Part #301: Can I Be Electric Too?
“NEW SCIENCE CARTS! AUTHORISED IMPORTS!
PROF CHEN MEILING (CHINA) – ‘THE SILICIUM LIMIT – WHITHER YPOLOGETICS?’ (2007)
DX BEATRICE BRISTOW (ENGLAND) – ‘MANY FUTURES, MANY PASTS – THE POLY-STREAM HYPOTHESIS’ (2018 NEW!)
DR VLADIMIR NIKOLAYEV (RUSSIA) – ‘LIFE ON MARS, THE ULTIMATE QUESTION’ (2010)
Fully authorised with Ministry seal of quality! All-American voice dubbing!
Compatible with Stimmetz AND Imperial Standard cart players!
Prices start at just Ī14.9.9! Contact Pottermack Imports on Motext page 22A-551!”
– Advertising poster outside Chamberlain Hall lecture theatre, Fredericksburg, ENA.
Photographed and transcribed by Dr David Wostyn, October 2020
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(Dr Wostyn’s note)
This was one of the first lectures we observed and recorded – discreetly, as it’s not technically allowed, but fortunately their detectors aren’t looking for small solid-state electronics like our recorder. They probably wouldn’t have noticed anyway, what with Captain Nuttall providing a nice distraction by CONSTANTLY FIDGETING THROUGHOUT
(coughs)
Anyway, although this was a public lecture, we understand that Prof George Greening, the lecturer, essentially just put on the first of an existing academic lecture series he gives at Imperial College, with a few tweaks. Not the best pedagogic practice for a general audience, but for our purposes, it does pitch it at a more usefully higher level than some of the other lectures we’ve recorded...
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Recorded lecture on “The Second Interbellum: The Electric Circus” by Professor George Greening, recorded October 10th, 2020—
The period of almost 30 years, separating the Black Twenties from the Sunrise War, goes by many names. In France it is
Les Trente Glorieuses, while in Russia it is
Epokha Leta, the Age of Summer. To us in the English-speaking world, it bears the appellation awarded to it by the Californian author Elspeth Kennedy, at the time, rather than in hindsight: The Electric Circus.
All of these names have something in common. Like ‘The Black Twenties’ before them, they betray the fact that they were coined in the spirit of a more popular age. Some have dubbed the 20th century ‘The People’s Century’, and these choices of names reflect this. Not so the anodyne, stuffy names of past conflicts and periods of peace, chosen by kings, bishops, historians. Reflective of this same popular spirit, it was at this time that historiographers frequently reinterpreted their labelling of past eras from a less elitist perspective.e
Though the Diversitarian idea would continue to develop through this age, it was early on that the eighteenth century in particular would see considerable such re-examination. The American politician and historian, George Spencer-Churchill the Younger, would re-examine the past conflicts of that century – along with others of similar mind – though the ‘Central Character’ interpretation of history itself would see similar criticism, it has proved far more resilient!
Rather than elitist labels such as ‘the War of the Spanish Succession’, ‘the War of the Austrian Succession’ or ‘the War of the Diplomatic Revolution’,[1] Churchill and his fellow neo-whigs would rename these conflicts by the more global, ideological names they are more frequently known by today – the First, Second and Third Wars of Supremacy. Churchill argued that the real import of these wars had not been the issues which had dominated their
casus belli or eventual peace treaty at the time – the occupancy of a throne or ownership of a few scraps of land in Europe – but rather the seeming sideshow of those wars’ global, colonial theatres. It mattered very little for the long-term future of the nations of the human race who owned Silesia in 1759, say, a small bit of land that would change hands several more times over the ensuing centuries. Rather, the true significance was over vast swathes of land, resources and people signed over in India, Africa, or – especially – the Novamund, often almost as an afterthought at those treaties.
