(listen to episode on Spotify)
(music: fluttering and beeps)
Nelson Bond background, "Lightship, Ho!" non-spoiler discussion
Gretchen:
Hello, you are listening to Chrononauts, a science fiction literature history podcast. This segment is part of our episode covering the July 1939 issue of Astounding. Please check the previous segments to hear our discussions of "Black Destroyer" by A. E. Van Vogt, "Trends" by Isaac Asimov, and "The City of Cosmic Rays" by Nat Schachner. For this segment, however, we start by covering the Nelson S. Bond story, "Lightship Ho!".
Nelson S. Bond was the son of Mary and Richard Slate Bond, the latter of whom was a publicist. He was born in Scranton, Pennsylvania, on November 23, 1908, and raised in Philadelphia. From 1932 to 1934, he attended Marshall University in West Virginia, where he met his wife, Betty Gough Folsom. They married in 1934 and had two sons. It was a year after their marriage in 1935 that Bond, after a brief stint in public relations for his father's agency, started his freelance writing career and sold his first story.
Two years later, he published his first science fiction story, "Down the Dimensions" in Amazing. A fantasy story, he wrote, called "Mr. Mergenthwirker's Lobblies" Quite a mouthful to say. It was also published in 1937 in the magazine Scribner's. This work became one of his most prominent and was later adapted by Bond for a radio and a TV play. Many of Bond's works were found in Amazing, Fantastic Adventures and Weird Tales. Though Bond stated, "I wrote as many or more sports and detective stories as I did fantasy and science fiction. I never thought of myself as a science fiction writer. I thought of myself as a fantasy writer, but occasionally the fantasy would include hardware."
He had his stories collected in multiple collections, including "Nightmares and Daydreams", which acquaintance August Derleth asked Bond to compile for Arkham House. Bond wasn't too fond of writing longer works, usually writing shorter pieces that often themselves were slimmed down. He claimed, the shorter the Bond, the better the story. However, he did publish one novel, "Exiles of Time", in 1949, which was part of a series that included three stories he wrote for Amazing during the 40s.
Along with his adaptations of "Mr. Mergenthwirker's Lobblies", he also produced numerous other radio and TV plays. Plays for the former included pieces for the radio show's Hot Coffee and The Sheriff's Show, while his credits for the latter include stories for the series Tales of Tomorrow, Kraft Television Theatre, Studio One, and Thriller. Bond also adapted Orwell's "Animal Farm" for TV.
JM:
That's neat, I didn't know that.
Gretchen:
Yeah, that was really cool to find out. And he also made a piece for CBS called "The Night America Trembled", which was based on the reaction to Orson Welles' "War of the Worlds" adaptation. Apparently Welles rejected the request to narrate and also sued Bond and the network over copyright issues. I'm sure partially because of that, he was unimpressed with his experiences in TV and in Hollywood, so Bond opened a public relations business in Roanoke, Virginia, in the late 1950s and wrote less frequently. He also took up selling rare books and was very respected in the trade. He died in 2006 at the age of 97.
The story by Bond found in this issue of Astounding is "Lightship, Ho!", the first I've read by him. But this isn't your first Bond story, right, JM?
JM:
This is the third Nelson Bond story that I have read. And so far he's zero for three with me, I'm afraid. And it's really sad because he seems kind of like a cool person and maybe I would like, I don't know, maybe under other circumstances. It's possible that he's written something that I would like, I don't know. But yes, not a success for me. I don't know if it's the worst of the three, but yeah, I mean, maybe I'll talk about that a little more later. But there's a few writers that we're doing today, or at least two. One of them is also from Pennsylvania, who just sort of stopped writing kind of abruptly, I guess, and like their careers took other paths. And they didn't really operate in the field anymore. And I guess in the, you know, it'd be kind of interesting to see what he would have done had he kept going into the 50s and wrote more written more science fiction and stuff. But yeah, there's a lot of bad humor in pretty much all the stories.
Nate:
Yeah. Yeah, this one's full of that from the get go and I don't know. I didn't think this was good, but it's the kind of crap that's more charming rather than the kind of crap that's just like, made me annoyed and irritated. Like, I don't know, it lets you know from the get go that it's going to be a silly pulp romp and not to get your expectations up too high. And that's pretty much what you get.
It's very self referential. There's lots of in jokes and stuff like that. The dialogue that attempts to be humorous doesn't really succeed, but...
