The Dream Life of Prototypes
Colin Bennett
1. Claims, Devices, and Pseudo Performances
2. The Deep Past
3. Discojets, Avrocars and Skycars
4. Prototypes as Intermediate Forms of Life
5. Prototypal People
Introduction
Ufology, Magic, and Paradigms
All cultures, whether simple or complex, powerful or weak, draw their values from a constellated scheme of teachers and heroic figures, some of whom attain the status of gods and goddesses. Such elemental beings are present in every cultural system, whether ancient or modern. In the sense that Jesus was said to have walked on water and come back from the dead, he reflects the general character of magical or elemental beings found everywhere in cultures that have little or no connection with Christianity. Claims of “alien contact” (see Looking for Orthon, my biography of the UFO Prophet George Adamski) appear at first sight certainly appear to be absurd or ridiculous. But we must bear in mind that such contacts with magical beings created the world’s great religions which are all “mystical” in both origin and purpose. We have therefore to accept the idea that absurd and mystical elements play a vital part within the creative and visionary structure of social-psychology, despite the protests of sceptics and scientists.
Objective valuation in the contemporary sense, that is judging whether a particular hero is fact or fiction, or real or unreal is less important than to understand the principle around which the transcendental figures and their roles cohere. Moral rules (and hence a complete “metanarrative”) gather around the teachings of Jesus Christ for example. By contrast, an example of a purely intellectual amoral rule or paradigm is the convention of signs by means of which we organise the solution of an algebraic equation. Both these things are best seen as schemes of organized information whose significance is far more important than questions of concrete “reality.” In any case, in all cultures, whether moral or amoral, the constellated “real” always turns out to be something of a shadowy Platonic approximation.
Such a central cohering principle is generally termed a paradigm, which is some basic formulation around which a set of rules are formed. Such paradigms may be moral or intellectual, abstract, or indeed profoundly religious.
The internal structure of a paradigm can be vast and complex, but most paradigms are fairly simple as regards their main outline. For instance, a typical moral paradigm is the basic assumption that under normal conditions, all human life is sacred. Our ideas cluster around such a basic assumption rather like crystals gather around a cotton strand in a jar of solution, itself often called indeed a “culture” in chemical terms. This “crystallisation” is a very good model for the action of a particular paradigm. The cultures generated by religious texts, such as the Bible or the Koran, are spun around these books much as crystals form in a jar of salt solution.
We need paradigms because we have to have some means of controlling and defining experience and the world. A generally accepted overt paradigm supplies what are deemed to be generally satisfactory “explanations,” and traditionally, such a thing puts birth, death, and copulation in terms of a drama of universal progress in terms of myth and fable, folklore and the experience of learning and discovery of outer and inner worlds.
A paradigm based on equations such as work=worth, or input=output may operate successfully for a considerable length of historo-cultural time. Throughout this time we model a cosmology of action and values until we see the entire mental and physical universe working as a function of such equations.
As dominant forms of live information, such powerful paradigms generate automatically whole sets of explanations about how the universe “works.” For a time, these explanations are accepted and do indeed appear to be complete. From Ptolemy onwards, the geocentric universe was “complete” until Copernicus showed that the earth’s course was around the sun and not vice versa. Newton’s mechanical universe was just as complete a synthesis, but contained no knowledge of magnetic, electrical, or nuclear forces. A similar confidence in late Victorian mechanical determinism in physics was utterly destroyed by the Curie’s discovery of radio activity, Quantum Theory, and Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle.
But despite traditional historical models being revealed constantly as “false” in the sense that we are talking about, it has to be accepted that some of the great works of mankind were nevertheless created based on these false or approximate assumptions of universal “truth.” We are thus faced with the somewhat quantum thought that the systems of both Newton and Euclid still “work” almost perfectly for macrocosmic schemes, yet they do not recognise magnetic, electric, or nuclear elements.
This is intellectually astonishing of course; it is rather like taking the engine out of a car and yet seeing that the car still works! Therefore if we assume that the mediaeval world could not work out any truth for itself because it didn’t have modern science to help it is the height of intellectual folly. If a baby monkey recovers from an illness because it thinks a hot water bottle is its mother’s breast, we have a situation where input does not equal output in any concrete sense. This example illustrates how a stage-set can achieve corporeal changes. It is also an example of the connection between the Imagination and the construction of socio-mechanistic experience.
Noise in the System
Scientists and engineers in particular often call anomalies “random noise in the system.” The social analogue of this notion supports the idea that the uneducated, the unintelligent, the eccentric, the mentally afflicted, and all those with unacceptable and unusual ideas have absolutely no contribution to make to society, either in terms of thought or culture. This extremely negative and somewhat sinister view is in support of the basic idea that a completely unified theory of life and consciousness is possible provided after we tidy up and (solemn thought) “get rid of” all contradictions and impurities within a particular set scheme of cosmic interpretation, either religious or scientific.
Such is the nature of intellectual eugenics. No drunk or social misfit is "allowed" to see a UFO.
But certainly without such a flow of counter-balancing contradictions (which we now call anomalies), any major cultural programme would settle down on its legs and be eventually unable to move in time. In other words, without such a constant destabilization which keeps a culture in a kind of perpetual motion, the concept of change and “advance” in time would eventually become meaningless.
Therefore despite itself, any culture must change or die, or become a kind of frozen tapestry described by Keats in his poem Ode on a Grecian Urn. The mediaeval European world for example is now such a tapestry, shed as a snake sheds its skin, though scholars may continue to dig things out, propping up stage fronts for “creative interest,” and undoubtedly we can still “enter” the mediaeval experience through its literature, music, and art. But effectively, as an experience, mediaevalism is dead in the sense that the Italians are no longer Romans, the modern Egyptians are no longer the people who built the pyramids, and the English are not the people who saw Shakespeare’s original plays.
There is a clear path leading out from our tourist visit to the mediaeval world, and we can leave whenever we wish to leave. However, the path leading out from our own contemporary paradigm is not so easy to find, if only because finding the OFF switch is almost impossible. Trying to switch off the face of a particular actor of films or TV is equally impossible. Actual exposure to media visions or broadcast transmissions is almost irrelevant. A person who has never seen TV in their life is as exposed as is a regular viewer.
The technology merely established a state of mind. Once that programme is running, then possession of a TV set is somewhat irrelevant.
Indeed, from one point of view, Mankind itself may be a somewhat irrelevant prototypal process. Change the entire personnel of CNN overnight and the organization would function in an identical way with a complete set of changed staff.
Thus any paradigm may be seen as a cultural agenda or program, this being a complete set of self-replicating software which binds cultures together like a kind of metaphysical glue. It is possible to call cultures “programmatic” in this sense because whilst their value systems are still alive and functioning (and indeed developing and growing) they consist of self-generating proliferating elements which are passed on from human generation to human generation, surviving and largely independent of individual personality. When such genetic analogies are seen in terms of information flow rather than in biological terms, we get a different view of how “knowledge” transforms itself and develops as sets of information menus.
Such a semi-automatic replication of evolving patterns, somewhat independent of individual human beings, appears to work very well for a time. Such an organised body of signs and references propagandises itself as a “complete explanation” of the meaning of birth and death, cosmic revelation and world-destiny. The world of 19th century Britain, for example, was such a sealed world, for great length of time quite consistent within itself. An energetic colonizing social caste produced a system of world-wide Empire which worked as smoothly as the clocks and gears of the 18th century, as smoothly indeed as the railway timetables and steam ship schedules of the burgeoning industrial world.
