Tom Swifties
Over here, I’m having a conversation wiht Mrs D about fiction and it’s effect on the culture. Specifically science fiction, or at least that’s the part of the conversation I’m trying to contribute.
Mrs D, not a geek, feels that there is a correlation between people who read science fiction and people who invent things, and that is a natural correlation. Sure, it is. She also feels that the fact that people invent things is generally not caused by reading science fiction. Well, not so much.
I’m not a mathemetician, but I am a reader, and I have watched the advance of science, and I can tell you, the idea that someone reads something in a science fiction novel or story and turns it into reality is a verifiable fact. I have independantly verifiable personal experience with several of these instances (and they are damned big ones, manufacturing wise).
I believe, though I’m not smart enough to prove, that the advancement of technology has a causational relationship with the popularity of science fiction. I’d be interested to see if anyone has any statistics on that.
I DO know, that in a lot of cases, the inventors of devices or processes or mechanisms have taken their inspiration from science fiction. I have met Joe Engelburger, who invented the industrial robot, and who was following the career of Asimov at the time he did. He makes it very clear that I Robot was the inspiration for the Unimate. I have also met Dr S Inaba, who brought industrial robotics to the state they are in today, and he named the special language robots speak “Karel” after Karel Capek, the man who first used the word Robot in his play RUR. Which Dr Inaba read in his youth.
And it’s not only huge ideas and incredible processes that begin as the fancies of SF writers. As I explain at Mrs D’s place, the TASER is an invention of a gentleman named Victor Appleton- or at least the name is. The Tom A Swift Electric Rifle was invented by a guy named Jack Cover after reading of it in “Tom Swift and his Electric Rifle”
These are simply places where causation can be proven beyond a shadow of doubt; each of these inventors will come right out and tell you they got their inspiration directly from a specific science fiction novel.
As for Victor Appleton, he himself is an invention. The books- or most of them- were written by Howard Garis, and they were popular enough (Tom Swift and his adjective noun) that they (the Stratemeyer syndicate) brought the hereo’s son back in a new series, back in the late 50’s through the 70’s, written by “Victor Appleton Jr”. The “Tom Swift Jr and his adjective noun” books are the ones I cut my teeth on, but I have gone back to read the originals too.
If you look down the list of these books, though they were children’s stories, they told of fantastic inventions. At the time. Today, they are mostly science fact. The motorcycle. THe electric locomotive. The deep tunnel. The sky warship. These books seem simplistic because they are full of what today is science fact. Don’t forget, when these books were written, none of this science existed. Correlation. Someone wrote it, and someone invented it. But: if you were to show me you could prove causation, that the folks who were working on these mechanisms took their inspiration from the pages of Tom Swift and his…., I would not be surprised. In fact, I expect it is true, if not of Tom Swift, than of something similar.
20 comments Og | Uncategorized
A lot of the sci fi writers were in fact scientists and/or engineers and wrote about a “what if” based on current knowledge. For example Heinlein wrote about gene splicing many years before it was accomplished but he was aware of the double helix DNA and the possibilities if not probabilities of gene manipulation.
But then a lot of what we call sci fi comes under the heading of fantasy..not sci fi. The Dune series is an example…and most of the current stuff that passes as sci fi
People who read broaden their imaginations and from that stems inspiration for invention and I also believe that Sci Fi is the mother of many if not most of today’s inventions. As to fantasy Sci Fi, what was fantasy in Jules Verne’s time is pretty much reality today. It all boils down to that somone’s imagination became anothers inspiration. A collective at work I sometimes think.
Just brings up the chicken and egg thing. If something is invented due to an idea planted by a novel, regardless of who wrote it, where did the writer get the inspiration.
I’m not discounting the inventing from Sci Fi, just watch the discovery series on the Star trek for all the examples you need. How did Rodenberry get his thoughts on what could happen?
That is the process that confounds me.
But then that could be why I never did have much claim to fame.