JM:
No.
Nate:
I don't know. It's definitely not the kind of story that made me like annoyed or like hate the characters or the situation or anything like that. I thought it was kind of fun, even though it definitely was not a good story. And if it was any much longer, it probably would have overstayed its welcome.
Gretchen:
I agree that it's charming in its own way, but it's definitely, as I said, I can't compare it to other Bond stories, but compared to the other stories in this issue, it's definitely a weaker one.
Nate:
Yeah, for sure.
JM:
Did you come across a reference to a story called "Lancelot Biggs Cooks a Pirate"?
Gretchen:
I think there was a mention of a Lancelot Biggs, but I did not know of that title specifically.
JM:
Okay, so that's one of the other ones that I've read by him, and it's actually quite similar to this one in a way, but I think it's a little more fun. And I'm just kind of wondering which was first, because again, it's in one of those big science fiction mega packs from whatever that publisher is called, I forget, and they don't really put much attribution in there. So there's no dates on the stories or anything, which is really annoying, because they could be from anywhere from the late 1800s to the 1960s, and you just don't know until you read it, and then you have to guess or look it up somewhere else.
Nate:
Yeah, according to ISFDB, that story is from 1940, so it would have been a little bit after this one. Assuming that the order that it was published was the order that it was written, which I guess is not always true with some of these guys.
JM:
Yeah.
Gretchen:
And if I remember correctly, there were a couple of Lancelot big stories, I think it was like a character.
Nate:
I think a series he did, yeah.
JM:
Yeah. He's a cook that works on a spaceship who's really smart. And some pirates try to board the ship, and they insist on having a nice meal, and he put something in the food that like, makes everybody turn into like loving, they all start loving each other and being really sweet and cute. And it's like the pirates are, you know, they were like threatening them a minute ago, and he uses that to basically disarm them and stuff. It's kind of cute and fun. I think I liked it a little more than this.
The worst one is a story that I might have mentioned before to you Gretchen, "Lighter than you Think", which kind of plays on his public relations career, I think, and has an anti-gravity device, which somebody uses to beat, I don't know, the odds at horse racing or something like that. And it's just like wall-to-wall, really, really bad puns. So it's, yeah, it's like even down to the title, right, the lighter than you think. Right. So it's a stupid double entendre.
Gretchen:
Just based on this story alone, it doesn't surprise me that he has stories like that.
Nate:
Yeah, there's certainly a lot of puns in this one that are just really groaners.
JM:
You know what, it is kind of like we're thinking about it, even though I don't like it, it is kind of good to have a story like this in a magazine because it is in general very serious, straight. There's not a lot of humor in most of these stories.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
JM:
So it is kind of nice to have this touch. I just wish it had a bit more depth or something like this.
Nate:
He's not Mark Twain, that's for sure.
Gretchen:
Yeah. I guess it's true that, you know, it's nice between the Asimov and the Moore to have, I guess, a little bit of a break from some darker stuff. But yeah, not the funniest that you can find.
Nate:
No, no. One thing that I did think was kind of neat about the story is the pseudoscience that it involves is the same perpetual motion pseudoscience that we previously encountered. And Edward Page Mitchell is "The Tachypomp".
JM:
Yeah, I didn't really make that connection while reading it, but you mentioned it in our chat. So I was like, yeah, I guess I can see that. It kind of reminded me of Star Trek too in a way that they had to get around the problem of communication in deep space. So they just invented this thing called subspace, which is this like alternate, this weird little universe that's like not warp, but it's like radio, I guess like signals can pass through there and stuff like that.
Gretchen:
I do want to give a little warning for this story and the next one that I have. There are some scientific principles that I struggled to kind of articulate in my own words how to describe. So you're just going to hear me try to do that and hopefully it'll make sense or borrowing terms from the authors.
Nate:
Yeah, the other, I guess, little minor thing that reminded me of Star Trek is the whole cook on a spaceship thing. And there was one throwaway line from Deep Space Nine episode where like Quark pulls out a phaser and Odo says something like, you know, what do you have a phaser for? Weren't you a cook on the ship? And he was like, well, everybody was a food critic.
JM:
Yeah, I remember. That was one of the early episodes, I think.
Nate:
I forget what that episode was, but.
Gretchen:
Yeah, I can't remember either, but I wish more humor like that was in the episode.
