Look to the West Volume VII: The Eye Against the Prism
- Thread starter Thande
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Thande
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Your regularly scheduled LTTW update will be coming later today (er, once I've written it) but in the meantime, check out the Introduction to LTTW article on SLP. I didn't get a chance to cover everything I wanted given the word limit - now I'm wishing I'd had a chance to talk about alternate terminology as Michael C suggested, but oh well, I get LTTW examples of that regularly into my article series on that very subject.
I read this as "article on SCP" and I thought I knew the combine was creepy but this is ridiculous.
261
Thande
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Part #261: Give Me Some Time, I’m Living in Twilight
“No, that’s a negative. NEGATIVE. Neasden, Ealing, Greenwich...yes. Yes, no I mean! That’s a negative on bringing DESCARTES to White Gate. Authorisation GALAHAD is for Gold Dolphin only. Please acknowlerdge and confirm. And there’s an authorised French restaurant next to the Hoddesdon service station on the R14...yes, Hackney, Orpington, Deptford...yes. Just take him there. No, no-one will blame you if this leads to war with France over tubecooker-reheated dolphinish potatoes. White Gate out.”
*
From: Motext Pages MS070A;L [retrieved 22/11/19].
Extraneous advertising has been left intact.
INVENTIONS THAT CHANGED THE WORLD INDEX PAGE!
...
These Motext pages will include recaps and supplementary information that we didn’t have time to cover in the Motoscope programmes. Just select the code option below for the programme you want!
MS070C The Ypologist
MS070D Asimcony
MS070E The Standard Crate
MS070F Photel
MS070G Gunpowder
MS070H The Aerodrome
MS070J The Grooveplayer
MS070K The Printing Press
MS070L The Quister
MS070L The Quister
Loading...
Patrick Neil Fitzgerald was born in the town of Macroom, Ireland in 1851. To all schoolchildren (at least in the English-speaking world) he is the inventor of the quister. In reality, as with most inventions, the quister was the result of painstaking work by many people in many different nations. However, given what Fitzgerald went through before the quister was accepted by the world, perhaps he deserves more credit than most!
Fitzgerald studied law at Trinity College Dublin. It was still a time when academia tended to sneer on his real area of interest, engineering and the electrical sciences. This was especially true in the stuffy academia of Ireland, containing many old-fashioned British academics who had fled there from either Blandford or Populism. Trinity had always been an Irish answer to the old Oxbridge; now it preserved a memory of the old days in the age of a bonfire of tradition over St George’s Channel. Fitzgerald was never more than a moderately competent lawyer, but his studies in that area did at least stand him in good stead when it came to managing his patents later on.
Electricity had been regarded for a long time as a scientific curiosity with no practical use. This rapidly changed with the introduction of Lectel by the Carolinians during the Great American War, shortly before Fitzgerald’s birth. However, even when Fitzgerald was a young man, things remained contentious due to the so-called ‘Telegraph Wars’. The existing Optel companies mostly sought to suppress and attack the new rival of Lectel, sometimes by open sabotage, sometimes by campaigns of character assassination in the press. A few of those companies instead embraced the new technology and tried to control it, but their rivals had succeeded in fogging the waters to at least some extent. Even after Lectel came out on top in the late 1870s and 1880s, the Optel companies could rely on a shrunken but loyal customer base—older people who believed the propaganda that Lectel was flawed and error-prone, or that their messages were being intercepted and read, or even that the cables themselves gave off dangerous invisible energies. With a breathtaking lack of self-awareness, some of the Optel companies even encouraged paranoid Sutcliffist gangs to cut Lectel cables and smash their pylons—these being very much the same kind of people who had been burning Optel towers and lynching their operators not so many decades before.
Perhaps the contentiousness of this question is one reason why Fitzgerald’s electrical hobby did not take him into the field of Lectel. Ireland, quite conservative and adequately served by an extensive Optel network criss-crossing the relatively small island, was almost uniquely well-equipped to resist the siren song of Lectel, at least until the final decade of the nineteenth century. Instead, Fitzgerald looked into other applications of electricity. He was one of many inventors to experiment with precursors to the incandescent coalstuff lightglobe, which finally became commercially viable in the years following the Pandoric War.[1] He also worked with chemist Sean Alfred Doyle on electrochemistry, which contributed to the development of superior battery technologies.
But Fitzgerald is, of course, best known for the quister. His work would have been impossible without that of his predecessors. Antonio Correa, a Portuguese exile working in Madrid (and later Lyon) secured a patent in 1885 for a device he called a “Phakophone”, Greek for ‘sound lens’. The name was derived from the idea that the device could be used to magnify sound, in the same way that a lens could magnify an image. In practice, it seems Correa’s claims in this regard were exaggerated. His device could convert sound into an electrical signal and then reconvert it back to sound, but there was little to no magnification (amplification) involved, as well as a dramatic reduction in sound fidelity. Correa’s device worked using a diaphragm to capture sound, a technology that had already been pioneered the previous decade by Kabanov and Deryabkin’s Phonosphrage (see our programme on The Grooveplayer).
Correa had deduced that if a metal rod was joined to a vibrating diaphragm, then placed within a substance whose electrical viscosity would vary in response to the rod’s moment, the sound vibrations would be converted to an electrical analogue and then back again. This was in accordance with Riedel’s Rule, published in 1859, which related conductance, electric pressure and viscosity.[2] His choice of substance was water containing a small amount of vitriolic acid. His device worked as a proof of principle, but produced very poor quality sound when the electric signal was reconverted back again after being amplified. It might have been considered acceptable if Correa had transmitted the signal across Lectel wires and reproduced (imperfect) human speech on the other side of the country, but oddly (in hindsight) this does not appear to have occurred to him.[3] Some have suggested that Correa might have held some of the holdover anti-Lectel views circulating thanks to the Optel companies’ propaganda, or perhaps his wife did and he did not wish to antagonise her by going into that industry. Other historians have suggested that it really did never cross Correa’s mind due to his focus on one specific application for the technology, which is something which has frequently taken place with other inventors throughout history.
