blasts from the past
The Vanishing of Gertrude Strassburger THEO PAIJMANS
In 1906 German occultist Franz Hartmann expressed his puzzlement over a strange phenomenon: “…the most astounding and perplexing [examples]… are evidenced in cases where people in their natural bodies have suddenly disappeared in one place and in an incredibly short space of time been found in another distant place, which they could not have reached by ordinary means.” Since it did not have a name, he suggested one: “To such cases the name of ‘magical metathesis’ or transposition may be given; because as far as we know, the change of locality is usually not made by one’s own efforts but by the aid of superior powers unknown to those who are subjected to it.” 1
A quarter of a century later Charles Fort introduced a new name for the phenomenon in Lo!, his third book. Fort writes: “Mostly in this book I shall specialize upon indications that there exists a transportory force that I shall call Teleportation.” 2 His proposal caught on. Lo! was widely reviewed and the American newspapers jumped on the new word. Since then, Fort is generally credited for having coined it. 3 Surprisingly, a much older example was unearthed recently of a nearsimilar word used in a similar context. It appeared on 6 March 1878 in the pages of the Times of India in a tale of teleportation with a matter transmitter, under the heading: “The Teleport: The Most Remarkable Invention Of The Age”.
In it an anonymous writer claims that a Mr Chinchpooglyjee Chowpattyjee from Bombay had invented an apparatus “by which man can be reduced to infinitesimal atoms, transmitted through the wire, and reproduced safe and sound at the other end!” How “this most remarkable disintegration” works must remain secret until his invention is patented, but a description of the device is given: “The apparatus… – of which four sets have been made – consists of a powerful battery, a metal disc nine inches diameter by half an inch thick, insulated from the ground by four ordinary telegraph insulators, a curiously constructed bellshaped glass house reaching from the ground to about six feet high by three feet wide and three feet deep, at the apex of which is an iron funnel, six inches diameter at the mouth and tapering away outside for about 18 inches, until it becomes of a diameter of a quarter of an inch. The wire along which the experiment is to be made is fastened into this end by a screw. Round the funnel is wound coil upon coil of fine silk-covered wire. The ends of this wire are carried into Mr Chinchpooglyjee’s private room, into which we were not allowed to enter, as here are contained the portions of his apparatus which he wishes, at present, to keep secret.”
Demonstrations follow. “Four glass houses were set up, two at one side of the compound, A and B, and two at the other side, C and D: A was connected by wire with C, and B with D.” A dog is placed on the metal disc in A, and the inventor applies a powerful current to the under side of the disc. The
“Some portions of the currents must have gone by the wrong wires, for the man and dog were mixed!”
dog changes size and becomes vapour-like and disappears in a matter of seconds to reappear in house C. “Now we will try man”, the inventor says, and a boy is placed in the glass dome of B: “The current was again applied to the under part of the disc, and the same effect was observed as with the dog. The house was instantaneously filled with a vaporous man whose features and parts were quite distinct until they disappeared… In 15 seconds Pedro was gone. Running over to D there we found him grinning more than ever.” A final demonstration is given and those familiar with the story of The Fly know what to expect: “Mr. Chinchpooglyjee said he would now send both man and dog at the same time through the two wires, from C and D back to A and B.” As the inventor applies the current, a terrified bystander flees the scene, accidentally knocking the wires off the wooden pegs from which they are suspended: “…on our return to A and B we saw with horror the mischief the unhappy man had caused. In falling, the wires must have been in contact for the fraction of a second, and some portions of the currents must have gone by the wrong wires, for the man and the dog were mixed! On the hindquarters of the dog was an unmistakable black human nose, and from the face of poor Pedro hung a tail – a tail which was still wagging. The horror and excitement caused us to lose consciousness at this point, and when we recovered we beheld a well-known surgeon holding with one hand a cruel looking knife and with the other trying to steady the still wagging tail. We spare our readers the details…” The story ends with the assurance that the inventor is confident that his system will transmit bodies to any distance, “and that by improved apparatus he will shortly be able to send a fully developed man to England, through the various sections of the sub-marine cable in less than four and a half minutes…” 4