HG Wells wrote:
“The sober Englishman at the close of the nineteenth century could sit at his breakfast-table, decide between tea from Ceylon or coffee from Brazil, devour an egg from France with some Danish ham, or eat a New Zealand chop, wind up his breakfast with a West Indian banana, glance at the latest telegrams from all the world, scrutinise the prices current of his geographically distributed investments in South Africa, Japan, and Egypt, and tell the two children he had begotten (in the place of his father's eight) that he thought the world changed very little. They must play cricket, keep their hair cut, go to the old school he had gone to, shirk the lessons he had shirked, learn a few scraps of Horace and Virgil and Homer for the confusion of cads, and all would be well with them....”
Running Out of Time
But a particular paradigm is never quite as alone or complete as this example from Wells would suggest. All cultures run out of time. Their states as programmatic states are only partial functions of their physical development in political and economic terms. Their economies may be quite sound, but if the psychic structure is incapable of producing new metaphors in terms of that thing called vision, they will certainly die.
To try and avoid such a systems-death, cultures generate closet subtexts rather like a liner carries life boats. Such boats are kept under wraps, and are hardly the subject of general conversation on board since they are reminders of the possibility that the strength of Nature may be far stronger than the strength of the most powerful ship or the most convincing paradigm.
If we see the lifeboats as anomalies, then we can see alternative thinking as hidden sub-routines and covert agendas which are kept sustained at a low energy level as semi-legal experimentation. The paradigm, as a form of information-life, keeps its options open therefore, ready to change the goal posts very quickly if it senses that resources and processes are becoming exhausted, emptied of metaphor by being deprived of fresh psychic resources, and therefore incapable of imagining beyond itself.
In this model, we have disembodied intelligence itself acting rather like a live foraging animal, using all the tricks and deception and camouflage needed to stay alive as an entity.
To this end, any prevailing paradigm runs many covert optional programmes. Some it discards, others it keeps hobbled, yet others are quietly and secretly groomed to take over the reins when a crisis occurs.
What form could such a crisis take? Such things usually occur whenever a problem arises that cannot be answered in terms of the prevailing paradigm. For example, such Victorian psycho-social confidence as Wells illustrated above was being undermined steadily by Romanticism, by spiritualism and indeed (of course) by Marxism and Darwinism, and the new discoveries in physics and mathematics.
Therefore we may have to consider seriously the rather uncomfortable idea that pure information is forever an evolving and unprecedented form of life, complete with its own intention fields.
Within the life and operation of a particular paradigm, many questions are answered, and many difficult problems are solved. Indeed the appearance is of the momentous and continual “success” of a particular state of mind. As in Wells’ example, this success appears to be total until a set of very special questions arises which cannot be answered within the terms of a prevailing paradigm. When this happens, a culture goes into a kind of shock, as did Victorianism and the fossilised monarchies of European culture after 1914.
Within months, an entire world-view vanished due to the inability to “explain” its tragic experience, caused by forces quite beyond its comprehension.
Thus did the British Generals fight the tank as a weapon just as eagerly as they fought the Germans.
The battle between scientific scepticism and Ufology is a perfect example of the kind of conflict between agendas and counter-agendas within a prevailing paradigm. The grinding together of these cultural fault-lines gives us our sense of time passing and keeps both ideological systems and belief-constellations in a kind of perpetual motion.
The UFO phenomenon is a perfect example of how society manages to run apparently contradictory paradigms at one and the same time, as option menus within a scheme of negotiated sanctions and allowances rather then as “objective realities” of Victorian Station Master “science.” Both the “alien” and the UFO can be looked upon as sub-menus within our idea of a programmatic paradigm which has some degree of self-awareness as regards the longevity of its operational field before it is forced to change. Here we must consider the idea of the decay of a system in terms of the aging of information fields, which in the strictly Cartesian view are not supposed to age at all.
In these terms, parapsychology, metal bending, UFOs, and remote viewing, may be looked upon not as anomalistic areas within the traditional sterile “real” versus “unreal” debate, but as sub-routine options for a possible evolving world-modelling of belief systems. This represents the Post-modern view that sees the birth of anything and everything as a creation of an ideological flux within time-elements which are kinds of symbolic dream-theatres.
In this sense it is possible to conceive of “matter” as a form of information-life whose “body,” as it were, consists not of atoms, but of advertisements, presentations, shows, acts, and endless performances struggling for cultural prime time.
It must surely be admitted that such a view is a whole lot more interesting than atoms or molecules!
Here then, in The Dream Life of Prototypes, is a brief history of what we might call covert image-agendas that have almost an image-life of their own.
As always the fantasists are the key to opening our own life-saving sense of wonder. They create the outlines of fantastic new options which we absorb despite ourselves. We may despise and ridicule them, we secretly admire their courage and their nerve, which never fails them. Like the anomalies, the adventurers we are about to meet are always on the night-side of town, where the real action is. Their mad devices are an essential part of our secret lives, seeding ourselves into the future quite beyond our three score years and ten.
1. Claims, Devices, and Pseudo Performances
Margaret Sachs, in her 1981 UFO Encyclopaedia, gives many examples of patents taken in the U.S.A for “flying saucer” type aircraft designs since 1945. Although almost none of the designs discussed here were built, the accompanying descriptions of performance are nevertheless superlative. There are blushing claims for supersonic speed, altitude performance, and space travel.
One of the very earliest designs was Archie L. Leggett’s 1955 design, for which he took out a patent in 1960. This was to be a rotating disk-shaped aircraft designed “primarily as a rocket for interplanetary or satellite travel, but also adaptable to jet propulsion within Earth’s atmosphere.” How suitable it was for such ambitions can be judged from his plan, complete with propeller:
Lent’s 1957 design Leggett’s 1955 design
Constantine P. Lent, who was issued Patent 2,801,058 on July 30th, 1957, stated in his application, “The flying saucer described in this invention is not a thing in the realm of phantasy [sic] but a very practical aircraft obeying approved aerodynamic principles.” Lent said that his craft was intended for “commercial and private, long distance and local flights carrying passengers or cargo,” adding that his “Saucer-Shaped Aircraft” was designed to rise vertically instantaneously, move transversely, hover and travel at supersonic speeds. We notice the appeal to common sense, and the rejection of “phantasy.” This appeal to the bourgeois norm (possibly with the thought of not frightening off any possible investors) is present in all the claims for these designs. Even if the thing has quite obviously no more aeronautical significance than a child’s scooter, there is always a barefaced claim for quite revolutionary performance, an appeal straight from Herman Melville’s 1857 novel, The Confidence Man.
Certainly such claims have something to do with unique creative excitations within the American mind as described by writers from Melville to Norman Mailer in A Fire on the Moon. Quite brimming over with almost totally absurd enthusiasms of every kidney, no other nation produces such quite deliciously crazy energies as these, as irresistible as any American universal icon based on similar impossibilities, from Marilyn Monroe to Michael Jackson. Such paper dreams of quite extraordinary flying machines are a similar assault on infinity. Certainly the normal confines of life are insufficient for often tragic lives that attempt to extend those boundaries that normally define human beings. In this sense their limitless speculations relate to the B-29s made of wood found on cargo-cult islands. Every single one of the machines illustrated here is a similar prayer for the impossible.