Another set of early experiments stemmed from the work of Jeremiah Maybury and B. Franklin Holmes, two mining engineers who worked for the powerful First Westernesse Mining Corporation. Maybury was a workingman by birth who had fought his way up to management through practical experience, while Holmes was a middle-class academic who had studied at the University of St Lewis before taking employment with FWMC. Despite these disparate backgrounds, they were great friends and both were fascinated by the properties of the minerals they mined. In particular, Maybury was an advocate for the idea that FWMC should not simply seek to extract those minerals currently prized, but to seek applications for those that were presently thrown away as scrap. He had had a long career, and had become self-educated through libraries in what had come before. In particular, he cited the fact that the Spanish in New Granada had once thrown away vast amounts of platinum, dumping it in the sea, as they had seen it only as an adulterant for gold coins. It was not until research in Spain, funded by Charles III, that platinum could be successfully purified and worked. But then, its properties had led to it being in high demand, initially for non-tarnishing silver-coloured jewellery, and then in powdered form as a catalytic ignition device for gaslights. Maybury pointed out that many of the ‘useless’ materials being abandoned in the polluted slagheaps of Gualpa and Verdigris might be valuable in a few years as technology changed.
Holmes, meanwhile, had been raised by an ornithologist father who was a Taxonomist—someone who celebrated Carl Linnaeus’ scientific achievements, and was angry that his legacy had been hijacked by Racist ideologies from the Jacobins to the Burdenists. Holmes had grown up reading his father’s Linnaeus books, and had come across some work that that versatile Swede had produced in 1747. Linnaeus (along with some other natural philosophers) had discovered that some minerals, such as tourmaline, could generate an electric pressure gradient [potential] in response to a temperature change.[4] This aspect of Linnaeus’ career, at least, had been largely ignored at the time, as the late eighteenth century had seen a temporary decline of interest in electricity as a field of research. However, Holmes was fascinated by the idea of what was dubbed ‘pyroelectricity’. As well as replicating Linnaeus’ results, he wondered if some materials might produce an electric pressure gradient if subjected to mechanical force rather than heating. He proved that this took place with Linnaeus’ tourmaline as well as other substances, including the quartz crystals that were largely abandoned (other than a few attractive examples as semi-precious jewellery) as by-products of the Arkensor mines. He and Maybury had discovered what was dubbed piezoelectricity (piezo- from the Greek word ‘to squeeze’).
Piezoelectricity would go on to have important uses in later years, but was initially just a curiosity. Holmes did work with gunsmiths Martin Lovell and Julius Strecker on producing an ‘electro-lock’ firing mechanism for weapons as an alternative to compression-lock firing caps. However, this did not appear to bring any advances over the latter, and the project was abandoned when a shed was blown up during one experiment, burning fragments landing amongst the surprised folk in Coppertown market square.
It is Holmes’ second attempt at a practical use, with Maybury, which interests us here. In 1889 Holmes used a crystal of Rochelle salt (kalium natrium tartrate)[5] as the basis of a Phakophone of his own (though he did not use that name). Possessing strong piezoelectric properties, the crystal’s electrical viscosity changed when subject to pressure (such as that from a voice against a diaphgram). Ironically, Holmes did realise the potential of being able to transmit the human voice over a long distance through wires, unlike Correa, but also unlike Correa he did not have the idea of electrically magnifying the signal to make this practical. Piezoelectric phakophones did become useful later on, but not for several decades after their invention.[6]
We might, therefore, assume that Fitzgerald was the first to put those two concepts together. Even that is a contentious statement, however, with many other nations claiming other inventors as the ‘real’ one—as is their right. Many inventors were working on the concept at the same time. Fitzgerald is remembered for three reasons. Firstly, his earlier work on coalstuff filament lightglobes had given him familiarity with coalstuff’s electrical properties, which led him to invent the coalstuff phakophone in 1895.[7] Fitzgerald’s phakophone consisted of two metal plates, one thinner than the other, separated by a layer of coalstuff granules and with an electric current passed across the whole, imperfectly conducted by the coalstuff. The outer, thinner plate functioned as a diaphgram in response to the vibrations of a voice, which altered the pressure on the granules and therefore changed their electric viscosity. The variation produced by the sound pressure was therefore reproduced as a variation in the electric current, which could be magnified and transmitted through Lectel lines. The technology was very crude by later standards, but hard-wearing and functional.
Fitzgerald experimented with one phakophone in his office at Trinity and a second down in the porters’ lodge, connected by a wire, with the idea that important visitors could be announced to him as they arrived. He was not secretive about the experiment, but it is believed that those helping him believed his device was a purely acoustic speaking-tube, as were already somewhat well known.[8] The idea of two tins joined by a taut string through a hole in the wall as a primitive communications device was also known, being notorious in contemporary fiction as a way for two lovers in adjacent rooms to get around their chaperones.[9]
This was where Fitzgerald’s second advantage came into place, although it turned out to be a double-edged sword. He was a showman. Though only a mediocre lawyer, he was most effective when functioning as a counsel who could play to the court with his theatrical, dramatic rhetoric. He brought this same style to marketing his new product. Having tested his machine to the point that it was capable of transmitting sound of adequate quality across the city of Dublin, he decided to launch it. Using capital from a wealthy friend, he staged a demonstration in Temple Bar Square—a deliberately lower-class location where novelty would be viewed with interest rather than snobbishly rejected. This took place in July 1896, immediately prior to the outbreak of the Pandoric War. Passers-by gasped in wonder as they were invited to stand in a booth on one side of the street and speak into a horn, then heard it return the voices of their friends in the booth on the other side. Though the sound was crackly and imperfect, the demonstration worked. Hundreds of Dubliners became fascinated by the latest craze of the day.
Unfortunately for Fitzgerald, the means he had chosen to demonstrate his new patent—though effective—led to him being shunned by higher society. His machine was dismissed as a mere toy to appeal to the credulous lower classes. The name ‘Phakophone’ for the speech input devices did not help, sounding uncomfortably like the words ‘fake’ and ‘phoney’.[10] As for the whole system, Fitzgerald had wanted to call it the Televox (far-speaker), already envisaging that Lectel-style lines would carry voices from Belfast to Cork and beyond. However, dismissive write-ups in the Irish Register and the Dublin Comet would give it the name it has born in most countries since: the Ventriloquist Machine, or Quister for short.