The fantastic account, which was reprinted in other newspapers, 5 may have been inspired by the very first teleportation story involving a matter transmitter, ‘The Man Without a Body’ which was published just a year before in the Sun, a newspaper from New York. This story was printed without a by-line as well, but its writer was Edward Page Mitchell, the later editor-in-chief of the Sun. In his story we meet professor Dummkopf, the German word for ‘stupid’, who now is but a shrivelled head in a glass case. The professor has discovered “the great secret of the transmission of atoms”, and has given the name “The Telepomp” to his method of dissolving a body into atoms by way of “chemical affinity or by a sufficiently strong electric current”. The professor tests the device on himself: “I began to disintegrate at my feet and slowly disappeared under my own eyes. My legs melted away, and then my trunk and arms. That something was wrong, I knew from the exceeding slowness of my dissolution, but I was helpless. Then my head went and I lost all consciousness… I recovered consciousness. I opened my eyes... My chin was materializing, and with great satisfaction I saw my neck slowly taking shape. Suddenly, and about at the third cervical vertebra, the process stopped. In a flash I knew the reason. I had forgotten to replenish the cups of my battery with fresh sulphuric acid, and there was not electricity enough to materialize the rest of me. I was a Head, but my body was Lord knows where.” 6
Mitchell, one of America’s science fiction pioneers, also had a lifelong fascination with the supernatural. He wrote ghost stories and interviewed and befriended Madame Blavatsky, whom he nevertheless considered a fraud. 7 Edward Everett Hale, writer of The Brick Moon (1869), the first science fiction story involving an artificial satellite, was his onetime mentor. At the Sun one of his colleagues was Garett P Serviss who penned ‘Edison’s Conquest of Mars’ (1898), where a disintegration ray invented by Edison defeats the Martians, who, we learn, also built the Sphinx. The ancient Egyptians developed an interplanetary matter transmitter thousands of years ago in Fred T Jane’s To Venus
in Five Seconds (1897). They used it to travel back and forth between the pyramids of Egypt and Central America but sometimes they ended up on Venus, due to interference with a similar matter transmitter technology of the Venusians. 8
A teleportation resembling the procedure of ‘The Teleport’ is encountered in ‘Prof. Vehr’s Electrical Experiment’, a short story by Robert Milne from 1885. It too features an enormous glass bell with “a marked resemblance to the known characteristics of a Leyden jar”, into which the person is placed and electricity is applied. “I distinctly saw his form become thin, filmy and transparent it grew, till the attenuation was such that even the outline was scarcely visible… ‘He has gone’ whispered the professor, with subdued excitement…” It ends badly as well; the atoms of the man who was teleported to his lover as well as hers are dispersed in the ether on their way back. 9 Milne did not coin a name for the phenomenon, but Henry William Stacpoole did a year later. He called his teleportation method ‘Teleporon’ in his similarly titled story published in 1886.10 The disintegration into a vapour-like substance that most of these stories feature is reminiscent of the earliest tale involving a teleportation, published in 1855. In it a man journeys to the Sun and visits its inhabitants by becoming mist-like: “My feelings at the moment of dissolution it would be impossible to describe. The molecules of my body partly separated, and became thin and vaporous. Cohesion, however, still feebly existed, and, curiously enough, my sensations were by no means unpleasant…” 11
In these early tales, as well as in later stories such as The Fly or accounts of the ‘Philadelphia Experiment’, the teleportations often go haywire, echoing the erratic nature of Fort’s universe, where people suddenly appear or disappear and anomalies unexpectedly come crashing down from the super-Sargasso sea. In addition to Hartmann’s ‘magical metathesis’ or ‘transposition’, these early science fiction stories also introduced new words like Teleporon, Telepomp and Teleport.
The search for that one captivating expression or phrase to define the phenomenon went on for much longer, but in the end Fort coined the winning verb.