I think Paul has brought up the subtlety of this, that is very difficult to quantify.
For example (and this is a weird example), people in Hollywood (not literally, but folks in show biz) will not talk about an idea out loud, until they’ve sent the script off to the Writers’ Guild of America for a number and a registered date stamp. This is a superstition that developed with experience (“legitimate” is irrelevant to the point). That is because these folks have experienced idea theft. But it isn’t theft. They just THINK it is.
It is not at all uncommon for multiple writers to have the same idea for a screenplay, at about the same time. This is because we are all exposed to the the same newspapers, news stories, world events, etc. Our thought processes are not as unique as we might like to think. These events trigger a series of thought processes, which can lead to a “Voilà !” occurring in the minds of multiple people at the same time.
Now lots of folks like to attribute that sort of thing to psychic energy waves that can be triggered by talking about something… somehow concluding that speaking of the idea puts it into the cosmos and it travels around the ether and ends up in the brains of others.
Pbbbbbt.
There are a lot of people. There are not a lot of ideas, and a lot fewer permutations of those ideas than people think when you include the population size.
In a related bit of research, Kim was once working on a project (with a math-geek extrordinare at MIT). The guy had come up with an algorithm that could predict (with greater than 85% accuracy), what a coupon amount needed to be to MAKE you buy something. He could also tell you what product to offer the discount on.
Now all of this sounds like magic and it was the Holy Grail of loyalty marketing. Getting something above 50% redemption in this field was amazing. Most folks thought a marketing campaign a success if you got a 15% response (10% higher than the typical/industry average of 5%). The 85% was astonishing (and practically unbelievable) until you learned how it worked.
He knew, based on where you lived (zip code) what advertising you were exposed to, because (like it or not) based on where you live, we can predict (with reasonable accuracy) what TV programs you watch, what magazines and newspapers you read, and what type of food you purchase.
I know people don’t like to be typecast that way, but them’s the facts.
He knew then what product advertising you had seen. The number of imprints was important. If you’d seen XYZ product advertising 10 times, not 100, that was going to alter the redemption of a specific coupon.
Combined with the household income (also derived from your zip code with reasonable accuracy) he could predict what motivated you, and the price point that would force you to take action. Add that to your shopping basket history, improved over 5 weeks, and he could get up to 98% accuracy.
Don’t even begin to ask me to explain the formula or on what Boolean-Spoolian logic tree it was based. I was hanging on by my fingernails on the middle bit, let alone the formula bit.
The point is, that people are a LOT more predictable than they want to think, and a whole lot more predictable the minute they form social groups, pick houses, or work for a particular research institution or university.
The Sci Fi and science universe is small. The folks travel in similar circles, are motivated to read the same types of journals, literature, etc. They watch the same types of TV programs, buy the same types of cars, and drink similar brands of soda pop.
The source of an idea then can be constrained within that same universe. They THINK it came from within the group, perhaps by fiction.
But it depends on where you are standing. If you are standing next to the trees, of course you are going to assume that some other tree did it.
Stand back at 60,000 feet.
One example Og brought up was how similar cell phones look to the communication watch of Dick Tracey. That had to be the origin of the idea. Well, cell phones don’t look at all like that to me. They look like calculators to me.
So, depending on where you stand, you can add more to the pot of potential sources.
Say, the WWI communication radios. Walkie-talkies. Two cups attached by a string.
Invention is an iterative process. We don’t get new things, invented from scratch, out of whole cloth. They are improvements on something that came before, with the microcomputer (for example) a smaller version of the minicomputer, the minicomputer a smaller version of the mainframe, the mainframe a more powerful version of the vac tube machines, and the vac tube machines a by product of the adding machine/telegraph machines which preceded them… and those were based on the abacus or piles of rocks people used to use to keep track of things.
The point being, that it depends on how far back you want to take it.
So what influenced the microcomputer, the cell phone, satellites, rockets, and moving sidewalks? EVERYTHING. Everything that came before. Every single thing that laid the foundation for the thought that gave rise to the thing that inspired the next thing.