Undaunted by the fact that he was now being shunned by legal high society, Fitzgerald persisted with his work. This was his third advantage; the Pandoric War had intervened, and he had several years to perfect his invention. The combination of the war distraction, and the press’ cold reception to his demonstration, meant that other inventors around the world were slow to jump on the bandwagon. The Quister did not seem to have many war applications, even to those who actually believed it was real and not an elaborate hoax, so the Irish government did not trouble Fitzgerald during the war years. Finally, in the immediate aftermath of the Third Glorious Revolution in England and Scotland, with panicked crowds on the streets of Dublin, Fitzgerald approached the new government of Brian Mulcahy (Xavier Finucane having just tendered his resignation to the Duke of Mornington). Fitzgerald offered his invention to Mulcahy as a means to speed up voice communication between government buildings without needing Lectel couriers. At a time when it seemed likely that Ireland was about to be invaded by either English or American troops, Mulcahy seized upon the idea as a way to look like he was doing something.[11]
The rest of the world had become used to dismissing the Ventriloquist Machine as a hoax or toy, when they thought of it at all, and it was quite a surprise to see the refined, reliable product of a few years’ extra work in use by the Irish government. Companies around the world rapidly began building their own machines under patent, though Fitzgerald’s hopes for the name’ ‘Televox’ remained vain ones. Ever afterwards, men and women would speak of quisting one another. The one exception was Scandinavia, which did adopt ‘Televox’ because ‘quist’ sounded like the Swedish word for ‘twig’ and sounded absurd.
Fitzgerald’s design had mostly been built around the assumption that there would be a closed loop of two, or at most three or four, Phakophones, and there was nothing to prevent everyone speaking at once. While adequate for Mulcahy’s government buildings, this was unsuitable for a network stretching across a whole country with thousands of users. Two Polish engineers, Tadeusz Lomacz and Dawid Kuszczak, were the first to develop the Quister Hub, so called by analogy to railway hubs.[12] Hubs had already been in use for Lectel systems, but proved even more useful for quisters. In the early days, hubs simply had all the electrical cables from the quisters coming together at a single switchboard, where the operator would physically link one cable end to another using a linking wire. Typically, the person placing the quist would first tell the operator whom he or she was trying to contact, and then the operator would find the relevant cable end and link them. The link would only be broken when the call was over. Soon, the numbers of people using quisters meant that more elaborate, hierarchical switchboards were needed, and numbers and location markers were used to simplify finding a user in the increasingly large list. Books of quist numbers were produced almost as soon as the system appeared, with the earliest subscribers typically being doctors and other essential businesses. Public quist stations first appeared in Prague in 1905, where members of the public who lacked their own quister at home could place quists to these businesses for a fee.
Indeed, Prague soon eclipsed Dublin as the centre of quister research, and for good reason. King John II’s Russian-imposed throne was very shaky, as the riots of 1904 proved. Tsarevich Paul, an enthusiast for new technologies (as later events proved) saw the quister as a potential means of controlling dissent and coordinating imperial forces. Given the vast gulfs of the Russian Empire (which both Optel and Lectel has struggled in turn to link up), he decided to start smaller by attempting to stabilise the Czechosilesian kingdom. The Russian secret police, the Okhrana,[13] was already in the habit of opening and reading the postal letters and Lectel messages of Russian subjects on a routine basis. Not a few Okhrana men had done well for themselves in exploiting the stock-trading information they encounted in such important state security operations. But the quister...the quister was already proving popular, and people even in other nations were accustomed to the idea that the operator was potentially listening in on their conversation. Yet, as a number of newspapers had remarked, quist users seemed to forget this and talk as though the operator was not there even when they certainly were. It was a perfect opportunity to expand state surveillance of those subversive elements.
The real breakthrough in Czechosilesia, however, was the realisation that the system could also be used one-way to transmit music or audio-only plays from a single source to many recipients. Starting in 1906, operas, concerts and other media were transmitted by the Vzdivaldo state company. At this time, Photel sets were banned or heavily restricted in Russia and the other Vitebsk Union states.[14] The Imperial Soviet feared that the technology was too difficult to control and there were too many possibilities of unauthorised stations. (This fear was, of course, unjustified, as the Combine quite successfully ran an autocratic Photel system in the same years—whilst ironically being suspicious of quisters!)
The centralised quist system, generically dubbed Dalekodeon (from the Russian word for ‘faraway’ and the Greek word for ‘theatre’) provided an alternative source of entertainment for Czechosilesian, and later Polish, Lithuanian and Russian, subjects. It was also sometimes used in other countries, but generally could not compete with Photel.[15] The much larger rollout of Dalekodeon systems in Russia itself was masterminded by the Imperial Tarefikhov Company, a corporate body which had begun as a railway company (as the name implies) but had moved on to Lectel and now a new technology in turn. ITC was able to use its existing Lectel infrastructure and experience to speed up the development of the Dalekodeon network.
From the point of view of the user, the Dalekodeon node (commonly abbreviated by its users) was a large, roughly conical or pyramidal device whose outer case was made of tough hardwoods. The more expensive ones were typically decorated with impressive Slavicist artwork or carvings. The node often occupied pride of place in a living room. The content of programmes available became more diverse, with comedies and more populist dramas, and systems were developed to allow switching between multiple channels. The nodes became a status symbol for the Russian middle-classes, with state-backed schemes helping even the poorer end of this bracket afford a node via breaking up the cost or rental. Isolated villages and city slums typically got one larger version (later often amplified with an Augmentophone compressed-air device) run by the mayor or other local authority figure, to which passers-by could listen in exchange for a small fee.
What was ‘known’ to everyone, of course, was that the Dalekodeon nodes could be made more cheaply than ‘proper’ quisters because they were only one-way; they only produced sound, rather than detecting it. Any engineers who pointed out that the diaphragms could always work both ways were quietly silenced. Tsarevich Paul had successfully persuaded a large portion of his vast empire’s population to place a listening post for the secret police into their own homes...
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From: Motext Pages MS191A [retrieved 22/11/19].
Extraneous advertising has been left intact.
Welcome to the Motext tie-in page for our new historical documentary series, “The Bear and the Basilisk”. In this series, historians led by Sir Roger Palfrey and Anna Weatheringham will be taking us back to the days of the turn of the last century. They will try to answer the question that a generation of kids in history classes always ask—why didn’t people in the 1900s see how dangerous the Combine and Societism would become? Why didn’t they try to stamp it out then and there, when it was weak? How could they be so blind, so stupid?