No matter how powerful a united Germany (for instance) might become, in terms of global cultural dominance she would forever be playing catch-up to the civilisations that spoke English or Spanish, which had expanded to fill entire continents. It mattered not that Britain/England suffered decline through the 19th century while France became arguably the world’s premier power for a time. The continuing relevance of the French language and culture in our own time, almost a century on from the end of the Black Twenties, owes far more to the founding of the enduring Pérousie colony long before that than to any transient temporal power that France wielded at that time. It is almost irrelevant that Pérousie would come into conflict with her mother country; France still benefited from her language and culture planted on the far side of the world. Such is the thesis of the Churchillians.
Of course, by mentioning the Pérousien Troubles, we implicitly highlight an issue with the labels we know the ‘Electric Circus’ period by. Most popular culture remembers the 1930s and 1940s as a time of unsurpassed peace, prosperity and development, with the 1950s dampened only by the distant drums of the coming war. But as far as the governments and ruling elites of the European (and American) nations were concerned, the 1930s-50s were a far more mixed bag than the positive names appended to them imply. Yet it is that self-same popular spirit of the age which lies at the heart of this apparent paradox. In nations as varied as Scandinavia and China, from Guinea to Bisnaga, ordinary people were standing up to demand a greater say in the governance of their lands. The Black Twenties had seen a mobilisation of society on all levels. While the Pandoric War had affected civilians far from the front lines like no war before it, the Black Twenties had been fought as much against the plague as against any human enemy. Indeed, it is significant that there is no widely accepted overarching ‘war’ label for the Black Twenties (as opposed to particular theatres or component conflicts). Again, this is a sign of the impact of the popular spirit on historiography.
Regardless, the peoples of many nations had been tested to the limit by the harrowing challenges of the 1920s. In military victory and defeat alike – the two frequently barely distinguishable – they had been weighed in the balance, and not found wanting. Now, they were unwilling to be neatly folded back into their antebellum box. Not only the male front-line veterans, but the young women who had volunteered as nurses in plague hospitals or as agricultural labourers and factory workers. Many of this group lacked voting rights, depending on the country. Frequently contrasted with their parents of the ‘Flippant’ generation, these young people would demand the right to have their fair share of influence over the leadership of those same nations that had called on them to fight, to care, to make, to harvest.
What these people (and indeed their older relatives) were frequently concerned with was their own standard of living and their economic opportunities. By any measure, the 1930s-50s were a golden age of improvement in these factors. They compared favourably even to the Long Peace, whose prosperity had frequently only trickled down so far in society. Such things had seemed unimportant in the eyes of many bourgeois commentators at the time, who might scarcely view their servants or employees as people. But the world was changing.
The point is that the 1930s-50s were frequently becoming defined by the wider populations living through them, and not merely by the formerly dominant elite commentators. As such, the fact that this age saw violent colonial wars and the ever-growing threat of Societism was ignored. The people, it transpired, rarely cared if their nation’s flag was being burnt by rebels in a far-off colony of which they knew little; rather, they cared more if their taxes were hiked to pay for a punitive expedition to put the revolt down. A minority even sympathised with rebel colonists or subject peoples fighting for their freedom. After all, the propaganda of the Black Twenties, that the nations were fighting for freedom, could not be quietly ignored and forgotten after the conflict was over. So what if wealthy businessmen lost money on their colonial investments? To the average subject – the average
voter - colonies were increasingly seen as a sink, not a source, of money.
And as the period went on, they voted with their feet.
This is not to say that the ‘Electric Circus’ age was dominated by serious, humourless politics – far from it! However, even the higher standard of living that came to much of the world was manifested in more ideological youth movements than the Flippants of the last generation. Perhaps inevitably, the global trauma of the Black Twenties defined a cutoff point of history, and two opposing youth subculture factions formed in response. The exact names and attributes of these two naturally varied greatly from nation to nation, but they were present almost everywhere in some form.
