Telectroscope doesn't need width for all of its length to work. For most of the distance, just a few inches (maybe less?) would do the trick. When the Victorians laid the Trans-Atlantic cables for the telegraph, they invented the method that could be used to lay hollow cable sheaths - which were set in a shallow trough and covered (hence technically, 'tunnels'). Effectively the Telectroscope is a form of opto-telescope (not to be confused with the earlier optical telegraph).

Today, we're familiar with fibre optics, and the idea of light not having to travel in a perfectly straight line doesn't phase us, but to the Victorians it seemed impossible. To some, makyoh topography is still something of a mystery, but in theory it COULD just work.

(Heaven knows how much money Paul must have spent on cleaning out that 'tunnel' - did he have Dyno-Rod on board?!).

The Selenium Watermark

Stephen Herbert writes:

Not many people know this but Alexander Stanhope St George put an intentional error into his draft Patent application. The red herring is the Selenium. He did this to 'watermark' anyone who tried to copy his invention. Anyone who copied without sufficient knowledge would keep the error in their text.

You will see from the various false versions of the Telectroscope invention that the others all refer to Selenium and that all there so called inventions would not work.

(For more on selenium proposals for distant vision apparatus, see my 3-vol "A History of Early Television" (Routledge 2000)).

Re: David Burder's note - it's doubtful whether the extra expense of a double tunnel would have been viable. There is some evidence that Theodore Brown later tried something similar between Salisbury and Bournemouth (using his stereophotoduplicon -for details of which see my 1997 biography "Theodore Brown's Magic Pictures"), but sadly (as always) Theo ran out of funds.