Of course, they weren’t blind or stupid. This is an illustration of the folly of trying to make sense of the past when viewing it through the tinted lenses of hindsight. Today, it seems ‘obvious’ to us that Alfarus’ regime was the most dangerous one around at the time. But that wasn’t the case back then. South America was far away. The Societists had barely fought off a French intervention, something which we’d have expected the old UPSA to do anyway. And a lot of people still thought of the Combine as being just the UPSA, or its wider alliance the Hermandad, under a new regime. It would take a long time for the truth to become clear.
That’s a negative point, why people underestimated the Combine. But you’ll probably have heard that before. Instead of talking about why they underestimated the Combine, let’s talk about why they overestimated other potential threats. Or did they, in fact, overestimate them? Do we only call those judgements wrong now because of how history turned out? As the speculative romantics will remind us, it could have been very different!
If an ultratellurian[16] looked upon the world of 1910, he might well say there was one regime that was obviously going to be a major threat to world peace in the future. But it wouldn’t be the Combine, still slowly rebuilding after the war and the intervention, painstakingly constructing the nightmare of the Final Society. Nor would it be the ENA, retreating into self-accusation and dreams of Social Americanism; nor France, the lofty ambitions of the Marseilles Protocol brought crashing down by the embarrassment of the failed intervention. Perhaps it might be powerful China, but China had got what it wanted, for the most part; it was newly reunited, that ancient scar was healing, and its people were consumed with deciding what the future now looked like.
No, the obvious threat to the future was the one empire that had come out of the Pandoric War virtually unscathed, save for the loss of its largely useless Beiqing puppet state. The empire that had crushed its rivals in Europe, swatted away its old Ottoman foe and pushed back the Americans on their own home continent, yet whose rulers remained unsatisfied. That land was confident in its swagger, fuelled by ever-growing industrial production, convinced of its cultural special place in history.
Russia.
And, of course, one could not strictly say that ultratellurian was wrong. We think back on the Black Twenties by focusing on their aftermath, the vile harvest of the Doctrine of the Last Throw. We do not stop to think about whose actions produced the circumstances which made it possible for Alfarus to throw the dice at all...
[1] In OTL the carbon filament lightbulb first became practical in the early-to-mid 1880s, and was eclipsed by the tungsten filament lightbulb about twenty to thirty years later. ‘Coalstuff’ for carbon is the agreed scientific term in TTL, based on an anglicisation of German Kohlenstoff.
[2] OTL Ohm’s Law, published in 1827, though not widely accepted until the 1840s. Note that while TTL still uses the term ‘current’, ‘pressure’ is used instead of ‘voltage’ and ‘viscosity’ instead of ‘resistance’.
[3] In OTL Alexander Graham Bell’s famous first telephone experiment did use a liquid microphone of this type.
[4] Linnaeus also did this in OTL. He got about a bit.
[5] AKA sodium potassium tartrate in OTL. It was first isolated by an apothecary in Rochelle in 1675, hence the name.
[6] In OTL piezoelectric or ‘crystal’ microphones were often used in valve / tube radio sets, but were typically subject to high levels of noise from the electrical impedence of the crystal.
[7] I.e. the carbon microphone.
[8] These were already in use by the turn of the nineteenth century. In OTL, the wheel of HMS Victory was shot away by enemy fire during the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805, but a speaking-tube was used to issue steering orders from the quarterdeck all the way down to where sailors were working the tiller manually.
[9] In OTL this was dubbed the ‘lovers’ telephone’ by the Victorians.
[10] The word ‘phoney’ is thought to have originated in Ireland in the eighteenth century.
[11] Properly this should be ‘British or American’, but this writer, like many people, tends to act as though Great Britain was split up immediately after the Third Glorious Revolution.
[12] Called a telephone exchange in OTL, similarly by analogy to railway exchanges.
[13] This term was also used in OTL for the Tsarist secret police. It long postdates the POD of TTL, but simply means ‘guards’ and would be a likely choice for any similar organisation.
[14] ‘Vitebsk Union’ is a (largely anachronistic at this point) term used to describe Russia and her allies and vassals, the name stemming from a series of treaties signed in the city of Vitebsk across a period from the 1880s to the 1920s.
[15] A similar OTL system, the Théâtrophone, was first demonstrated in France in 1881 (and listened to by, among others, Victor Hugo). Coming a decent time before radio, it managed to hang on as an alternative until the 1930s.
[16] Alien.
“No, that’s a negative. NEGATIVE. Neasden, Ealing, Greenwich...yes. Yes, no I mean! That’s a negative on bringing DESCARTES to White Gate. Authorisation GALAHAD is for Gold Dolphin only. Please acknowlerdge and confirm. And there’s an authorised French restaurant next to the Hoddesdon service station on the R14...yes, Hackney, Orpington, Deptford...yes. Just take him there. No, no-one will blame you if this leads to war with France over tubecooker-reheated dolphinish potatoes. White Gate out.”
–part of a transmission to or from the English Security Directorate base at Snowdrop House, Croydon, intercepted and decrypted by Thande Institute personnel
*
From: Motext Pages MS070A;L [retrieved 22/11/19].
Extraneous advertising has been left intact.
INVENTIONS THAT CHANGED THE WORLD INDEX PAGE!
...
These Motext pages will include recaps and supplementary information that we didn’t have time to cover in the Motoscope programmes. Just select the code option below for the programme you want!
MS070C The Ypologist
MS070D Asimcony
MS070E The Standard Crate
MS070F Photel
MS070G Gunpowder
MS070H The Aerodrome
MS070J The Grooveplayer
MS070K The Printing Press
MS070L The Quister
MS070L The Quister
Loading...
Patrick Neil Fitzgerald was born in the town of Macroom, Ireland in 1851. To all schoolchildren (at least in the English-speaking world) he is the inventor of the quister. In reality, as with most inventions, the quister was the result of painstaking work by many people in many different nations. However, given what Fitzgerald went through before the quister was accepted by the world, perhaps he deserves more credit than most!