Nate:
Yeah, I wouldn't say it's well written humor in this one, but just the fact that it doesn't take itself seriously and doesn't shoot for something and like really fail it. It just kind of sets its expectations, know exactly what you're going to get with this one from the first paragraph when you read it.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
Nate:
It pretty much telegraphs all of its twists and turns. So, you know, even when you reach the end, you're like, yeah, I saw that one coming from a mile away.
Gretchen:
Yeah, I mean, like the very first conversation between the two characters, you can kind of see everything that's going to happen sort of laid out right there.
Nate:
Yeah, definitely.
Gretchen:
I do say that I think that the two characters, despite the groan worthy puns, it's kind of fun to follow the two. Yeah. They seem sort of nice.
Nate:
Yeah.
JM:
They do have a kind of a fun relationship.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
JM:
Those two guys, like I would have read them in a different story, I guess, like in this one, the villain is really terrible. Like, he's very perfunctorily written and he's like, not even mustache twirling, like that's kind of an insult to mustaches. I don't know. Yeah. And he, he has these dreams of building like interstellar empire just because he has this one little thing, like, I don't really know his plan doesn't make it much sense to me, but I don't think the author really put that much thought into it either. So.
(music: driving synth, radio signals)
"Lightship, Ho!" spoiler summary and discussion
Gretchen:
At the farthest outpost of man, out near Pluto, gunner McCoy prepares a meal for himself and Lieutenant Ki Barlow, the only two at the post as he reads a story from a copy of Martian Tales. After realizing the food is ready, he calls Barlow to the galley. A man of action, McCoy complains of missing the glory days of Mars, wishing for some excitement. Barlow questions why McCoy signed up for the assignment here in the first place to which McCoy gets a bit bashful. Barlow knows the other man took it out of loyalty towards him.
Barlow then discusses some of the progress that has been made making Pluto habitable. It is no longer as frozen as it had been before they constructed a solar mirror and concentrated the sun's rays onto the planet's surface. The mirror can also be used to relay signals to people on the Earth's moon, and Barlow doesn't understand how McCoy isn't as impressed by their work as he is. But Barlow reminds his friend that he might still get some action if the scientist turned pirate Red Armitage ever nears their ship, even though he is assumed dead. Keep that in mind. Stick a pin in that.
McCoy asked Barlow how the signal system he is working on is coming, and the scientist admits he's having trouble with it. He's trying to work out a way to send messages faster than the speed of light, but still has not managed to figure out a way to do so. There's no urgent need to do this, Barlow remarks, for if there's any danger they must warn Earth about, the message will arrive quicker than the threat itself.
It's at this moment in their conversation, the alarm warning of approaching vessels is set off, hurting to see outside the ship and aim the post's gun. The two men are met with no ship in sight. A moment later, they hear their ship being boarded and are held at gunpoint by none other than Red Armitage and his crew. Barlow claims the pirate won't get away with his crimes this time, with all the ships in the galaxy looking out for him. Red Armitage counters him, reminding him that the alarm on the post was not able to alert the two men in time. As he gets his crew to find a current chart of the solar system, Armitage tells the men he is prepared now to conquer Earth.
After being taunted and then threatened by McCoy and Barlow, he tries to recruit the former who vehemently declines the offer. Now possessing the charts, Armitage is about to leave the ship when Barlow springs into action and orders McCoy to grab Armitage. The pirate, though, readies his ray gun and fires at Barlow before McCoy can prevent him from doing so, then kicks McCoy in the stomach. Armitage spares them so they can see his departure, during which all of his ship's jets are firing simultaneously, by which Barlow realizes the outlaw has devised a way to accelerate to nearly the speed of light. This means he explains to McCoy that he is traveling as fast as any message they can send, warning Earth of his arrival, meaning he will catch the planet completely by surprise.
The two feel the Earth as well as themselves as armitage promised to return and finish them off are doomed, but McCoy wants to tend to the lieutenant's wounded leg where he was shot. He hauls Barlow up a ladder and remarks that instead of this piggyback business, they need an escalator on the post. His remark causes a revelation for Barlow who has an idea about sending a message that can stop armitage. He works on this as the gunner takes care of his leg and soon sends out a transmission.
Confused, McCoy asks what he had done and Barlow responds that the former's comment made him realize that instead of sending messages by double electric currents and putting the electric current on piggyback as he describes it, he should think of sending messages based on the group velocity principle, a signal sent down a pre-existent series of light waves. Using the solar mirror as his method, Barlow was able to do this and sent a message that should be twice the speed of light.