Was Sci Fi the source for the idea the TASAR? Maybe. Maybe it was a cartoon image, seen in childhood, with Ben Franklin standing in a storm, holding a kite string, with a key attached. Maybe the string of the kite, the string of the two-cups they made for a spy phone for their fort, and the string of a pop gun made an imprint on the person’s mind… and they remembered it when they read the fiction of it. All they had to do was remove the string and a TASAR was born. They just THINK it was the fiction, but the ideas of all of it had been planted years before, and the fiction just reminded them… reminded them at a time when they had to tools and skills to take the next step.
From Isaiah’s Job, Albert Jay Nock:
Was Sci Fi the source for the idea the TASAR? Maybe
not maybe. YES. ask the inventor. were not talking tenuous attachments here. we’re talking instances where the inventor said “yes, THAT was my inspiration” . does inspiration for machinery come from outside sf? certainly. does it come from chaucer, shakespeare, or hemmingway? No.
It is STILL maybe, regardless of what the person says. He THINKs that was the source, and on that we can agree. We can agree he SAID that, but he doesn’t know the source anymore than you or I know why we like chocolate chip cookies. We might think it was because we remember having them served to us by our grandmother, when it fact, we had them before that and at Grama’s house the taste was familiar.
does a treo look like a two way wrist tv? .aybe an artist cares. I do not. I care about the function, which is what I see when I look at the two devices.
as to the chicken/egg thing, when garis writes about an electric rifle in the 50s and an inventor reads the book and invents the taser, the causation is crystal clear. Did garis get the idea elsewhere? probably. Verne writes about an electric rifle years earlier.Garis undoubtably read 20,000 leagues under the sea..
… and Neptune had a sword that did the same thing.
this is a hard conversation to have on a cellphone while driving 70. assuming the inventor of the taser lied (and I retuurn to this example only due to thumb typing) do you suppose his inspiration came from greek tragedy? epoc verse? Harlequin romance? no. science and science fiction writing are the nursery of scientific ideas. always has been. always will be.
the inventor of the taser DID read Tom swift and his electric rifle. we cannot assume he had Any knowledge of mythology..
alet’s assume for a moment you know nothing of cooking. you read a hog on ice post about using chili powder in chocolate. he,s using the idea to make cocoa. you use it to .ake a candy bar. Who is your inspiration: steve, or the aztecs who knew it 10,000 years earlier?
I still think there is a collective mind thing going as well… Take for instance the freestyle MX craze, one guys does a somersault and all of a sudden all the riders can do it? Some do it first shot and better than the originator without breaking bones as well! We are Borg… :-)
“Fan the fires…of creativity!” bellowed Tom…
“…” said Tom blankly.
I have no underwear,” Tom said expansively.
“I have a split personality,” said Tom, being frank.
ok, last one…
“I’ve been feeding the crocodile,” said Tom (T1G) offhandedly.
I do not assume to know the source of his inspiration, nor should I. I shouldn’t assume and I shouldn’t trust him either. That doesn’t mean he’s lying, on the contrary. I’m convinced he thinks that’s the case.
That’s the point. There is no way I can know that… and no way anyone can know the complete source of inspiration for anything they do.
He may think it was whoever he said it was, but we should no more assume he’s correct than anyone else is, when trying to make those determinations.
That doesn’t mean he shouldn’t thank whomever he thought he got it from.
Robert Altman said the inspiration for Three Sisters came to him in a dream. Maybe the inspiration for the dream was a postcard of Virgo and he looked at it cross-eyed and saw three women instead of two. Maybe it was a newspaper article, written by someone he should have thanked, about triplets being born. Maybe it was the meatball sandwich that gave him indigestion and the last time he felt that way was when he slept with three women.
It’s fun to make this stuff up, but that’s all it is, even when folks THINK they are certain of it.
all of which misses my point entirely.