Fitzgerald studied law at Trinity College Dublin. It was still a time when academia tended to sneer on his real area of interest, engineering and the electrical sciences. This was especially true in the stuffy academia of Ireland, containing many old-fashioned British academics who had fled there from either Blandford or Populism. Trinity had always been an Irish answer to the old Oxbridge; now it preserved a memory of the old days in the age of a bonfire of tradition over St George’s Channel. Fitzgerald was never more than a moderately competent lawyer, but his studies in that area did at least stand him in good stead when it came to managing his patents later on.
Electricity had been regarded for a long time as a scientific curiosity with no practical use. This rapidly changed with the introduction of Lectel by the Carolinians during the Great American War, shortly before Fitzgerald’s birth. However, even when Fitzgerald was a young man, things remained contentious due to the so-called ‘Telegraph Wars’. The existing Optel companies mostly sought to suppress and attack the new rival of Lectel, sometimes by open sabotage, sometimes by campaigns of character assassination in the press. A few of those companies instead embraced the new technology and tried to control it, but their rivals had succeeded in fogging the waters to at least some extent. Even after Lectel came out on top in the late 1870s and 1880s, the Optel companies could rely on a shrunken but loyal customer base—older people who believed the propaganda that Lectel was flawed and error-prone, or that their messages were being intercepted and read, or even that the cables themselves gave off dangerous invisible energies. With a breathtaking lack of self-awareness, some of the Optel companies even encouraged paranoid Sutcliffist gangs to cut Lectel cables and smash their pylons—these being very much the same kind of people who had been burning Optel towers and lynching their operators not so many decades before.
Perhaps the contentiousness of this question is one reason why Fitzgerald’s electrical hobby did not take him into the field of Lectel. Ireland, quite conservative and adequately served by an extensive Optel network criss-crossing the relatively small island, was almost uniquely well-equipped to resist the siren song of Lectel, at least until the final decade of the nineteenth century. Instead, Fitzgerald looked into other applications of electricity. He was one of many inventors to experiment with precursors to the incandescent coalstuff lightglobe, which finally became commercially viable in the years following the Pandoric War.[1] He also worked with chemist Sean Alfred Doyle on electrochemistry, which contributed to the development of superior battery technologies.
But Fitzgerald is, of course, best known for the quister. His work would have been impossible without that of his predecessors. Antonio Correa, a Portuguese exile working in Madrid (and later Lyon) secured a patent in 1885 for a device he called a “Phakophone”, Greek for ‘sound lens’. The name was derived from the idea that the device could be used to magnify sound, in the same way that a lens could magnify an image. In practice, it seems Correa’s claims in this regard were exaggerated. His device could convert sound into an electrical signal and then reconvert it back to sound, but there was little to no magnification (amplification) involved, as well as a dramatic reduction in sound fidelity. Correa’s device worked using a diaphragm to capture sound, a technology that had already been pioneered the previous decade by Kabanov and Deryabkin’s Phonosphrage (see our programme on The Grooveplayer).
Correa had deduced that if a metal rod was joined to a vibrating diaphragm, then placed within a substance whose electrical viscosity would vary in response to the rod’s moment, the sound vibrations would be converted to an electrical analogue and then back again. This was in accordance with Riedel’s Rule, published in 1859, which related conductance, electric pressure and viscosity.[2] His choice of substance was water containing a small amount of vitriolic acid. His device worked as a proof of principle, but produced very poor quality sound when the electric signal was reconverted back again after being amplified. It might have been considered acceptable if Correa had transmitted the signal across Lectel wires and reproduced (imperfect) human speech on the other side of the country, but oddly (in hindsight) this does not appear to have occurred to him.[3] Some have suggested that Correa might have held some of the holdover anti-Lectel views circulating thanks to the Optel companies’ propaganda, or perhaps his wife did and he did not wish to antagonise her by going into that industry. Other historians have suggested that it really did never cross Correa’s mind due to his focus on one specific application for the technology, which is something which has frequently taken place with other inventors throughout history.
Another set of early experiments stemmed from the work of Jeremiah Maybury and B. Franklin Holmes, two mining engineers who worked for the powerful First Westernesse Mining Corporation. Maybury was a workingman by birth who had fought his way up to management through practical experience, while Holmes was a middle-class academic who had studied at the University of St Lewis before taking employment with FWMC. Despite these disparate backgrounds, they were great friends and both were fascinated by the properties of the minerals they mined. In particular, Maybury was an advocate for the idea that FWMC should not simply seek to extract those minerals currently prized, but to seek applications for those that were presently thrown away as scrap. He had had a long career, and had become self-educated through libraries in what had come before. In particular, he cited the fact that the Spanish in New Granada had once thrown away vast amounts of platinum, dumping it in the sea, as they had seen it only as an adulterant for gold coins. It was not until research in Spain, funded by Charles III, that platinum could be successfully purified and worked. But then, its properties had led to it being in high demand, initially for non-tarnishing silver-coloured jewellery, and then in powdered form as a catalytic ignition device for gaslights. Maybury pointed out that many of the ‘useless’ materials being abandoned in the polluted slagheaps of Gualpa and Verdigris might be valuable in a few years as technology changed.
Holmes, meanwhile, had been raised by an ornithologist father who was a Taxonomist—someone who celebrated Carl Linnaeus’ scientific achievements, and was angry that his legacy had been hijacked by Racist ideologies from the Jacobins to the Burdenists. Holmes had grown up reading his father’s Linnaeus books, and had come across some work that that versatile Swede had produced in 1747. Linnaeus (along with some other natural philosophers) had discovered that some minerals, such as tourmaline, could generate an electric pressure gradient [potential] in response to a temperature change.[4] This aspect of Linnaeus’ career, at least, had been largely ignored at the time, as the late eighteenth century had seen a temporary decline of interest in electricity as a field of research. However, Holmes was fascinated by the idea of what was dubbed ‘pyroelectricity’. As well as replicating Linnaeus’ results, he wondered if some materials might produce an electric pressure gradient if subjected to mechanical force rather than heating. He proved that this took place with Linnaeus’ tourmaline as well as other substances, including the quartz crystals that were largely abandoned (other than a few attractive examples as semi-precious jewellery) as by-products of the Arkensor mines. He and Maybury had discovered what was dubbed piezoelectricity (piezo- from the Greek word ‘to squeeze’).
