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"I'm just trying to get home!"
Nov. 19th, 2004 10:34 pmIf it's ever discovered that the Quantum Leap project has been real all along, I nominate Morgan Robertson as Person Most Likely To Have Been Temporarily Impersonated By A Time-Travelling Scientist Who Fixes Things In Very Minor Ways While Having Full Knowledge Of Future Events. It won't fit on the trophy, but me and Al, we'll know.
He was a little-known Victorian author who turned to writing because his eyesight wasn't good enough to let him train as a jeweller. In 1905 he wrote a book called The Submarine Destroyer, simultaneously a) proving that the ability to think up good titles is a rare and precious thing and b) inventing the periscope. When officials from the Holland Submarine Company arrived at his door to ask whether he'd thought to sketch out a couple more details (and what a fun place that must have been to work if its employees read things called The Submarine Destroyer on their days off, too), Morgan Robertson didn't say "?!", as most of us would. Instead, he showed them a model periscope that he'd already patented, and sold it to them for $50,000.
Another book of his, Futility, featured a huge and expensive British ocean liner called the Titan which was carrying society's rich and famous across the North Atlantic. The biggest and best of its kind, it was widely claimed to be unsinkable, and therefore didn't have enough lifeboats to save all the passengers when - you've guessed it - it hit an iceberg and sank. The book was published in 1898, fourteen years before the Titanic did just that.
However. The story he should have been remembered for The Battle of the Monsters, written in 1899. Given that my academic work is on supernatural fiction, it's saying something that ( this is the weirdest story I have read for a long, long time. )
*sniff*
He was a little-known Victorian author who turned to writing because his eyesight wasn't good enough to let him train as a jeweller. In 1905 he wrote a book called The Submarine Destroyer, simultaneously a) proving that the ability to think up good titles is a rare and precious thing and b) inventing the periscope. When officials from the Holland Submarine Company arrived at his door to ask whether he'd thought to sketch out a couple more details (and what a fun place that must have been to work if its employees read things called The Submarine Destroyer on their days off, too), Morgan Robertson didn't say "?!", as most of us would. Instead, he showed them a model periscope that he'd already patented, and sold it to them for $50,000.
Another book of his, Futility, featured a huge and expensive British ocean liner called the Titan which was carrying society's rich and famous across the North Atlantic. The biggest and best of its kind, it was widely claimed to be unsinkable, and therefore didn't have enough lifeboats to save all the passengers when - you've guessed it - it hit an iceberg and sank. The book was published in 1898, fourteen years before the Titanic did just that.
However. The story he should have been remembered for The Battle of the Monsters, written in 1899. Given that my academic work is on supernatural fiction, it's saying something that ( this is the weirdest story I have read for a long, long time. )
*sniff*