This is a hard way of doing it, of course. This kind of designer doesn’t get a couple of aeronautical engineering degrees and work for Boeing for ten years before they get a foot in the door. They take a sheet of paper and design something to go into space, right there and then. Such an act of personal faith not only says something about both Mind and Product, it defines the American psyche. Despite the protestations of rationalists, cynics, and sceptics, we would be dead without people such as this. Somehow they are part of the rainforest of the mind. We bulldoze their silliness out of our minds at our peril, for such a thing is an essential part of the last vestiges of Western innocence.
If we have no innocence within us, then we were dead before we were born.
Another disk-shaped craft designed “to hover, travel at high speeds,” and “quickly turn and maneuver (sic) in azimuth heading” was Irwin R. Barr’s “Flying Machine"
Barr’s 1958 “Flying Machine” Fleissner’s 1955 “Rotating jet Aircraft."
The claims for performance become as fantastic as those of Lent or Leggett with Heinrich Fleissner’s “Rotating Jet Aircraft with Lifting Disc Wing and Centrifuging Tanks.” Fleissner did not hesitate to use the present tense prototypes when he described his machine:
“It takes off from and lands vertically on any suitable ground or water surface, and has the ability to remain in suspension at any point at any desired altitude regardless of weather conditions.” Its inventor claims that “acute angle turning is made possible by the fact that all the turning devices are in proximity to the center of the aircraft and further, the center body is the only portion that is turned in that the wing, extended outwardly therefrom, is continuously rotating and is not affected by the turning of the central body.”
Many of these designs look like the George Adamski machines in photographs that were publicised after the time of George Adamski’s desert “contact” in 1952, Most of them use large-diameter ducted fans, little better than big lawnmower units or fairground drives. At the time, these heavy, noisy, industrial fan units were used mainly for air-conditioning, or agricultural machinery, and were somewhat inefficient, low-powered, and bulky. Fifteen-foot diameter fans were certainly not an efficient form of drive in any configuration envisaged by these designers, who were of varying degrees of technical competence.
Jet engines, when they appear at all, are stuck pretty well anywhere, as if the designer doesn’t quite know what to do with them. Most designers were amateurs, but even the professionals were seduced by the idea of a completely circular craft, although the aerodynamic virtues were (and still are) extremely doubtful in comparison to the universal swept-wing pencil-shape. There is no rational aerodynamic reason for a having a totally circular shape, given present power plants.
Therefore all these designs have one characteristic: they represent monstrous gaps in the chains of technological logic that are supposed to make them do what the makers have claimed they can do. But we are here not talking about incompetence or mistakes, or about mock-ups for film sets, frauds, or about acknowledged creative fictions. These machines were intended to do what most of the designers claimed, that is fly to planets and even the stars.
But as far as even a modest performance is concerned, all of them have wondrous holes in common sense concerning both structure and claimed performance. Whilst the designs look appealing indeed, what are we to make of Nathan C. Price’s claim for a “High Velocity High Altitude VTOL Aircraft,” of 1953? This patent was filed for in January 1953, months before the Adamski pictures were published. Then, as now, the blurbs were as good as any in commercial breaks nowadays. Why was the velocity “High” we ask, and why was it “High Altitude” when USAF conventional prototypes at the time (such as the U-2) were struggling to get up to 80,000 feet? Was Price mad, or just optimistic? Certainly the symmetry and beauty of his drawings do not indicate mental instability:
 |
|
|
Nathan Price’s V.T.O.L. design |
Homer Streib’s circular wing design US Patent 3,103,324 “capable of vertical and lateral flight” |
We might ask why Homer Streib’s 1953 machine was judged to be capable of “vertical and lateral flight” just as we might ask why the performance of a ship held up by rotating umbrellas (with rows of brass cannons aboard, no less) was described as a possible “warship of the skies” in 1870.
By 1956, Streib had improved his design. This time he tells us a little more about the power plant. It is a ducted fan, capable of being tilted to obtain a forward drive component. The heavy transmission gear required to do this is not illustrated, and neither is the power plant to drive such a large body and the equally heavy fan at the same time. Cooling, fuel space, electrics are not considered, and where, on this model, with its considerable under-hang, any undercarriage could be retracted to is a good question. Given the weight, calculations concerning the amount of lift generated by the turning fan (little more than that for a child’s circus-ride) were optimistic:
Homer Streib, 1956 John Fischer, 1954
Other designers were even more optimistic concerning practical engineering possibilities. Above is John Fischer’s 1954 design for a “rotating circular aircraft.” There are few details about how the rotation is to be achieved and what is its function is as regards flight and performance. In general, these designers ignore all matters concerning bearings, lubricants, fuels, petrol-electrics, transmissions, gearboxes, or control surfaces. That’s all for lesser men. As long as the machine looks like a Thunderbirds toy, then all is well. Style, not rationale, was the name of the game, although one supposes that few of these designers would ever admit that. This world appears to be in a state of ecstasy where rules of the lower earth do not mean a thing. The rule seems to be taken from one of the oldest engineering maxims: “if it looks good, it will be good.” Those males who are romantics concerning the female of the species will no doubt have their own opinions concerning the risks of such a claim.
Therefore power supplies are no problem, if only because in the cases we are considering, they did not exist as far as giving the claimed performances. But like love, dreams and fantasies are compulsive drives. They are not untruths so much as differing levels of inspired approximations, all of which have great attractive power. We can no more get such things out of our minds than we can stop ourselves breathing. As human beings, if we haven’t got a particular piece of the puzzle, usually we either invent it, or ignore it, or simulate it, often leaving an open space where “it” should be, and get on with less mundane matters. Perhaps in these cases, there is the subliminal hope that the missing power plant will grow into the open space all by itself and, confounding us again, indeed it appears often to do just that.
Certainly the circular design has always been the most compulsive. Attempts to make a circular craft in defiance of any and every rule has, over a century, consumed many lives, like the quest for alchemical gold or the Grail. Even the common sense folk of the Armed Forces of Canada, Britain, and the U.S. caught the magic bug of circularity and tried the principle in one form or another, and all their efforts came to nothing.
Below, in contrast to the above, are professional civilian efforts. As distinct from the examples given, here are circular designs brimful of calculations proper and not a little practical honest worth:
Note here that these very different thinkers are going for the power supply, not the shape. These experimental designs resulted finally in the moderate success of the Hovercraft and the single brilliant success of the Harrier jet fighter. But this somewhat limited destiny did not please the circular-shape stalwarts.
It was obvious that those believers in the Adamski-type ships that had inspired generations were not going take no for an answer. They were determined to try and design and make a circular flying machine in the face of all rational considerations. The compulsion was such that patents were taken out for flying saucer shapes not intended even as flying machines, but as buildings, no less. Here are three examples:
A 1968 design by Matti Suuronen for James Sides, 1968 design for a
“a dwelling house.” "corporate building"
My own personal favourite design for a UFO building is Lee Sebastian’s “ornamental” construction, issued Patent 3,469,804 in 1969:
Lee Sebastian, 1969
George Adamski’s book Flying Saucers Have Landed (co-authored with Desmond Leslie) was published in late 1953. Almost immediately, Adamski became a world-famous and influential figure. Here from his book, is the world-renowned photograph taken in Palomar Gardens:
Sketch by Leonard Cramp of George Adamski's spaceship
The machines illustrated below were almost certainly drawn under the influence of the Adamski photographs:
Donald Ordway’s 1961 “circular John Sherwood’s “Vertical Lift Flying
aircraft.” Machine.” of 1967.