Several hours later, Barlow's message is received by Lunar One on the moon and Earth has time to put up its protective shield just before Armitage arrives who gets destroyed.
JM:
Thank God for that!
Gretchen:
Yes! They're very good, very nice to see. What a dastardly villain.
Nate:
He does have a pretty good villain speech and his villain actions where he insists that you have to watch me depart and be so evil and all that.
JM:
Yes, I'm so evil that I'm going to just leave you and I'll come back for you later. That's how he...
Gretchen:
Yeah, it's like, you know, I'm not even going to dispose of you now because what are you going to do to stop me?
JM:
Yeah, it's not even like Goldfinger setting this laser to kill James Bond by walking away. It's like forgetting to set up the laser.
Gretchen:
Yeah, just leaving them in a cell and... Soon after, Barlow and McCoy learn of the success of the message and Barlow's transfer to Earth. McCoy wonders if that means he will be coming to, to which Barlow responds, where you go, I go.
Nate:
So yeah, set up for a serial there.
JM:
Yeah, I guess so. I kind of enjoyed the way it flashes to the different stations and how they're receiving the message and these other guys are like, where's that coming from? I don't know, I kind of like that for some reason. And I mean, yeah, the relationship between the two guys was kind of nice. Like, you know, they're just out there on their own and they obviously have to like each other in order to keep doing this. It's got that lonely narrative kind of feeling to it. But instead of being like dark and atmospheric, it's just kind of silly and pallying.
And then the bad guy just bursts right into their spaceship. Like, boom, there he is. I mean, it does mention an airlock, so it's not like they don't have that. But I guess it's like, it's funny sometimes reading these older space operas because like the technology is sometimes really far out and futuristic, but sometimes it's not. It's like, well, all they have to do is unscrew this thing to open the airlock and then they can just get in.
And meanwhile, Earth has an impenetrable force shield if they can just put it up in time.
Nate:
Right.
JM:
It probably uses a lot of power.
Nate:
Yeah. We don't really get the fantasy physics on that one, but there was some physics data dumps at us here. And I always wonder if those parts come from the author or if they come from Campbell saying, you know, hey, this is a science fiction story, you know, more of the science.
Gretchen:
Yeah. Even Bond had said he wanted to write fantasy, but with hardware. So, you know, it makes you wonder, yeah, maybe this could have been something he was asked to put in or something like that.
JM:
Yeah. I'm not sure. I mean, from what I was reading and mostly in the Nevala-Lee's book, it seems like Campbell would sit them down or write them and suggest an idea. And he would be like, I want you to incorporate this idea. And then they would try and do that in the stories. And when he gave them rejections or he kind of gave them like, hey, try again, like do this again. It was mostly for the polishing, like mostly for getting the story up to his standards. I don't know that he, I mean, I guess maybe he did try to correct some writers on science, but nobody really commented seemed to comment too much on that. So I don't know that he would have been like, again, it seems like a lot of these writers, they had the ability to work in the different markets that they were writing.
At first, when I was reading a lot of Robert E Howard, I was very struck by that where they're like, well, he can just turn the story into a Western or he can do a Middle Eastern adventure story or he can do a sort of sorcery tale about Conan or he can do make it about boxing. It's kind of they're all similar in a way. He just has to tweak a few things here and there. Right. And then you kind of realize, oh, actually a lot of the pulps are kind of like that. So you could submit a story to one magazine and if they didn't like it, you could just tweak it a little bit and submit it to a slightly different genre market and still make it work.
But I don't know, this one does seem to rest a lot on the science like the about how cool the sciences and the fact that it's on Pluto, which is still somewhat new discovery at this time.
Nate:
The whole idea of like terraforming is pretty neat, though that doesn't really play like a large part of the story. It's mostly this like faster than light communication device that relies on, I guess, rather creative interpretations of relative motion and perpetual motion.
JM:
Yeah, something it's all done with mirrors somehow.
Gretchen:
Don't think about it too much.
JM:
So I don't know. I mean, even just like while I was reading it, I was like kind of groaning and not having the most awesome time. But talking about it now, I kind of it's not the first time this has happened, but I'm like, yeah, it's not that bad. It's kind of it's not too long.
Nate:
Yeah, it's short.
Gretchen:
Yeah, yeah, like 10 pages. So it's not like some of the other stories we're reading that are much better are the longer ones.
