The Tanist's Wife and other stories by Isobel

Author:Isobel
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: The Electronic Bookshop

The End

Background to “Wave Goodbye”

In 1920 Einstein, already recognised as perhaps the greatest living thinker, theorised that light amplification itself might be possible but that it could only be done in impossible conditions. As a result the Laser was not developed for another forty years, when a scientist realised how to create the ‘impossible conditions’. Historically, a number of inventions have been delayed because they were theoretically impossible. Equally, the annals of conspiracy theories are full of supposed free energy devices whose patents ‘have been bought and suppressed by big corporations’. Suppose, I am suggesting, a combination of the two had resulted in one element of modern technology being suppressed while all other scientific advances that don’t need that technology did take place more or less as in our timeline. This story is set in a world in which that has happened.

Another great thinker was Charles Fort, who would have loved the Laser story. Amongst his writings was the phrase ‘steam engine time. This has been misused, but the idea that human inventions follow one upon another in an inevitable flow is a belief, not a scientific law, since we cannot know what inventions might have been made, only what actually were. Alternate history provides a way of exploring this idea.

For some time I have tried to imagine how much of the modern world would still exist if a key component of technology had been permanently missed, the way the Laser was for forty years. I had already realised that the Apollo missions only required Newtonian physics, just as architects usually can ignore the fact that the world is not flat. I decided to take the modern world and remove one element – radio transmission and its associated television systems. I was surprised at how much could still exist.

Before the invention of radio there had been a number of proposed telegraph systems. Samuel Morse’s 1837 system and code eventually won out. Some systems attempted to create a graphic depiction of a telegram’s message but none of these were ever adopted. This is because one of the expenses of the telegram – the need for a skilled operator to encode, send, receive and decode Morse messages — were simply replaced by the expense of employing someone who could read the printed version of a similar system. One example was Alexander Bain’s development of 1846.

In my world the digital nature of Morse’s system (prefigured by Gauss’s system of 1833) was combined with the idea of visual representation to create a system by a British inventor called Reedham, unknown in our own timeline. Here a board of small tiles, black on one side, white on the other and hinged at the middle, are pre-set to black and, when a signal is to be received, a receiver is ‘run’ behind the board, each blip of the telegraph transmission activating a small magnet to flip the tile from black to white. (I have developed a detailed explanation of the technology involved, it was all available

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