There should be created a new science of examining these beasts in the manner that crustaceans are examined for form, development, and function. Mendel used beans, and Darwin the Galapagos finches to demonstrate the laws of Natural Selection. Here indeed is a kind of Natural Selection operating within related families of industrial landscapes which are truly liminal in the sense that they are strung between the theoretical infinities of absolute fact and absolute fiction. Each individual part, motors, framework, and major parts are "real" enough in themselves yet they are put into an utterly fantastic landscape which is a kind of form of cave-wall painting.
Had he seen such contrivances, Darwin himself might have noticed certainly the technological equivalent to a useless flap of skin, there a half-forgotten tail, here a more efficient claw, there almost an afterthought, all implying different degrees of inspiration, commitment and resources and, one imagines, not a little love; here is an improved mouth, here a wide array of varying psycho-social plumage, developing technological achievements, and social power. The shapes and ambitions here illustrated are masses of advertising, great clouds of fecund ideological spores, perfect examples of that irresistible intellectual eroticism by means of which the Western mind navigates its way towards Prime Time constellations.
In this classy country of pure mind, a designer starts with a bubble-cockpit, not aerodynamic equations. This comes before any money-grubbing considerations of tunnel-vision artisans concerned with lower-class ideas of mechanical “success.” From this placenta (not called originally the “cockpit” without reason) came the space helmet: glistening, sexual, an almost exclusively American technological art form and a damn sight more interesting and significant than a row of “impressionistic” trees stuck on a wall and called art “proper.”
Frost, 1963
3. The Deep Past
Long before the Wright Flyer took off in 1903, the 19th century produced many beautiful dream-shapes of impossible flying machines. In many cartoons and sketches, rabbit-ear wings were pedalled to move up and down, umbrellas were rotated for lift, and propellers were turned by hand-cranks. Bird-wing shapes were attached by harnesses to the arms of muscular men, which were the only miniature power plants available.
Just like some designers one hundred years later, almost all shunned these theoretical marvels and the questions they could not answer, and solved the problem of motive power by ignoring it altogether.
This was a much more elegant solution. Prototypal wings and tails sprout from flying prams formed by sheer guesswork regarding what would be the best geometry for possible atmospheric travel. Crude ship-type screw propellers appear, but the skeletal fuselages are quite empty. Like the Age of Reason waiting for the discovery of electricity, it is as if the forlorn propeller-shafts are waiting for the invention of the petrol engine.
By about 1870, power plants appear in conjectured aircraft, but they were course the only ones available –steam engines!
|
|
|
|
Albert Robida: "Departure of the Scientific and Colonising Expedition to the Moon" (early 1870s) |
ARIEL: The Henson Steam Carriage (1842) |
For generations
after Henson, such dreaming forms as those of Albert Robida, a contemporary of
Jules Verne, continued to spout funnels, chimneys,
boilers and furnaces. In many of Robida's delightful illustrations we see stout captains in
full dress uniform standing upright, guiding smoking iron beasts through space
and sky, cheered on by waving crowds below, assembled as if for a naval regatta.
By the time of the Wright brothers' first flight in 1903, the petrol-driven internal
combustion engine has reduced the great floating palaces of imperial dream to
the almost invisible shape of the Wright Flyer, one of the great seeding
prototypes of all history:
In every sense, the Flyer was the inverse of all history in that its shape was built around a power plant. Gone are the feathers and balloons, the arm-muscles and oars, the pedals, bird-wings and steam-furnaces of historical attempts at flight. More powerful engines mean more aerodynamic problems and the shapes of aircraft from the Flyer onwards represent attempts to solve these problems with regard to what power was available and of what type in terms of size and weight.
But despite the success of science and technology, the pre-Flyer dreams continued.
Inspired by such people as Arnold (1947) and Adamski (1953), many would-be designers began to sketch out circular or semi-circular shapes. As we shall see, they did this quite in defiance of mainstream aeronautical theory and practice. But in the 1950s there was no power supply that was at all suitable for these particular shapes. Therefore, jet engines being new and rather uncertain things, this new generation of circular-form designers still crammed in crude duct-fan apparatus, just as the visionaries in the nineteenth century put steam engines in linen-covered bamboo carts and expected them to fly through the sky with the greatest of ease.
But the history of the circular shape wrapped regardless around conventional power plants has not been good. As the US Navy and the Canadians (and indeed the British) found out, there is simply no point in attaching such a configuration to known power units.
An argument could be made saying that the British SVTOL Harrier “jump jet” fighter was the final expression of these ideas. Certainly, with its balanced computer-managed thrusters, it did (and still does) certain of the things the circular disk designers wanted their craft to do. But it did them with a conventional fighter-type body, which it retains as a warplane today, still in service with the RAF, the Royal Navy, and the US Marine Corps.
Having achieved this, can we say that the search for the circular form is over? Well, no, not by any means. Yes, a thin lightweight screen could be put around the Harrier and it would perform as a pretty noisy and mediocre “flying saucer,” but its stability and performance would suffer. In any case, this would not be the performance our circular purists are seeking at all.
The circular shapes in question relate to the scores of "flying saucer" shapes that have been seen in the skies of the world practically every week for the past fifty years. As in the 19th century, our modern designers of circular craft either leave empty spaces that are waiting for another age, or use duct-fans that, more often than not, are the aeronautical equivalent to a child’s windmill on a stick.
Below are four duct-fan units from the innocent days of post-1945 aeronautical speculation. In a sense we are looking at the very last dreams of the 19th century. The dreams are struggling within an ever widening penumbra of uncertainty that is finally going to destroy them. We can look upon these shapes as art form, pieces of concept-art that tell us as much as does conventional art-form with regard to mood and character, individual destiny and national endeavour. Though these machines were not built, men dreamed of them as Quixote dreamed of the Enchanted Dulcinea. They were loved and caressed, men put their every hope in them as they sailed to their doom like paper boats in a rapid stream of time. In every sense, here are cyber animals, pure species of information as a form of life.
Here they are, still grazing in the dream fields of old technology until their corpses are pinned up in a kind of Jurassic Museum:
Leonor Zalles 1956 Leonore Zales 1955 Stefan Postelson 1962
Future generations will look upon these "impossible" forms unique to the 1950s as we now gaze upon Mayan temple-steps that lead nowhere, and wonder why the temple was apparently suddenly abandoned and not finished.
Here are shapes that emerge from an anthropology of industrial ideology and material resources. But few have thought of forgotten technological guesses such as this as concept art. Far fewer even have thought of natural selection, and indeed mutation, within the progress of technological developments.
We have to conclude that frequently we dream in defiance of fact, and often leave out some connections that are still forming under the hill of time. This simultaneous seeing and not-seeing provides the potential difference between the two vital faculties that drive the visions that come to pass. The psychology of discovery tells that without self-deception we are nothing. We create the future as a collage. It becomes a partner to act freely in forming and evolving consciousness.
In its attempt to describe the indescribable, indeed Ufology can been seen as concept art. Conceived as art-form in the sense described here, it gives us insights into ourselves and into places where equations cannot go.
