Ten Billion Tomorrows by Brian Clegg

Author:Brian Clegg
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781466861923
Publisher: St. Martin's Press

12.

BEAM ME UP

If your first experience of teleportation was Star Trek and the all-too-frequent requests to Mr. Scott to be beamed up (wonderfully parodied in Galaxy Quest), then you probably have a benign feeling about this convenient means of getting from place to place without all that inconvenient walking or flying. But for me, and a whole generation brought up on 1950s sci-fi B movies, it was a concept of terror. We had seen the excitement turn to horror as the hero Vincent Price—who could at best be described as somewhat distracted in the movie, and at worst downright demented—found out to his cost the dangers of dabbling with basic physics, when his brother became merged with an insect. I still can’t sit in a room with a big, fat fly buzzing around me without conjuring up the horrible images from The Fly, caught on some illicit late-night TV viewing in my youth. No doubt now the scenes would seem ridiculously fake, but things are very different when you are young, and no one has seen CGI.

It is not in the world of mad scientists or dour Scottish starship engineers that teleportation first cropped up, though, but in the imagination of American writer and researcher of the extraordinary, Charles Fort. Fort made a career of investigating and writing about oddities and the unexplained. From the early years of the twentieth century, he amassed copious notes and “evidence” of strange happenings. So strong is the association that Fort now has with the field that strange phenomena and their study is often given the label “Fortean.”

It was Fort who first came up with the term “teleportation” in his 1931 book Lo! Here, Fort remarks: “Sometimes, in what I call ‘teleportations’, there seems to be ‘agency’ and sometimes not … Some other time I may be able more clearly to think out an expression upon flows of pigeons to their homes, and flows of migratory birds, as teleportative, or quasi-teleportative.” Fort had in mind here an imagined ability to travel from place to place by willpower alone—a concept that probably fits better with medieval stories of magicians making objects and people instantly move from A to B than anything with a basis in science.

In devising the concept of teleportation, Fort was primarily seeking to explain showers of stones, frogs, fish, and other strange rains of objects that had been reported through history, and a favorite of the Fortean fraternity. He believed that there were two types of teleportation, one based on an electric field that arose when a thunderstorm was involved, and another based on some unknown field that was involved when objects appeared from a cloudless sky or were suddenly discovered inside a house. This may sound like science, but Fort’s ideas gave a veneer to science to what was otherwise an appeal to magic.

It would have been more likely, if less romantically satisfying, to suspect that many of the tales of amazing appearances that he reported were simple fabrications. But where

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