JM:
Yeah, but in all fairness, there were quite a lot of stories like this being written. And I think the way this one tries to stand out is with the humor and Bond just isn't. Well, like you said, Nate, he's no Mark Twain.
Gretchen:
I think he uses the term monkey like four or five times in this.
Nate:
Yeah, in some ways, it kind of reminded me of some of the stuff we covered in the last episode when we were looking at the fanzine stuff like the James Blish space opera thing when he wrote when he was 15 or whatever. Yeah, like the dialogue and the setup and the action here just...
JM:
It's got that quality to it.
Nate:
It does. Yeah.
JM:
And you kind of feel again, like you stepped into the middle of something just like with that one because there's already an evil guy who has a history that we don't know about. We're kind of told a little bit about and that's it. And I don't know. And he has a vendetta against Earth, which is sort of explained, but that in itself might have made an interesting story. I guess that's how that all happened. Blish got a lot better. A lot better.
Nate:
Yeah.
JM:
So this guy I'm not so sure. It seems like this was the peak of his at least magazine writing time.
Gretchen:
I'd like to try out some of the TV plays that he wrote. They sound pretty interesting.
Nate:
Yeah. I think they made the switch around this time like a little bit afterwards in the early 40s, right? He started doing the radio and TV stuff around them.
Gretchen:
Yeah, around this time. Yeah, that time.
JM:
A couple of radio people this time around. Yeah, kind of cool.
Nate:
Yeah, I mean, it was definitely a huge medium, especially in the 30s. I mean, it's not like people were doing TV or at least science fiction TV programming.
JM:
No, I think the first play, and we talked about this during RUR, the first player on the BBC was the production of RUR.
Nate:
Right.
JM:
Other than that, yeah. I mean, like even on the radio, most of the programming was mystery stuff, crime stuff.
Gretchen:
Yeah, suspense.
JM:
Suspense, right, that that was even the name of the show. Yeah. There wasn't a ton of science fiction until the 50s. I think there was a show called Space Patrol, and there's probably a few others from like around this time. But they were very much aired toward a juvenile audience, I think a little more so than the magazines were.
Nate:
Was that actually like on television or they were like serials that were shown in the theater? Because I know there are a bunch of those like Flash Gordon stuff like that.
Gretchen:
Yeah, yeah.
JM:
Radio men of, no, I'm getting it confused with something else, but there was another famous one besides Flash Gordon.
Nate:
Yeah.
JM:
Something radio or a radio, I don't know, I can't think of it. But yeah, there was that stuff. And those were weird because yeah, it was almost like a TV show, but I guess they were, I mean, there wasn't really, people didn't really have televisions at the time and they were shown in the cinema, I think, in between other movies, like actual movies.
Nate:
Right.
Gretchen:
Yeah. I couldn't remember if it was before the film or was it during a double feature?
JM:
Yeah. So they have like the Flash Gordon serial or something like, I don't know, it's a number of episodes. I can't remember how many. Somebody actually put together a compilation that you could watch on YouTube of the whole serial. It's pretty long.
Gretchen:
Back in my film class in high school, we watched like several of the episodes in class one day.
JM:
I was curious to watch them, but I found it a little, a little tough. I don't know if it was just because the quality seemed really bad, but I was just, yeah. I didn't, I mean, I didn't expect something sophisticated, but I don't know, for some reason, I was not able to continue it even though I kind of wanted to. So I might try again sometime.
Gretchen:
I don't remember too much of it, except I remember there's one part when he's like in this like large body of water and it looks like he's in danger. And you can obviously tell it's just like a regular turtle in like a water tank. And I just found that very, very endearing.
Nate:
Yeah. Some of the effects in there are pretty good. It's been a while since I've seen any of it. They aired it on like public access. I want to say like 15 years ago and I caught a decent chunk of it then, but I think the serials are like three hours long with all the episodes tied together or something like that. A fair amount.
JM:
But it's really no different than what Doctor Who would be several decades later in terms of that format, I guess.
Nate:
Yeah.
JM:
I don't know, you could probably argue that sci-fi television didn't actually go like it did kind of travel away at that time. I would say that the early Doctor Who serials, even though some people today do have trouble watching them because they look pretty spare and basic and stuff. It seems like they did a little better.
Nate:
Yeah. I mean, I don't know. I love early Doctor Who. I think that stuff is great. I don't know. The effects, the costumes, like the whole vibe of it. I mean, yeah, it looks like it's from the 60s.