Here are some more typical dream-cars of yesteryear, rich in association as a Dickens Christmas pudding, nostalgic as the pyramid smell of the interior of a B-29, and circular as ever they were:
Robert Cromie 1891 Cyrano de Bergerac 1659 William Bradshaw 1892
Below are two space-ships of a more homely variety. Both are huge hollow cone-shaped shells designed to fire a gentleman of independent means into space and maintain his dignity at the same time. The shells contain everything that a person of quality needs: a library, a sitting room, and a gun-dog.
Faure/Graffigny 1890 Verne 1865 And something to read on the trip
These are perfect examples of how a middle-class projects itself into burgeoning technology. The 19th-century class system only accepted such extraordinary devices provided that its own self was not transformed and hence destroyed utterly. The centre image above illustrates well a culture which is running out of time, yet understandably is trying to reach a relationship with a threatening future. In a series of pictures, the man and his dog, complete with bookcase, are blasted off from Earth and reach the moon. They presumably used the anchor to secure themselves to the moon, for it appears to be the only visible piece of technology available. Whilst we may smile at this, the comparison between the 19th-century space-rescue from the sea and the retrieval of the Apollo capsule is quite astonishing:
The only difference appears to be the absence of the dog!
4. Discojets, Avrocars and Skycars
Moller, 2004 Moller, 1974
The “levitating” Skycar is the brainchild of Chris Moller, who has spent $200 million trying to get his invention airborne. In 1974, Moller stated that the car needed only 35 feet to take off, but thanks to its 205hp engine it could climb at 2375 feet a minute and reach speeds of 200mph. By 2004 we note that the girl in the left-hand illustration has vanished. Perhaps she was scared off by the improved performance figures and the prospect of travelling at 365 mph at 15000 feet without oxygen or parachute. But as always, Discojet Corporation were ever hopeful. Here are two of their abandoned prototypes from 1967 and 1968, looking as forlorn as any of the faded patents we have seen from the 1950s and indeed 1850s:
1967 1968
and his very latest effort:
We can state without irony, that there are few who could resist a thing as beautiful as this. As a piece of art, it certainly beats a dead fish on a brick on top of a sheet of corrugated iron. Moller himself is as optimistic as ever. Referring to the above, he told BBC News Online,
“The head of NASA says that in 10 years, 25% of the American population will have access to the Skycar. And he also says that in 25 years 90% of people will be using them.”
Of course none of this could or will happen or perhaps was not even supposed to happen in the first place. It is more than possible that Moller, like the makers of miracle engines, will not be heard of or seen again, bless him. This car is a mannequin: slim and perfect, provided she does not go outside and meet a light breeze. It is a mayfly, born without a mouth. The important feature of the vehicle is the same Doris Day honeymoon quilted bed of 1955. Like a retro toaster, the thing is built not so much of matter but advertisements. It is a piece of kitsch which is as valid an entrance into the consumer mysterium as any Gainsborough or a Reynolds. In this sense, when we enter the Skycar world at any point in its image time-line, we enter the world of the chrome Cadillac bumper and its strip of psychedelic indicator lights.
The Skycar really is the epitome of Tom Wolfe's Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby.
This is the importance of people such as Chris Moller, and the many like him. He is an artist first, an aerodynamicist second; in this sense, his hopelessly impractical Skycar will be remembered long after more sober and sensible designs have left the air.
People often ask if the Skycar ever takes to the air, and Moller's claims that it has done so are the subject of litigation. In any case, this functional ability is secondary to how the Skycar performs as as a complex symbol. Asking it to fly is rather like asking Warhol’s lithographs of Marilyn Monroe to speak, or his Campbell’s Soup tin to contain soup.
In this sense, advertisements indeed are new forms of matter and consciousness. As concept artists, designers such as Moller get the advertisements right long before the thing itself is launched. The resulting product, as in Moller’s case, is often marvellously impractical. It is merely a burnt-out catalyst whose function has been to induce a state of mind. In this the brave Moller has achieved perhaps more than he ever knew or would ever indeed acknowledge as the brilliant engineer he is.
Seen in this light, the Skycar leads us right into the engine room of the capitalist society, no less. Images like Skycar hold the consumer matrix together, and again, there is no OFF switch either for Jane Mansfield or indeed the shapes of Moller.
We leave Chris Moller, torn between Melville and Hemingway, a true American hero, with the spare bleached bones of the Skycar in his hands. We leave him facing a mounting tide of litigation concerning the “reality” of his claims for flight. Like the space ships of George Adamski, Moller’s cars are information-animals grazing on the cud of belief, having evolved into pure techno art form. In an age that consists almost entirely of corrupt and worthless things, such dream-machines, like Marilyn Monroe, will be perhaps all that will remain of any love and worth of our time.
It may appear strange to old analogue folk that such toy-people and toy-products have such an important destiny. Other civilisations have given us the profound thoughts of men and women, saints and sinners, and the intricate sand-grain counting of the depressed and woebegone scientists.
But then the sand-grain counting didn’t work; the grains would stand still - many were found missing, and strict accounting was almost impossible. To cover the mysterious losses, the beloved scientists started telling lies. Rationalism and Profundity both became suspect. The former led to loss of the Sacred, and few, if the truth were told, "enjoyed" Profundity, which was anything but a comic affair. Profundity led to Harmony, and as soon as the great abused of History heard the word Harmony, they knew they were going to get ripped off good and proper in a very classy and po-faced manner.
We ourselves now have only the myths of Entertainment and the brain-death camps of the mini-series and the soap-opera. These of course are much more effective as regards quite precise social control than bombs or bullets. The Muslim religion, for example, will not survive Television as pure unadulterated Control, any more than Christianity could survive the Industrial Revolution as Prime Time.
But for a few seconds in historical hell, toys give a kind of pleasure. Pure pleasure as a concept and an experience was almost absent from History. Therefore our present culture was constructed around vast systems built not of Cathedrals or Great Books, but of advertisements, toy-stuff and "personalities." Billions of psychic golem and harpies and doll-folk fly out from our internal and external media every minute of the consumer day. That they do not do "work" in the old industrial sense and offer no more meaning than a lick of ice-cream is irrelevant. Toys are not supposed to do work. Perhaps when alien contact is made, we will be surprised at the extent to which toys and play make up the alien mind. Aliens may look upon our own passing industrial “work=reality” phase as an age of mounds and barrows full of relics and skeletons, often built and conceived by men of vision, such as Moller.
That an alien mind might indeed have reached some advanced stage in which they see our selves as toys is a daunting thought.
John Frost’s U.S./Canadian Avrocar Hiller Machine
In that they do not have any kind of old-industrial role, our prototypes are Shobiz Stars. They are expressions of personality and performance, being made of that pure advertisement-stuff that is virtually a new form of matter for our time. They belong hardly to an objective mechanical reality; they are, like George Adamski, pure star material to which the equations of a passing industrial world, with all its rigidities, facts, and concrete certainties hardly apply.
Leonard Cramp's 1954 drawing of the Adamski "scout-ship
These half-realised phantoms are in a transition stage from mechanism to media. The UFO itself is a similar larval form, a liminal manifestation sculpted by the cultural tensions between fact and fiction, media and technology.
