The Weekly Machen
The following article is the sixth in a series by Arthur Machen for The Daily Express. Admirers of Machen’s horror classic, The Great God Pan, will find this dispatch particularly interesting.
Quicker Than Thought
Prophecy in a “Shocker” that Has Come True
by
Arthur Machen
October 3, 1918
Twenty-eight years ago, I have just discovered, I was a prophet. I was writing a book then, a book called “The Great God Pan,” and one of the characters talks as follows:—
“This world of ours is pretty well girded now with the telegraph wires and cables; thought, with something less than the speed of thought, flashes from sunrise to sunset, from north to south, across the floods and the desert places. Suppose that an electrician of today were suddenly to perceive that he and his friends have merely been playing with pebbles and mistaking them for the foundations of the world; suppose that such a man saw uttermost space lie open before the current, and words of men flash forth to the sun and beyond the sun into the systems beyond, and the voice of articulate-speaking men echo in the waste void that bounds our thought.”
Thus I made Dr. Raymond orate in 1890. I hope that he was somewhat picturesque, but I had not really any definite views or anticipations of the future of telegraphy. I need scarcely add that the possibility of “wireless” had never entered my mind.
Now I have just been reading how Marconi has sent a wireless message from Carnarvon in Australia—
a distance of 12,000 miles. Really Dr. Raymond appears to have been a greater man than I took him for; I thought he was just a character in a “shocker” but he clearly had the gift of scientific prophecy.
Wireless telegraphy has established, as it were, Raymond’s preamble; the message is launched into space, and every year the range of the current increases. Who can set bound or limit to a process which, thirty years ago, was an inconceivable miracle?
But there is another point. The message sent from Carnarvon to Australia flashed across the 12,000 mikes of space in one-fourteenth of a second. Now a second is not the infinitesimal portion of time that it is commonly conceived to be: it is a considerable duration, large enough for a man to say, “one, two, three, four, five, six, seven,” if he speaks as fast as he can. But, even then, dividing this duration of time into fourteen parts and taking one of them, it appears that wireless is as swift as thought itself. We think of Australia, and, in thought, we are there forthwith; and so, before the Marconi operator has lifted his fingers from the instrument. Sydney knows that Damascus has fallen.
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Thanks – this is fascinating! I wonder who else may have been speculating – and hoping – in a similar vein, as early as 1894? The English Wikipedia has assorted tantalizing and frustrating articles related to the matter – such as “List of Oldest Radio Stations”, which holds that Father Roberto Landell de Moura sent something from one place in Sao Paolo, Brazil, to another in “1893” – though its article on him does not include this!
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And, in any case, how quickly both “Wireless telegraphy” and “Radio broadcasting” (to name two more Wikipedia articles) spread and became ever better and more widely established within a year of two of Machen’s article, here!
To name one more, the “Capture of Damascus (1918)” is reported to have taken place on 1 October.
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Interesting! … especially the bit on Damascus. I am no radio expert, but I vaguely remember reading about an early radio experiment having taken place in the United States during 1906. Rereading this Machen article, I found that I incorrectly transcribed “1890” as “1800”! Big difference! That has now been corrected.
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I was checking the Bodleian Library site for something – and became belatedly aware that they have had a free exhibition entitled “Listen In: How Radio Changed the Home” (with accompanying book by Beaty Rubens) since 7 February, which will go on through 31 August.
Thinking of a famous 1962 movie, and looking up the capture of Damascus in a fascinating book I read recently, Sean McMeekin’s The Berlin-Baghdad Express: The Ottoman Empire and Germany’s Bid for World Power, 1898-1918 (2010), I note that in chapter 17 he writes “The most famous achievement of Feisal’s Arab Bedouin irregulars, the storming of Damascus dramatized in Lawrence of Arabia, never took place at all (the myth of Arab conquest was concocted by the British in order to deny Damascus to the French)”! His footnote (number 26) refers us to the 2004 edition of Elie Kedourie’s The Chatham House Version and Other Middle-Eastern Studies for the essay “The Capture of Damascus, 1 October 1918” and its appendix.
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