JM:
Because it is.
Nate:
I just like that mood.
Gretchen:
Yeah. Yeah. I don't mind it. I like the 60s atmosphere.
JM:
Yeah. Yeah. I don't know. I'm just thinking of a sort of a buddy of mine who's been trying to watch the Hartnells for the first time and he's really having a hard time. It's kind of funny, actually. Because he's this completist, fan type guy and he's obsessed with the new show, but he's never seen any of the original. He's like, I'm going to start at the beginning.
Nate:
Yeah. That's what I did. I watched the whole thing in order.
JM:
Yeah. Yeah.
Nate:
The Loose Cannon recons, they really put in so much work there.
JM:
Yeah. But I think you were a lot more used to old productions.
Nate:
That's true. Yeah.
JM:
Than he is. Yeah. Some people just don't can't handle it. They just, I don't know. It's too static or something. They just, not enough, whatever.
Nate:
More of that next month, maybe.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
JM:
I don't know. I'm not going to say that I'll never read Nelson S. Bond again, but I'm not in a rush. I'm a little curious about that novel he wrote because there is an entry for him in D'ammassa's, I think he's in the fantasy volume, actually. So he has got two encyclopedia volumes. One is the "Encyclopedia Of Science Fiction". And the other one is the "Encyclopedia of Fantasy and Horror". And they're not that complete. I mean, like you say something like an encyclopedia of people kind of picture this really complete, very comprehensive work. And while he's done really good work, there's no way he's included like every, you know, even close to every author in the field, right? But he's still done some pretty good work.
And I think Bond shows up in the fantasy one and he's mostly talking about that novel. He does mention some of his shorter work, but seems to praise the novel. And I guess that's kind of was enough to make me curious about it. So maybe I'd like to check that out sometime.
But you know, it kind of makes me wonder like maybe, yeah, maybe science fiction's not the right place for this guy. Maybe he can use his humor better in a contemporary set story or like urban fantasy kind of thing or something like that, which is kind of what was suggested that novel was like. So, yeah.
Nate:
Well, if you check it out, let us know.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
JM:
I'll definitely mention it if I do check it out. Yeah.
Gretchen:
I think if I were to check out Bond in the future, I think I'd check out some of the TV work, especially I've seen a couple episodes of like the Kraft Television Theatre. They have all the different Kraft series and thriller because I'd like to check those out. But I don't know if I'm as eager to try some of the sci-fi stories, but maybe in the future.
JM:
Right.
(music: echoey beeps)
"Tools for Brains" non-fiction article
Nate:
So I guess before we move on to the next one, why don't we talk about the next nonfiction piece in the magazine, which is the "Tools for Brains" article.
JM:
Yeah. So this was my favorite article in the magazine. I really enjoyed this. This is kind of what made me, again, one of the things that sort of justified the thinking that we should just read the whole magazine because normally we'd probably skip something like this because it is a science fiction podcast.
Nate:
Right.
JM:
Some of the other nonfiction pieces are okay to moderately interesting, but it's kind of more in a, oh, that was a long time ago in 1939. There's some one that's coming up where I think the person who wrote the article is more interesting than the article itself. And this, I can't find any information about Leo Vernon. I don't know who he is. Did anybody?
Nate:
ISFDB says he was an MIT mathematician and he has two other nonfiction pieces in Astounding.
JM:
Oh, okay. Yeah.
Nate:
One called "Rocket Flight" from 1938. One called "Unseen Tools" from 1940.
JM:
Okay. Yeah. I have to use that resource more obviously, but yeah, this was good because it was not a very dry article. Like he kind of made it whimsical in parts, which I really appreciated. And it was an interesting companion to our artificial intelligence episode and the history, Nate, that you put together about that stuff.
Nate:
Yeah.
JM:
And this was a little bit further along, but not very much.
Nate:
Yeah. So I mean, we talked about that at the beginning of our episode on Erewhon. And I basically gave the history of calculating and computing devices and how that intertwines with artificial intelligence. And because this is a longer article, it's able to go into more depth, especially about the earlier stuff like ancient calculating machines and stuff from the Middle Ages and Renaissance, which I just kind of glazed over. But for the most part, it is the same beats of the piece that we presented at the beginning of the Samuel Butler. And the main focus of the article at the end, because this is the latest development as of July 1939 is Vannevar Bush's differential analyzer.