(5) Prototypes as Intermediate Forms of Life
SpaceShipOne 62.5 miles high June 3rd 200
In our world torn apart by savagery and horror, such magic birds as SpaceShipOne and the Virgin Atlantic Global Flyer represent perhaps the last of our innocence and wonder in the West. Such things symbolise all the impossible midsummer night dreams of the prototypal folk.
If there had been a failure of nerve along the lines of inspiration, these quite impossible wonders would never have driven SpaceShipOne to the fringes of space. But of course in the infinite welter of deadly poisonous late-Roman accusations around us at the present time, it is almost inevitable that such unsullied youth and love will be turned into weaponry, losing all youth, innocence and beauty. Such things as SpaceShipOne will be dug out of our Western ruins as a reminder that for some brief moments in history, parts of us at least were capable of living in the fullest sense.
But though both SpaceShipOne and the Global Flyer are exotic prototypes, they are nowhere near exotic enough for the gung-ho fully-circular-craft addicts. For such folk, such brilliant cleverness and beautiful achievement smack of rational compromise, and that is not the name of the saucer game. As a symbol the circular craft pulls together many threads of modern conspiracies whose often demoniac complexity would no doubt have frightened the wide-eyed rustic designers of pre-Fall America, whose innocence allowed them to imagine travelling to the stars riding on big lawn mower fans.
Therefore the search for the circular machine is not over. As an archetype of perfect circularity it still arouses hypnotic inspirations. Though no circular aerofoil has ever flown effectively, the form continues to lead a spectral life of varying degrees of substance in films and fiction, inventions and dreams. There are still patents being issued for circular machines, and the claims for the performance of such are just as amazing as any we have seen made here.
There have of course been updates in the saucer world since the innocent days of Streib and Leggett, and in this sense, the circular flying machine has, over the past forty years, created indeed a new form of advertising life all by itself. It is as if being a form of intelligent life, the phenomenon were aware of its need for adaptation, a life that, like the alien and the UFO, consists of hints and glimpses, rumours and suspicions. This is not the “noise in the system” of mechanical thinkers but the rainforest seedbeds for all creative thinking. The English poet William Blake would have understood that hallucinatory poetry which breaks the barriers of the impossible. Without it, such a privately built device as SpaceShipOne would never have taken off over the Mojave desert, where indeed, George Adamski said he met Orthon, a "spaceman" from Venus in 1952.
Whether we like it or not, we live now in a world where the examination of Michael Jackson’s underwear for court evidence can wipe out momentarily all analogue considerations regarding that decayed and harassed concept called the Profound. Seriousness and objective factual assessment appear to belong to Agatha Christie’s “butler found the vital clue in the potting shed” world of Sherlock Holmes. Such rigid and mechanical world-models are concepts whose cultural shelf life has been in decline since the advent of such invading golem as Marilyn Monroe and Elvis Presley. In this hothouse media fluid of powerful advertisements, the saucer-shape with the exotic power-supply thrives very well.
Pure suggestion within media constructs could be seen as the new building material of the 21st century. This intermediate state between matter and spirit has more flexibility than Fact or Fiction, certainly. In the Fortean sense, this state exists between the two Platonic limits of Fact and Fiction, the region where lives that animal called the Cultural Advertisement. In this sense Plato understood TV 1600 years before it was invented. There is no OFF switch for such an advertisement, all advertisements being eternal prototypes of one sort or another in that they have no final mechanical form. As such, the advertisement is the ultimate prototype, making any concept such as objective accuracy smack of the Victorian railway timetable and an age that looked upon the working out of current flow, and the painstaking design of postal and drainage routes, as part of some final “reality” of mentality and universal structure.
Our almost total entertainment culture evaluates things in terms of character, personality and performance, sees the way the light falls across a face as moral synthesis, not hard structures. We have smells and atmospheres, sounds, situations, opinions replacing point-to-point wiring. We recognise now that individuals, like nations, navigate mentally by self-deception and hallucination, and the State machine operates in terms of image, symbol and metaphor; “fact” has almost nothing to do with anything except shoe-size and avoirdupois. As such, information no longer “travels” along hard-wired points in the late-Victorian sense. The pure information state models changing configurations of being, personality and performance. These are the new measures and constructs of that old box of input=output cultural frauds we used to call “reality.”
Seen in this light, the prototypal form is one of the very few authentic modern art forms, and it does all that art-form ever did. If this feels uncanny and not a little spooky, it is exactly the feeling experienced by pre-industrial folk in the early 19th century when they saw strange things called rails being laid across fields and they smelt coal-burnt steam for the first time. But the more profound disturbance was the realization that old Aunt Maud, say, once an obscure figure reached only by means of a long, arduous, risky and expensive journey, was now a cheap twenty minutes away in a dead straight line. At once, Aunt Maud’s image has changed. She is seen through the new technological media of steam power. Aunt Maud is not now the same woman. She has been deconstructed and put together again. The information vectors that sculpt her conceptually have taken her from agrarian time to mechanical time. She is closer, more significant. A new information array has changed her image, and Hollywood was well over a hundred years away. The “objectivity” of Aunt Maud has vanished. She is in every sense a totally different person. Her expectancies, her social relations, her image of her very self and its unique destiny have changed by a re-arrangement of image and hence information. Thus is the connection between Media and Technology.
Poor Aunt Maud, bless her soul, has been transmuted.
Similarly, “flying saucer” concepts have been reconstructing our selves for a considerable time.
Here is an e-mail to a large American web discussion group of May 29th 2004:
“You need to be aware that the United States military has been in possession of these antigravity machines (UFOs) for generations! The Russians have them! The Queen of England has them! The Vatican has them and other evil governments and entities have them as well. Be advised that they are solidly in the hands of the evil ones around the world and they plan to keep them in their possession. All over the world, there is going to be a great increase in the appearances of these antigravity machines! They are in the hands of the totally evil and absolutely destructive elite Satanists! Many of you will be abducted and injected with poisons and amnesic drugs, just as they have done to me. What a perfect crime! Or, so they think! However, they totally disregard the Spirit of God! In fact, they totally disregard our Father in Heaven and His beautiful Son, who is our Savior!”
In these terms, another way of solving the problem of the ever-troublesome prototypal power supply is to assume that someone else has invented it and is keeping it a secret. Here again is a drama of prototypal mutation. This is philosophy as consumer mystique. The ideas can be managed, processed, and consumed like a genetically-modified soya-crop.
In this sense, like Y2K, the idea of Nazi UFOs is another errant form of information “life” that is rapidly evolving in our image-conditioned society. In this sense it is difficult to separate mechanical objective truth about Nazi UFOs from their cyberspace transformations alone.
In a new attempt to change its image and update in fashionable “retro” terms, the prototypal entity has created no less than a whole and complete Nazi “flying saucer” mythology, which was bound to arouse a planet-wide response, if only because the Nazis have played the roles of demons ever since Hitler came to power in 1933. Theirs was an occult philosophy, and since this could not be dealt with at the Nuremberg Trials, we hung the Nazis as common criminals lacking all concept of who they were and what they did. As such, they still hang around our psyche as full-blown, old fashioned Macbeth-style witches, with all the creepy horror that entails.