Piezoelectricity would go on to have important uses in later years, but was initially just a curiosity. Holmes did work with gunsmiths Martin Lovell and Julius Strecker on producing an ‘electro-lock’ firing mechanism for weapons as an alternative to compression-lock firing caps. However, this did not appear to bring any advances over the latter, and the project was abandoned when a shed was blown up during one experiment, burning fragments landing amongst the surprised folk in Coppertown market square.
It is Holmes’ second attempt at a practical use, with Maybury, which interests us here. In 1889 Holmes used a crystal of Rochelle salt (kalium natrium tartrate)[5] as the basis of a Phakophone of his own (though he did not use that name). Possessing strong piezoelectric properties, the crystal’s electrical viscosity changed when subject to pressure (such as that from a voice against a diaphgram). Ironically, Holmes did realise the potential of being able to transmit the human voice over a long distance through wires, unlike Correa, but also unlike Correa he did not have the idea of electrically magnifying the signal to make this practical. Piezoelectric phakophones did become useful later on, but not for several decades after their invention.[6]
We might, therefore, assume that Fitzgerald was the first to put those two concepts together. Even that is a contentious statement, however, with many other nations claiming other inventors as the ‘real’ one—as is their right. Many inventors were working on the concept at the same time. Fitzgerald is remembered for three reasons. Firstly, his earlier work on coalstuff filament lightglobes had given him familiarity with coalstuff’s electrical properties, which led him to invent the coalstuff phakophone in 1895.[7] Fitzgerald’s phakophone consisted of two metal plates, one thinner than the other, separated by a layer of coalstuff granules and with an electric current passed across the whole, imperfectly conducted by the coalstuff. The outer, thinner plate functioned as a diaphgram in response to the vibrations of a voice, which altered the pressure on the granules and therefore changed their electric viscosity. The variation produced by the sound pressure was therefore reproduced as a variation in the electric current, which could be magnified and transmitted through Lectel lines. The technology was very crude by later standards, but hard-wearing and functional.
Fitzgerald experimented with one phakophone in his office at Trinity and a second down in the porters’ lodge, connected by a wire, with the idea that important visitors could be announced to him as they arrived. He was not secretive about the experiment, but it is believed that those helping him believed his device was a purely acoustic speaking-tube, as were already somewhat well known.[8] The idea of two tins joined by a taut string through a hole in the wall as a primitive communications device was also known, being notorious in contemporary fiction as a way for two lovers in adjacent rooms to get around their chaperones.[9]
This was where Fitzgerald’s second advantage came into place, although it turned out to be a double-edged sword. He was a showman. Though only a mediocre lawyer, he was most effective when functioning as a counsel who could play to the court with his theatrical, dramatic rhetoric. He brought this same style to marketing his new product. Having tested his machine to the point that it was capable of transmitting sound of adequate quality across the city of Dublin, he decided to launch it. Using capital from a wealthy friend, he staged a demonstration in Temple Bar Square—a deliberately lower-class location where novelty would be viewed with interest rather than snobbishly rejected. This took place in July 1896, immediately prior to the outbreak of the Pandoric War. Passers-by gasped in wonder as they were invited to stand in a booth on one side of the street and speak into a horn, then heard it return the voices of their friends in the booth on the other side. Though the sound was crackly and imperfect, the demonstration worked. Hundreds of Dubliners became fascinated by the latest craze of the day.
Unfortunately for Fitzgerald, the means he had chosen to demonstrate his new patent—though effective—led to him being shunned by higher society. His machine was dismissed as a mere toy to appeal to the credulous lower classes. The name ‘Phakophone’ for the speech input devices did not help, sounding uncomfortably like the words ‘fake’ and ‘phoney’.[10] As for the whole system, Fitzgerald had wanted to call it the Televox (far-speaker), already envisaging that Lectel-style lines would carry voices from Belfast to Cork and beyond. However, dismissive write-ups in the Irish Register and the Dublin Comet would give it the name it has born in most countries since: the Ventriloquist Machine, or Quister for short.
Undaunted by the fact that he was now being shunned by legal high society, Fitzgerald persisted with his work. This was his third advantage; the Pandoric War had intervened, and he had several years to perfect his invention. The combination of the war distraction, and the press’ cold reception to his demonstration, meant that other inventors around the world were slow to jump on the bandwagon. The Quister did not seem to have many war applications, even to those who actually believed it was real and not an elaborate hoax, so the Irish government did not trouble Fitzgerald during the war years. Finally, in the immediate aftermath of the Third Glorious Revolution in England and Scotland, with panicked crowds on the streets of Dublin, Fitzgerald approached the new government of Brian Mulcahy (Xavier Finucane having just tendered his resignation to the Duke of Mornington). Fitzgerald offered his invention to Mulcahy as a means to speed up voice communication between government buildings without needing Lectel couriers. At a time when it seemed likely that Ireland was about to be invaded by either English or American troops, Mulcahy seized upon the idea as a way to look like he was doing something.[11]
The rest of the world had become used to dismissing the Ventriloquist Machine as a hoax or toy, when they thought of it at all, and it was quite a surprise to see the refined, reliable product of a few years’ extra work in use by the Irish government. Companies around the world rapidly began building their own machines under patent, though Fitzgerald’s hopes for the name’ ‘Televox’ remained vain ones. Ever afterwards, men and women would speak of quisting one another. The one exception was Scandinavia, which did adopt ‘Televox’ because ‘quist’ sounded like the Swedish word for ‘twig’ and sounded absurd.
Fitzgerald’s design had mostly been built around the assumption that there would be a closed loop of two, or at most three or four, Phakophones, and there was nothing to prevent everyone speaking at once. While adequate for Mulcahy’s government buildings, this was unsuitable for a network stretching across a whole country with thousands of users. Two Polish engineers, Tadeusz Lomacz and Dawid Kuszczak, were the first to develop the Quister Hub, so called by analogy to railway hubs.[12] Hubs had already been in use for Lectel systems, but proved even more useful for quisters. In the early days, hubs simply had all the electrical cables from the quisters coming together at a single switchboard, where the operator would physically link one cable end to another using a linking wire. Typically, the person placing the quist would first tell the operator whom he or she was trying to contact, and then the operator would find the relevant cable end and link them. The link would only be broken when the call was over. Soon, the numbers of people using quisters meant that more elaborate, hierarchical switchboards were needed, and numbers and location markers were used to simplify finding a user in the increasingly large list. Books of quist numbers were produced almost as soon as the system appeared, with the earliest subscribers typically being doctors and other essential businesses. Public quist stations first appeared in Prague in 1905, where members of the public who lacked their own quister at home could place quists to these businesses for a fee.