JM:
Yeah, there's such awesome hype for this machine.
Nate:
Yeah, right. So the differential analyzer was a mechanical analog computer. And I guess one interesting historical piece about this article is while it does mention Babbage, it doesn't go into any of the Boolean logic or anything like that, which would become a fundamental piece of digital computers. Because the analog computer functions is different than a digital computer. Digital computers represent information by states of off and on, you know, one or a zero, which can be represented either by mechanical means, you know, flipping a physical switch, or in the case of electronic computers by a vacuum tube or a transistor in the state of on or off.
So an analog computer like the differential analyzer functions essentially like a slide rule where you move the pieces and they line up in a certain way. The only thing with the differential analyzer is it's far, far, far more complex than a slide rule, which is a relatively simple piece of equipment. So I mean, the differential analyzer was huge and very complicated system of gears and wheels that was, as the name implies, used to solve differential equations.
JM:
Yes, I'm going to read some of this hype, because I think it's just great. It's so, I mean, I remember reading stuff that was kind of like this when I was a kid, where they're hyping up some new kind of technology or thing and making it seem just so amazing and awesome. And even though this damn machine probably had like 1000th or less of the computing power of the machine I'm recording this podcast on, I still got that feeling.
So, so here I'm going to read this part.
"The new machine will be a sight worth seeing. As part of the equipment, a complete automatic dial exchange from the telephone company was brought in. The whole machine will weigh tons and fill a large room. There will be hundreds of vacuum tubes, new and baffling systems of power communication. Instead of a mere six integrators, there will be nearly 20, with space for several more to be hooked in. They will be really high speed, running 5000 rpm or more. Mechanical transmission of the torque is impossible now without slippage. The little disk is extremely lightweight and runs balanced on fine jewel bearings. The torque will be transmitted by a new teletorque amplifier. A specially designed segment on the axle of the disk cuts an electrostatic field transmitted by complex circuits and vacuum tube amplification. The rotation of the small shaft or large shaft with regular gear trail. Electromagnetic fields had to be avoided because of hysteresis and heating effects.
"In the new machine, instead of plotting curves, the actual numerical data can be used. Adding an advantage of the punched card machines. In this case, the data will be punched on a continuous tape like a player piano roll. Since this will be the same type of data that would be used to plot a curve, there will be blank spots between the separate entries. A curve could be drawn smoothly between these points. The new machine, though, will automatically compute the intermediate points, making use of fifth differences, providing an accuracy greater than can be obtained manually by drawing the curves.
"In addition, instead of having to set the integrators and other parts to fit the initial condition of the problem, all that can be put on a piece of tape. One section of tape for each integrator. The tape will feed through the machine, pausing for about 20 seconds to allow the machinery to start moving to set each integrator. After the tape has fed through, the machine automatically starts to tape through again, just to check that everything is set correctly. If one of the integrators is wrong, the machine checks that again, and if it still is wrong, a bright light flashes on at the one integrator.
"Dean Bush, in describing the machine, once said that there had been discussion of having the machine call out, 'yoo-hoo!', if something went wrong, but the light was thought sufficient."
So, in all those paragraphs, we get a really nice description of basically what the machine can do, how it can process information, and the error checking mechanism.
Nate:
Yeah.
JM:
I think this is actually really, really well put together piece of science non-fiction. It's just really well done. The fact that I wasn't reading this being like, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, computing's come a long way since then, whatever. I mean, this is even before the military computers in the Second World War became a thing at the end there, maybe 1944, 45, where they were using ENIAC with all its vacuum tubes and everything like that.
Nate:
Yeah, so the electronic digital computers that came out of the war, one was from the United States, which is the ENIAC, which didn't actually see wartime use. It came online at the very, very end and afterwards, and that was designed to calculate ballistics tables, more or less. And the one from the UK, the Colossus, that did see wartime use, but that was used to crack the Nazi codes. So it was basically used as a very efficient and effective cryptography device that aided British intelligence when it came to intercepting the German messages.
JM:
So interestingly, they mentioned a lot of potential uses for computers then and now, including for astronomy, business, just to make work easier for mathematicians, especially, like there's a lot of emphasis on how they're labor-saving devices, but they don't really mention cryptography. And I guess that really became a thing because of the war. I mean, obviously it existed before then, but like people were just not thinking, oh, this would be the primary use for computers, the most sophisticated computers to first come online. And obviously, there's a complex reason for that. I mean, it's not just the fact that it is wartime, but it's the fact that the military industrial complex is pumping all this money into research and development, right? So it's kind of what we mentioned at the beginning of the episode with fission reactions, right?