As an intermediate form of life, the prototypal entity was not long before it caught onto the latest cyber-game in town. Using modern means, within a very short time, we can make countless Nazi UFOs, all of different kinds. We can age the image, add weather, historical detail, and “authentic” background. We can make the Nazi UFOs look as if they were drawn on frayed bits of paper pulled from the bullet-holed wallet of a dead SS rocket expert at Peenemunde. Within a very short time such an image can be pasted into the world-mind, with its capacity for infinite transformations over an infinite period of time. This mind will of course, whether we like it or not, begin immediately to work on its own variations of such an input. It will cast, film, and indeed direct and write a world script almost instantaneously in terms of pure information that requires no Euclidean space. In our concept of the New Ufology the idea of “information space” (and not Cartesian extension) well expresses how a web of stories will continue to be produced and developed through limitless information levels, this legend-net being truly indestructible.
As such, by means of technology dreaming of its very self indeed, “art” and “fact” merge into a live mythology against which common sense rationalizations and old-fashioned “objective research” science stands hardly a chance at all. For example, the Nazi UFO, like planet SERPO, is now an actor on the world cyber-stage and as such its “reality” quota is at least equivalent to that of the Washington Monument.
The people who do not believe this are the same people who did not believe that Aunt Maud could ever be reached in twenty minutes' travelling time in a straight line. It appears that the need to disbelieve is with us always, if only as a counter-balance to such ideas as these:
Here are just two irresistible depictions from that information-rich, over-stimulated, semi-conscious dreaming that we love so much and which defines human beings and their perverse love of danger, both moral and physical.
Below are two pictures from which (like the people depicted) all trails have vanished:
Pre-War Nazi Rally```````````````Warsaw Ghetto, 1943
Truth or fiction? All human groups work by means of the scaling of psycho-social filters, whether their work concerns funeral parlours or radar stations, and especially courts of law, where truth and fiction can change into one another in a very short time. We limit ourselves to what can be sensibly absorbed, otherwise society, and indeed ourselves risk collapse.
Mrs Sohn, Look Out Your Bedroom Window
The prototypal form is a unique combination of glamour, entertainment, and technology combined with all the mock-cerebral elements of science, and engineering.
Should anyone think that prototypes do not have a dream life, then let them consider the following. Here is a sample of a report of one of our fabled circular craft. The utterly fantastic experience about to be described is, like the images above, a mixture of cartoon sketch, schlock fiction, horror, and child’s toy box. It rejects everything and anything that mature and intelligent people have ever been told, experienced, or expected. As an experience of what we call “reality” we will have undoubtedly very great intellectual difficulty in accepting the following experience as valid in any sense whatsoever. But this incident did not occur within the pages of the much-abused George Adamski’s book Inside the Spaceships. It occurred outside the windows of a children’s bedroom in the house of Mrs. Ann Sohn of Prospect Heights, Illinois, sometime in May 1952.
Here is the full Report made by Captain Runser of CUFOS:
“Mrs. Ann Sohn put on a pot of coffee and looked at the clock. It was 10:50 p.m. She walked into the rear bedroom of her one-story, ranch-style home to look in on her children, David and Lois, to see if they were covered and to check the window. It was a pleasant evening and the air felt so refreshing that she sat on the foot of her son’s bed to gaze out of the window at the stars. The sky was very clear that night.
After about a minute, Mrs Sohn’s attention was drawn by a bright light toward the right, and she was amazed to see a brilliantly glowing, round object hovering over the vacant lot next door. The bedroom window faced north and the lot was to the east of her house. There was a screen on the window and Mrs. Sohn pressed her face against it to more closely observe the object, most of which she was able to see but for the extreme right portion, which was obscured by the corner of her house.
The object, about 30 to 40 feet in diameter, was self-luminous and hovered absolutely motionless about 100 feet above the lot for three to five minutes, making no sound. From beneath the object, toward the left emerged a cloud of steam or vapor that drifted slowly along the bottom toward the right, giving the UFO an appearance of sitting atop a cloud. Mrs. Sohn was unable to tell where the vapor came from, seeing neither pipes nor any other type of opening. Because the object was above the level of the window, she could determine that the craft was round and not cigar-shaped.
Along the side of the object was a row of about fifteen square windows and just below the windows was a line which Mrs. Sohn described as a seam where the top and bottom portions connected. On the top of the object was a dome which appeared to be made of plastic or plexiglass. The entire object glowed with a bright white light except for the windows, most of which were dark, and the dome, which has a pale bluish cast similar to the “color of the blue haze of a distant landscape.” Mrs. Sohn’s impression was that the dome was illuminated by the reflected light of the rest of the UFO. Two faint vertical objects similar to poles were visible inside the dome.
Not all of the visible windows were dark; at the far right or ‘rear end’ were three windows interiorly illuminated by an intense white light the remaining row of windows was dark, except for some dim blue reflection from the glow of the UFO.”
We now brace ourselves for the heart of the matter:
“Inside each of the three illuminated windows, Mrs Sohn could see a ‘crewman.’ In the first two (moving left to right) the figures seemed to be looking out of the window toward the witness; the third occupant, at the far right, was seen in profile and appeared to be studying a panel of dials or instruments on the wall. As the UFO hovered, the men remained motionless in their positions. Mrs. Sohn tried to awaken her son by nudging him but he remained asleep; her father was asleep in another part of the house, but she was too frightened to yell for him and she was reluctant to leave the window for fear that when they returned, the object would have departed. Her husband was working nights and was not at home.”
Next we have pantomime smoke and mirrors, with a touch of Jules Verne’s levers:
“As Mrs. Sohn was wondering what to do, the figure in the first window (to the left) made a motion with his right hand as if he were pushing forward (toward the window) a lever of some sort. As he did this, a steam of vapor increased; almost at the same moment, he pulled backward on another lever with his left hand, and the color of the vapor changed from white to green with flecks of orange and then to orange with a few streaks of green visible.”
This of course is all very much against our sober work-ethic instincts. It sounds like a joke, and it probably is, but not on the part of Mrs. Sohn. That aliens may have evolved from serious linear industrial intention to a form of play (from which all intelligence comes, after all) is deeply insulting to everything in which we believe. It disturbs our profoundly held moral conviction concerning personal and social worth, our cultural input = output equations, and our valued senses both of the serious and the profound. But perhaps our deepest fear is that someone, somewhere, is getting something for nothing. Fifty years ago of course there were few if any prophesying that the IQ of the common discursive concentration would drop dramatically, the education system would fail, and that whole parts of Western nations would live completely inside the web-like heads of major media, show business, and rock stars. Far fewer predicted that the Western world at least would become a virtual entertainment panorama, bits which looked indeed very much like the thing Mrs. Sohn was seeing.
Mrs. Sohn concludes her story:
“Immediately following this, while the figure to the right remained motionless, the figure in the center window pushed a lever forward with his right hand and the entire ship, except for the darkened windows and the dome, turned a brilliant reddish-orange color and departed in a shallow climb to the north at an ‘intense’ speed...the three occupants (one of whom never moved at all) were wearing what Mrs. Sohn described as a kind of jumpsuit or coverall with hoods or headpieces that appeared to be part of the suit, covering all of the head except the faces; she therefore saw no hair nor ears on the men...the only other thing she could see besides the figures was the panel of instruments of [sic] dials in front of the man in the window to the right. He appeared to be further from the window than the other two.”