Such universality might have pleased the ghost of Pablo Sanchez, at least until someone told him that the one place which saw no such groups was, inevitably, the lands under Combine rule. Even in the latter days of Alfarus, before the Silent Revolution, such a public disagreement over a fundamental issue would be unacceptable under the black flag – even if it paradoxically meant trying to strike down an apparent ‘human universal’ that could have slotted neatly into the thesis of
Unity Through Society!
As I said, the two groups were known by many names. In the Empire and much of the English-speaking world, they came to be known as the Archies and Wreckies – short for Archaeophiles and Wreckers. Elsewhere, the local versions of the Archies might be known by names such as the Trads or the Nostalgics, and the Wreckies might be known as the Futurites or the Neophiles, but the principle was the same regardless.
The Black Twenties had shattered many comfortable assumptions about the world. The Archies sought to respond to this by looking into the past and embracing fashions, ideas, languages of past eras. The Wreckies, by contrast, thought that the Black Twenties were a signal to turn their back on all that had gone before. In its most harmless form, this might consist of wearing futuristic, utilitarian ‘rational dress’, fighting for greater Cytherean rights, and enthusiasm for the new rocket technology in peaceful forms. At its worst, some extremist Wreckies would attempt to burn down art galleries or libraries so that ‘the new is not strangled by the old’.
In many countries, commentators attempted to connect the Wreckies with Societism, but this was usually a coincidence. Ironically, one could argue that the K.a.K. in the wake of Alfarus’ death was itself an expression of the (suppressed) Wrecky ideology manifesting itself in Combine lands. Generally, however, the two rival groups were more purely aesthetic and less political than they are often portrayed. Even the Archies, no matter their backward-looking rhetoric, usually supported greater voting rights and new technology, at least in a qualified manner.
So much for the generational discourse and geopolitical contest of this era.[2] But we have yet to discuss that phenomenon which gave the age its Anglophone name – the ‘Electric Circus’. It would be a poor summary which did not discuss the nominative factor!
Electricity had been known of since antiquity, of course, to some extent. Our name for the phenomenon stems from the ancient Greek word
elektron, meaning amber – for the Greeks’ first observation of electric charge took the form of noting that an amber rod, rubbed on a wool cloth, would ‘magically’ attract small, light objects such as fragments of paper.[3] At the same time, the Chinese were inventing the compass, observing that a special ‘lodestone’ always pointed north – another piece of the puzzle. Named ‘magnetism’ after the region of Magnesia in Greece where lodestone could be found, this effect proved useful to generations of explorers, yet philosophers and proto-scientists struggled to explain it. Knowing that compasses could be thrown off by the presence of large amount of nearby iron (or iron ore), some mediaeval Europeans speculated that they their needles were pointing towards a giant iron magnetic mountain on an Arctic island![4] Few would have dreamed that this useful, but mysterious, bit of practical magic could have any connection with the amber rod party trick.
The eighteenth century saw a new interest in electricity, both classical and, eventually, channel. The famous kite experiments performed by both Ben Franklin and Abbé Nollet – we will skip over the obligatory debate over who came first! – showed that lightning is a natural form of channel electricity.[5] Henry Cavendish similarly proved that animals such as the torpedo fish and electric eel can naturally generate channel electricity, paving the way for the understanding that electric charge plays a key role in our own nervous systems. Basic charge-store devices like the Leyden Jar puzzled great minds throughout the century, and Franklin’s study of them was responsible for the victory of the monist over the dualist model of charge.[6]
It would not be until later in the 19th century that electricity and magnetism would finally be recognised as two manifestations of the same phenomenon. Always together, never apart. A moving electrical charge
must come with a magnetic field, like a shadow cast at ninety degrees into a different world; a world we cannot see, yet dimly perceive by how it impacts ours. This pairing became clear only when channel electricity became readily usable for experimentation for the first time. In the 1820s, Buysse and Luns developed the first electrochemical array, later known as a battery, and this source of power would ultimately make Lectel possible.[7] It would not be for another full century that the true potential of this invention, of electricity itself, was truly realised.