Nate:
Yeah. And electronic digital computers can process information differently than a mechanical analog computer can. In that paragraph you read, you mentioned that it is using vacuum tubes, but the vacuum tubes here are just used to power the machine.
JM:
Right. They're not actually transistor equivalents or whatever.
Nate:
Right, exactly. So the early machines like the ENIAC and the early vacuum tube machines use vacuum tubes to represent states of on and off. And they use a lot of vacuum tubes, like a really lot of vacuum tubes, which would blow out all the time and it'd be like a real pain to figure out which tube had blown because you have to replace each one. And there's thousands upon thousands and it draws just like a ton of power. So when the transistor was invented, that naturally sparked a major revolution in computer efficiency and all that stuff. But just the basic nature of how it processes information allows it to be used for somewhat different things than an analog computer would be. So I mean, it's some of the early peacetime uses of early computers. You start to see things like synthesized music or computerized chess and tic-tac-toe and things like that that would form the basis for some of the modern industries of video games and synthesized music.
JM:
In figure one, they show the astronomical calculator at Columbia University. And I just found this amusing because of the names of all the gadgets, but also what the last item in the chain is. So in the paragraph I read about the difference analyzer, they're talking about all the different integrators that can be hooked in and they say, well, you can use more than six. So this one, they were referring back to the astronomical calculator. And it has, I'm assuming from left to right, the multiplier, the tabulator, the summary punch, the card sorter, the high speed reproducer, and finally a blackboard.
Nate:
Because it's the most important part.
JM:
Yeah, somebody can write down the problems that the next person has to deal with, I guess. And sometimes they talk about like 20 people working on this machine all at once. It's just such a cool image, like a bunch of guys scurrying back and forth between these rotating wheels and levers and things. And that's, I don't know, I just love it for some reason.
Nate:
It's a pretty fascinating look on how people were using the technology at the time.
JM:
You know, it's still got that thing to where they're boasting about how big the machine is. At what point do you think that totally reversed and they just started getting like, no, actually the key is to make them as small as possible. That's going to be the true revolution.
Nate:
Yeah, I think that changes in the next decade when people realize that these enormous and enormously complicated machines that draw a ton of power are very, very difficult to maintain. And that becomes a factor in their usage because when you make more than one outside of the laboratory setting, especially if you're looking to commercialize it and produce dozens, if not hundreds of these units to be sold to businesses and governmental agencies and all that, well, they need to work reliably.
JM:
Yeah. Yeah, just it's just so fun to think like they're pretty much at this point imagining the future of computing. And this guy even who's like a really smart writer about it is thinking, well, you know, these things are going to get more and more complex until we basically have a brain the size of a planet. And that's going to be great.
Gretchen:
I was looking for the specific part that I remember thinking about that. It's on page 90 with "the dream machine may fill an entire building."
Nate:
Yeah.
Gretchen:
That's the dream. That's what that's the ideal.
Nate:
I'm not sure how big it would take to emulate the function of a human brain and all of its billions of neurons firing, but I don't know if they'd be quite planet sized with modern hardware and I'm sure within the next...
JM:
No, you got to think you got to think like a science fiction writer.
Nate:
Right, right. Of course.
JM:
Yeah. Planet sized computers are pretty cool.
Nate:
Yeah, they are right. This is a neat article and if you are interested in these kind of concepts definitely listen to the episode we did on Samuel Butler's "Erewhon" because it explores these ideas very, very early in the 1860s 1870s. So it's a really fascinating look at how the idea of machines being able to think has evolved over time.
Bibliography:
Bond, Nelson - "Introducing the Author" Fantastic Adventures, July 1939
Bond, Nelson - "Introducing the Author" Fantastic Adventures, November 1939
Locus Magazine - "Nelson S. Bond: Looking Way Back" https://www.locusmag.com/1998/Issues/10/Bond.html
Reed, Betsy - "Nelson S. Bond Obituary", The Guardian https://www.theguardian.com/news/2006/nov/21/guardianobituaries.booksobituaries
Science Fiction Encyclopedia - "Nelson S. Bond" https://sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/bond_nelson_s
No comments:
Post a Comment