Indeed, Prague soon eclipsed Dublin as the centre of quister research, and for good reason. King John II’s Russian-imposed throne was very shaky, as the riots of 1904 proved. Tsarevich Paul, an enthusiast for new technologies (as later events proved) saw the quister as a potential means of controlling dissent and coordinating imperial forces. Given the vast gulfs of the Russian Empire (which both Optel and Lectel has struggled in turn to link up), he decided to start smaller by attempting to stabilise the Czechosilesian kingdom. The Russian secret police, the Okhrana,[13] was already in the habit of opening and reading the postal letters and Lectel messages of Russian subjects on a routine basis. Not a few Okhrana men had done well for themselves in exploiting the stock-trading information they encounted in such important state security operations. But the quister...the quister was already proving popular, and people even in other nations were accustomed to the idea that the operator was potentially listening in on their conversation. Yet, as a number of newspapers had remarked, quist users seemed to forget this and talk as though the operator was not there even when they certainly were. It was a perfect opportunity to expand state surveillance of those subversive elements.
The real breakthrough in Czechosilesia, however, was the realisation that the system could also be used one-way to transmit music or audio-only plays from a single source to many recipients. Starting in 1906, operas, concerts and other media were transmitted by the Vzdivaldo state company. At this time, Photel sets were banned or heavily restricted in Russia and the other Vitebsk Union states.[14] The Imperial Soviet feared that the technology was too difficult to control and there were too many possibilities of unauthorised stations. (This fear was, of course, unjustified, as the Combine quite successfully ran an autocratic Photel system in the same years—whilst ironically being suspicious of quisters!)
The centralised quist system, generically dubbed Dalekodeon (from the Russian word for ‘faraway’ and the Greek word for ‘theatre’) provided an alternative source of entertainment for Czechosilesian, and later Polish, Lithuanian and Russian, subjects. It was also sometimes used in other countries, but generally could not compete with Photel.[15] The much larger rollout of Dalekodeon systems in Russia itself was masterminded by the Imperial Tarefikhov Company, a corporate body which had begun as a railway company (as the name implies) but had moved on to Lectel and now a new technology in turn. ITC was able to use its existing Lectel infrastructure and experience to speed up the development of the Dalekodeon network.
From the point of view of the user, the Dalekodeon node (commonly abbreviated by its users) was a large, roughly conical or pyramidal device whose outer case was made of tough hardwoods. The more expensive ones were typically decorated with impressive Slavicist artwork or carvings. The node often occupied pride of place in a living room. The content of programmes available became more diverse, with comedies and more populist dramas, and systems were developed to allow switching between multiple channels. The nodes became a status symbol for the Russian middle-classes, with state-backed schemes helping even the poorer end of this bracket afford a node via breaking up the cost or rental. Isolated villages and city slums typically got one larger version (later often amplified with an Augmentophone compressed-air device) run by the mayor or other local authority figure, to which passers-by could listen in exchange for a small fee.
What was ‘known’ to everyone, of course, was that the Dalekodeon nodes could be made more cheaply than ‘proper’ quisters because they were only one-way; they only produced sound, rather than detecting it. Any engineers who pointed out that the diaphragms could always work both ways were quietly silenced. Tsarevich Paul had successfully persuaded a large portion of his vast empire’s population to place a listening post for the secret police into their own homes...
*
From: Motext Pages MS191A [retrieved 22/11/19].
Extraneous advertising has been left intact.
Welcome to the Motext tie-in page for our new historical documentary series, “The Bear and the Basilisk”. In this series, historians led by Sir Roger Palfrey and Anna Weatheringham will be taking us back to the days of the turn of the last century. They will try to answer the question that a generation of kids in history classes always ask—why didn’t people in the 1900s see how dangerous the Combine and Societism would become? Why didn’t they try to stamp it out then and there, when it was weak? How could they be so blind, so stupid?
Of course, they weren’t blind or stupid. This is an illustration of the folly of trying to make sense of the past when viewing it through the tinted lenses of hindsight. Today, it seems ‘obvious’ to us that Alfarus’ regime was the most dangerous one around at the time. But that wasn’t the case back then. South America was far away. The Societists had barely fought off a French intervention, something which we’d have expected the old UPSA to do anyway. And a lot of people still thought of the Combine as being just the UPSA, or its wider alliance the Hermandad, under a new regime. It would take a long time for the truth to become clear.
That’s a negative point, why people underestimated the Combine. But you’ll probably have heard that before. Instead of talking about why they underestimated the Combine, let’s talk about why they overestimated other potential threats. Or did they, in fact, overestimate them? Do we only call those judgements wrong now because of how history turned out? As the speculative romantics will remind us, it could have been very different!
If an ultratellurian[16] looked upon the world of 1910, he might well say there was one regime that was obviously going to be a major threat to world peace in the future. But it wouldn’t be the Combine, still slowly rebuilding after the war and the intervention, painstakingly constructing the nightmare of the Final Society. Nor would it be the ENA, retreating into self-accusation and dreams of Social Americanism; nor France, the lofty ambitions of the Marseilles Protocol brought crashing down by the embarrassment of the failed intervention. Perhaps it might be powerful China, but China had got what it wanted, for the most part; it was newly reunited, that ancient scar was healing, and its people were consumed with deciding what the future now looked like.
No, the obvious threat to the future was the one empire that had come out of the Pandoric War virtually unscathed, save for the loss of its largely useless Beiqing puppet state. The empire that had crushed its rivals in Europe, swatted away its old Ottoman foe and pushed back the Americans on their own home continent, yet whose rulers remained unsatisfied. That land was confident in its swagger, fuelled by ever-growing industrial production, convinced of its cultural special place in history.
Russia.
And, of course, one could not strictly say that ultratellurian was wrong. We think back on the Black Twenties by focusing on their aftermath, the vile harvest of the Doctrine of the Last Throw. We do not stop to think about whose actions produced the circumstances which made it possible for Alfarus to throw the dice at all...
