The Best of R. A. Lafferty by R. A. Lafferty

Author:R. A. Lafferty [Lafferty, R. A.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Short Stories
Publisher: Books of Sand
Published: 2017-02-12T05:00:00+00:00

The Twenty-First Cen­tury began on this rather odd note.

Selenium Ghosts Of The Eighteen Seventies

Even today, the “in­ven­tion” of tele­vi­sion is usu­ally ascribed to Paul Nip­kow of Ger­many, and the year is given as 1884. Nip­kow used the prin­ciple of the vari­ation in the elec­trical con­duct­iv­ity of sel­en­ium when ex­posed to light, and he used scan­ning discs as mech­an­ical ef­fect­ors. What else was there for him to use be­fore the de­vel­op­ment of the pho­tot­ube and the cur­rent-amp­li­fy­ing elec­tron tube? The res­ol­u­tion of Nip­kow's tele­vi­sion was very poor due to the “slow light” char­ac­ter­ist­ics of sel­en­ium re­sponse and the lack of amp­li­fic­a­tion. There were, how­ever, sev­eral men in the United States who trans­mit­ted a sort of tele­vi­sion be­fore Nip­kow did so in Ger­many.

Res­ol­u­tion of the im­ages of these even earlier ex­per­i­menters in the field (Aure­lian Bent­ley, Jessy Polk, Samuel J. Perry, Gif­ford Hudgeons) was even poorer than was the case with Nip­kow. In­deed, none of these pre-Nip­kow in­vent­ors in the tele­vi­sion field is worthy of much at­ten­tion, ex­cept Bent­ley. And the in­terest in Bent­ley is in the con­tent of his trans­mis­sions and not in his tech­nical in­eptitude.

It is not our ob­ject to enter into the ar­gu­ment of who really did first “in­vent” tele­vi­sion (it was not Paul Nip­kow, and it prob­ably was not Aure­lian Bent­ley or Jessy Polk either); our ob­ject is to ex­am­ine some of the earli­est true tele­vi­sion dra­mas in their own queer “slow light” con­text. And the first of those “slow light” or sel­en­ium (“moon­shine”) dra­mas were put to­gether by Aure­lian Bent­ley in the year 1873.

The earli­est art in a new field is al­ways the freshest and is of­ten the best. Homer com­posed the first and freshest, and prob­ably the best, epic po­etry. Whatever cave man did the first paint­ing, it re­mains among the freshest as well as the best paint­ings ever done. Aes­chylus com­posed the first and best tra­gic dra­mas, Eu­c­lid in­ven­ted the first and best of the art­ful math­em­at­ics (we speak here of math­em­at­ics as an art without be­ing con­cerned with its ac­cur­acy or prac­tic­al­ity). And it may be that Aure­lian Bent­ley pro­duced the best of all tele­vi­sion dra­mas in spite of their prim­it­ive as­pect.

Bent­ley's tele­vi­sion en­ter­prise was not very suc­cess­ful des­pite his fee of one thou­sand dol­lars per day for each sub­scriber. In his hey­day (or his hey-month, Novem­ber of 1873), Bent­ley had fifty-nine sub­scribers in New York City, sev­en­teen in Bo­ston, four­teen in Phil­adelphia, and one in Hoboken. This gave him an in­come of ninety-one thou­sand dol­lars a day (which would be the equi­val­ent of about a mil­lion dol­lars a day in today's terms), but Bent­ley was ex­tra­vag­ant and prod­igal, and he al­ways in­sisted that he had ex­penses that the world wot­ted not of. In any case, Bent­ley was broke and out of busi­ness by the be­gin­ning of the year 1874. He was also dead by that time.

The only things sur­viv­ing from The Won­der­ful World of Aure­lian Bent­ley are thir­teen of the “slow light” dra­mas, the mas­ter pro­jector, and nine­teen of the old tele­vi­sion re­ceiv­ers.

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