It had already become apparent that this seemingly esoteric scientific puzzle, the relationship of electricity and magnetism, actually had world-changing implications. Electricity transfrormed the world as early as the rise of Lectel in the 1850s, just as the magnetic compass had centuries earlier. Yet it was the understanding of the
connection between electricity and magnetism, beginning in the closing years of the nineteenth century, that would be truly transformative. Almost twenty years after Buysse and Luns, the Italian signalman Giacinto Masselino noticed the impact of flowing electricity on his compass, and the scientist and engineer Gianluigi Argante published his observations.[8] Theories were gradually built up to try to understand the connection between electricity and magnetism.
Not only were electricity and magnetism linked, but
light itself was now understood as an ‘electro-magnetic’ phenomenon. And there were other forms of light predicted beyond the visible, which were dramatically supported when Bietmann accurately predicted the phenomenon of Far Infralight in 1881 before it was discovered in 1894. Far Infralight was harnessed by Ilsted and Photel was born.[9]
In the Flippant era of the First Interbellum, the new invention was experimented with, used for military communication and government propaganda. It would make a radical difference to warfare, even in its clumsy, primitive, early form, in the Black Twenties conflicts. Yet its impact on civilians at this time has been greatly exaggerated. Even the most ambitious VoxHumana ideas of the Combine were themselves more propaganda than reality at this time – not helped by the Biblioteka Mundial later rewriting the history of technological development to confuse matters. The Russian Dalekodeon, more widespread, is frequently misunderstood as a Photel set, when in reality it functioned as a variant of wired quister technology.[10]
No, Photel and electricity alike would not truly transform the lives of the wider population until the Second Interbellum of the 1930s-50s – in that same popular spirit of the age. The two are inextricably linked. When electrical augmentophones [amplifiers] superseded compressed-air ones in the 1930s, they might as well have been directly augmenting that same voice of the people that equally defined the age.[11]
While Flippants had danced to clockwork grooveplayers with simple manual output horns, their children congregated in deafening grooveclubs. Musicians bemoaned the decline in the playing of instruments (and their own gigs) as music from electrically augmented grooveplayers or Photel sets could fill theatres and clubs in their absence. The invention of the electrically-powered phakophone [microphone] in 1934 led to a decline in purely instrumental songs, as it was now much more feasible for a singer to project their voice over their backing group; formerly, they had had trouble gaining sufficient volume when simply singing into a grooveplayer horn used in reverse, which had favoured singers who used a very loud, shouty style. The phakophones allowed singers to access a much greater dynamic range and still be heard. Novelty, and continuing technical limitations in other aspects, meant that this favoured a new singing style synonymous with the late 1930s, 1940s and early 1950s – the so-called Smoothies.[12]
It is telling that, while many classical
composers from previous centuries remain household names – Handel, Beethoven, Druschetzky – few
singers from before this time are remembered by all but historians of music. But from the late 1930s, we finally have decent-quality recordings of singers, and Smoothies like Jack Phantom, Leo Desaix and Gordo Valentino are still popular today, often long after they have passed away. It took a little longer for female singers, reflecting the fact that the phakophones had first been designed for a male dynamic range, but then we had other icons like the Campari Sisters and Greta Dahlqvist. Not forgetting Lady Xinyi; this was also an age when music from around the world started to be heard in far lands, without musicians and instruments needing to travel. In 1942, disappointed he would never get to see his favourite groovetape singers perform in person, engineer Tajmul Mostafa hit upon the idea of overlaying instrumental versions of songs with live phakophone performances – the global phenomenon of
khalisangita was born.[13]
Music was the most iconic way that the wider availability of electricity an Photel changed the world. But there were many others. Home appliances had formerly been only for the wealthy, powered by electric motors on-site driven by the Civic Steam supply. Technological wonders of the pre-Pandoric age as they were, they were still bulky and inefficient, often implicitly designed with the assumption that their owners would always have servants on hand to operate them. Home electricity distribution systems were developed in the First Interbellum, but these consisted of a single large electric motor for the house driven, again, by Civic Steam, town-luft or other forms of power. It would not be until the Second Interbellum that switching-channel electricity distribution became advanced and cheap enough that it could be instead be generated centrally from a power station and channelled to homes to drive appliances directly.[14]
Central rather than local power generation dramatically changed the paradigm of electricity, and would ultimately make appliances – lec-apps, to use the term your parents’ generation and mine love – something within the price range of the average person. Even something we take for granted, like the vac-bulb [incandescent lightbulb], would have been considered the preserve of the wealthy during the Black Twenties. But by the end of the Second Interbellum, in the wealthier countries every home had its electrolier. The story of electricity is not that of Prometheus stealing fire from the gods, but of all mankind demanding their right to share in that power, not merely the ruling classes.