[1] In OTL the carbon filament lightbulb first became practical in the early-to-mid 1880s, and was eclipsed by the tungsten filament lightbulb about twenty to thirty years later. ‘Coalstuff’ for carbon is the agreed scientific term in TTL, based on an anglicisation of German Kohlenstoff.
[2] OTL Ohm’s Law, published in 1827, though not widely accepted until the 1840s. Note that while TTL still uses the term ‘current’, ‘pressure’ is used instead of ‘voltage’ and ‘viscosity’ instead of ‘resistance’.
[3] In OTL Alexander Graham Bell’s famous first telephone experiment did use a liquid microphone of this type.
[4] Linnaeus also did this in OTL. He got about a bit.
[5] AKA sodium potassium tartrate in OTL. It was first isolated by an apothecary in Rochelle in 1675, hence the name.
[6] In OTL piezoelectric or ‘crystal’ microphones were often used in valve / tube radio sets, but were typically subject to high levels of noise from the electrical impedence of the crystal.
[7] I.e. the carbon microphone.
[8] These were already in use by the turn of the nineteenth century. In OTL, the wheel of HMS Victory was shot away by enemy fire during the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805, but a speaking-tube was used to issue steering orders from the quarterdeck all the way down to where sailors were working the tiller manually.
[9] In OTL this was dubbed the ‘lovers’ telephone’ by the Victorians.
[10] The word ‘phoney’ is thought to have originated in Ireland in the eighteenth century.
[11] Properly this should be ‘British or American’, but this writer, like many people, tends to act as though Great Britain was split up immediately after the Third Glorious Revolution.
[12] Called a telephone exchange in OTL, similarly by analogy to railway exchanges.
[13] This term was also used in OTL for the Tsarist secret police. It long postdates the POD of TTL, but simply means ‘guards’ and would be a likely choice for any similar organisation.
[14] ‘Vitebsk Union’ is a (largely anachronistic at this point) term used to describe Russia and her allies and vassals, the name stemming from a series of treaties signed in the city of Vitebsk across a period from the 1880s to the 1920s.
[15] A similar OTL system, the Théâtrophone, was first demonstrated in France in 1881 (and listened to by, among others, Victor Hugo). Coming a decent time before radio, it managed to hang on as an alternative until the 1930s.
[16] Alien.
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What a chapter. I wasn't particularly impressed by VoxHumana, just felt like a radio version of 1984's telescreens, but turning phones into the other function that telescreens had... Now there's the mind that gave us Steampunk Nazis. No wonder everyone's so skittish about the Russians well into the future, the scale of what they've accomplished already is awesome in the original sense of the word.
I'm guessing the Combine is the Basilisk for... being toxic and deadly? Sheesh. Do these people have any other adjectives to describe Societism?
I'm guessing the Combine is the Basilisk for... being toxic and deadly? Sheesh. Do these people have any other adjectives to describe Societism?
Although (OTL) British soap operas are usually peak time rather than daytime and are doing rather better in viewers than American (at least, ones called soap operas).
I wonder if LTTW has produced any (photel/radio) soaps by the end of this update?
I think footnote [10] and [11] are the wrong way around.
Also, in Imperial Soviet Russia, text foreshadows you.
COMMUNICATE! COMMUNICATE!
Also, in Imperial Soviet Russia, text foreshadows you.
COMMUNICATE! COMMUNICATE!
Good update, Thande! 
It should be "António Corrêa" (the non-anachronistic form of that surname).
There's a couple of typos in the name.
It should be "António Corrêa" (the non-anachronistic form of that surname).
Seems this is Russia's high point before they descended into anarchy and a quasi-police state. I'm starting that the term Black Twenties has a double meaning: is not that it was only a dark period, but it was a period where Societists send armies (Im'm sorry "totally not soldiers to help our fellow humans") to allow the expansion of Societism. For what I can understand, the Doctrine of the Last Throw implies helping Societist uprisings by sending everything they can to finish off the enemy. It would be like Stalin sending a full Soviet Army to the Spanish Civil War just to allow communism.
Good update, Thande!
There's a couple of typos in the name.
It should be "António Corrêa" (the non-anachronistic form of that surname).
Thande's mentioned several times that English motext can't handle diacritics, so they are omitted.
Once more (with feeling!): TTL's Russia blows and deserves to reap what it has sown.
I'm surprised there's not more widespread golem/automaton imagery used given the Combine's "artificial" nature from a Diversitarian perspective. We already know that the genre will produce many anti-Societist works focused on the transnational nature of the robot uprising so I'd expect it would be a useful analogy.
Actually in that vein does Societism have some sort of symbolic animal like many countries and political parties do? Eagles and the like are fairly common so they have that "universal" angle but don't otherwise suit the movement metaphorically.
Humans can't wage war on each other if there are no more humans.
*touches forehead meme*
Thande
Donor
Thanks for the comments.
The basilisk analogy for the Combine is because its gaze turns people to stone,* which is taken as a metaphor for how the Diversitarian powers paint Societist-controlled regions as being 'in a national coma' rather than permanently culturally destroyed.
Prior to the revolution, incidentally, the Meridian national symbol was the condor (often portrayed as being locked in a death battle with the ENA's rattlesnake).
*although I think this may be a relatively recent confusion of legends, so perhaps I should have picked a gorgon analogy instead.
The basilisk analogy for the Combine is because its gaze turns people to stone,* which is taken as a metaphor for how the Diversitarian powers paint Societist-controlled regions as being 'in a national coma' rather than permanently culturally destroyed.
Prior to the revolution, incidentally, the Meridian national symbol was the condor (often portrayed as being locked in a death battle with the ENA's rattlesnake).
*although I think this may be a relatively recent confusion of legends, so perhaps I should have picked a gorgon analogy instead.
Fixed, thanks.
Indeed.
The Diversitarians are *Racist in universe, which OTL would be described as "racialist" in that they believe in biologically quantifiably different races/ethnicities (the definition seems slightly blurred TTL) but do not advocate a hierarchy of races (the technical difference between racialism and racism).
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I dunno, I think between the two I personally prefer the basilisk over the gorgon as a derogatory metaphor. As for an allegorical animal I'm sure honey bees would be featured heavily given their naturally occurring hierarchy, self sacrificing nature and global distribution. The fact that they only attack defensively is a bonus.