I have given you a very Western perspective. Even in China, the Black Twenties lasted well into this period – Black Thirties, if you will, while in Europe and America they had long since become the Dirty Thirties or Flirty Thirties as the older generation railed at the allegedly decadent youth. And that’s to say nothing of Bisnaga, Panchala, and other colonies fighting for their freedom, where such ecumenical electricity would have to wait many years more. Or the Combine. Even if I was to restrict myself to Europe and America, I could define this era in many other ways. What of the important shifts in attitude towards healthcare after the plague pandemic, the creation of universal national insurance programmes, a sense that poverty and deprivation was now everyone’s problem?
But I shall leave that for another day. Instead, I shall leave you with your eyes still blinking from the glow of those electroliers in every home. For the first time, the Earth from space – as rockets would see it, before too long – declared the presence of humanity with an artificial light sharper than candles, brighter than luftlights. The whole world lit as a beacon that proclaims, we are here, and we cannot be ignored, for all our foibles and misadventures. A time that would be fondly remembered when times of strife returned, and never forgotten.
An Electric Circus, indeed…
[1] See Interlude #1 in Volume 1. The War of the Diplomatic Revolution roughly corresponds to the OTL Seven Years’ War, but did not last so long and the Hispano-Portuguese aspect became a separate conflict in TTL, the First Platinean War.
[2] The latter has only been hinted at very briefly, of course.
[3] Not that the ancient Greeks
had paper.
[4] This theory originates from a lost 14th century work
Inventio Fortunata, which names the magnetic island
Rupes Nigra or ‘Black Rock’. It routinely appeared on European maps for the next two centuries, including those of Mercator.
[5] Classical and channel electricity = static and current electricity in OTL terminology. See Interlude #11 in Volume III for more details on this period.
[6] The term condensor or capacitor is used in OTL instead of ‘charge-store’. Charge is usually presented in a dualist manner in OTL (positive and negative charges), whereas in TTL it is presented as a surfeit or deficit in a single kind of charge (negative in OTL terminology, i.e. the charge of electrons).
[7] See Interlude #11 in Volume III.
[8] See Parts #254 and #261 in Volume VII. The Dalekodeon technology appeared in OTL France under the name Theatrophone.
[9] Far Infralight is the scientific name in TTL for radio waves, but most people just use ‘Photel’ indiscriminately.
[10] See Part #254 in Volume VII.
[11] See Part #256 in Volume VII.
[12] This is the same pattern that happened in OTL, except OTL’s faster pace of electrical technological development meant that it started sooner (the relevant microphone was developed in 1923). TTL’s Smoothies are similar to OTL’s Crooners.
[13] Very similar to karaoke in OTL, which was formally invented in Japan in the 1960s but based on the existing idea of ‘sing-a-long songs’.
[14] See Part #271 in Volume VII. ‘Switching-channel electricity’ (SC) is the TTL term for alternating current (AC) electricity.