The people who make prototypes are usually prototypal people. As such, like our circular machine, they appear to be at the mercy of blind era-forces reaching out for one another in a kind of historical slow-motion act. I have referred to Darwin, but it is very hard to accept any concept of Darwinian efficiency or “survival of the fittest” in this process. It appears that the smallest sliver of coherency is only purchased at the expense of pain, disappointment, tragedy, physical affliction or indeed suicidal despair as in the case of Alphonse Penaud, the French designer of flying machines. Indeed, the metaphor of flight connects the lives and thoughts of many of our prototypal heroes and heroines.
In 1828, Ada Byron, the daughter of a brief marriage between Lord Byron and Anne Isabelle Milbanke, produced a design for a flying machine. Five years later, in 1833, showing signs of becoming a brilliant mathematician, she met Charles Babbage at a dinner party, when he was Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge, a post once held by the great Isaac Newton. Even at this early age, Ada was enchanted by the talk about what Babbage called the Difference Engine, the world’s first programmable mechanical calculator. This machine was at least seventy-five years ahead of its time in concept and execution.
George Boole Babbage’s Difference Engine
In this same year, George Boole, the 13-year-old son of a Lincoln shoemaker, was working his way through Newton’s Principia, and the seminal works of the mathematicians Laplace and Lagrange. He is now regarded as the founder of modern information theory, and his book The Laws of Thought is regarded as a landmark alongside the Principia.
Although Boole didn’t meet Lovelace or Babbage, all three led prototypal lives as regards quite revolutionary technology connected to computer programming concepts. A mentor of Ada Byron, Augustus de Morgan, enthused upon reading Boole’s 1847 paper, The Mathematical Analysis of Logic, and soon afterwards Boole got a place in the Mathematics Faculty of Queen’s College in Ireland.
Although Babbage and Ada Byron were from the upper reaches of 19th century society, they led as miserable a life of rejection as did the self-educated working-class Boole and indeed many of our inventors discussed here. Both Lovelace and Boole died in a dreadful manner. Boole’s stupid wife threw buckets of cold water over him when he was in bed with influenza, causing his death in 1864. Ada Lovelace died of cancer, and her work has only just been recognised. In 1979 the world honoured its debt to her when the Pentagon named one of its main computer languages Ada out of respect for her achievements.
A bitter angry face stares out from the many photographs and sketches of Charles Babbage in his old age. I prefer to show here sketches of himself, Boole, and Ada Lovelace as they appeared in the bloom of youth: young, handsome, and confident that their work of genius would be recognised in their lifetime.
It was not, of course. Their names were forgotten for almost a century until their work was re-discovered up by the likes of Turing, Shannon, and Konrad Lorenz.
Alphonse Penaud.
The same fate awaited a French designer born in 1850 who made what must be one of the most inspired series of informed guesses in all technological history.
The Penaud and Gauchet Amphibian 1876.
Working with the mechanic Paul Gauchot, he designed a streamlined bat-winged stealth shape with twin propellers, a glassed-in cockpit, and a retractable tricycle undercarriage!
Though this aircraft was not built, in one stroke Penaud forecast electrical hydraulics, streamlining, control surfaces and closed instrumented cockpits. The undercarriage was fitted with compressed air shock absorbers. There was to be a single compensated control for pitch and directional change, wing-mounted air pressure gauges, a turn and bank indicator (prototype of the artificial horizon), an anemometer, and electric servo-control of the elevators.
But still no power plant!
This was a great pity, if only because the first prototype lightweight internal combustion engines had appeared some time earlier. Otto’s successful four-stroke engine was in existence in 1976 working on the famous “Otto” cycle, which became a principle for almost all piston engines. Also in this same year the first successful two-stroke engine was built by Sir Dougals Clerk.
Dreamer Casualties
As in our own time, casualties amongst dreamers were high in the 19th century. As could have been predicted, Penaud’s ideas were rejected by the Aerial Navigation Society of France. Penaud was cold-shouldered by Louis Giffard, who had made the first successful dirigible flight over Paris. Unable to take this, Penaud, after sending his designs in a small coffin to Giffard, killed himself at the age of 30 in 1880. Perhaps this contributed to the suicide of the manic-depressive Giffard, who killed himself in turn two years later. Samuel Langley, Octave Chanute, and Wilbur and Orville Wright all held Penaud’s achievement in the highest regard. Below is a reproduction of an 1878 Penaud design. It shows that he understood three-dimensional stability, airflow, power/weight rations and the importance of clean lines.
When they were very young men, the Wright brothers were given a rubber band operated Penaud Helicopter Toy of 1878 by their father, and they studied closely its characteristics.
And the final form:
If information is a new form of intelligent life, the prototype as a meme of information has, over the past 30 years, developed branches of new life for itself. We have seen its ability to mount implicit eroticism and glamour constructs, but over the past thirty years, it has developed two new areas of mass-suggestion both in terms of popular belief and national military-industrial involvements.
In yet another attempt to change its image, the information complex that is the prototypal form has vanished its image altogether. This “new invisibility” contrasts with the glaring visibility of Nazis and aliens in myth and folklore, films and SF novels. I refer to the vanishing of the prototype, or rather its journey into technological legend, a journey very different to the clatter-and-bang of its Nazi manifestations. This disappearance is a process that has steadily developed over the past forty years.
By way of contrast, there was a time when the prototypal aerial form was a vital part of a nation’s ego, technological muscle, its hopes and dreams. It was anything but invisible. There were the streamlined shapes on every magazine cover: bright silver fighters and bombers of the Age of Chuck Yeager, the hero of Tom Wolfe’s novel, The Right Stuff.
Everybody was happy. Everybody made money out of the prototype. From toy manufacturers to film makers, from the USAF itself to Boy Scout clubs, everyone was inspired and thrilled by the Great American Prototype. Even as late as the 1960s, whole families could motor out to grass-verged airfields and picnic only yards away from the myriad shapes of dreams and inspirations. Throughout these years, there was still a kind of family atmosphere in the American armed forces, an atmosphere now as vanished as late Rome. The airplanes themselves were big silver friendly things, almost like friendly toys with a smile on their face; they could be made into pots and pans and cars when they died a decent death. They didn’t look as if they hated you, they were not black or camouflaged; they didn’t look like spiteful bat-like things to be burned in toxic pits with a stake through their heart, and they did not have disturbing names like Stealth. This name appears to indicate an attitude towards the general population, more than any old-fashioned “enemy.”
Prior to the Vietnam conflict, the military arm was still properly socialized. Apart from munitions areas, many US air bases were unfenced even, and scouts and guides, spotting clubs, and enthusiasts of all kinds of could walk by the flight lines. At weekends, dad could place junior and the family by the cockpit of a fighter and take a Polaroid. The American people belonged to this integrated structure; generations of families worked in it, and were proud of what they did. Factory hooters still sounded, and hordes of workers with their own tool and lunchboxes would surge to canteens and main gates where there were very few guards. National threats were finite, external; they were still describable in plain terms. Like America’s aircraft, they had a name and a face. Today’s complicated threats, some internal, others shape-shifting and yet others indefinable (such as Y2K, 9/11, viral combats, information wars, and social-control through a culture of advertisements, entertainment, and media) had not yet arrived in the American consciousness in the modern sense.
Yes, the aircraft and the new consumer products (which they resembled somewhat) were mostly big and visible things, and a good mechanic could still understand the processes involved in their design, manufacture, and operation. Masses of drooping wiring were still extant, together with point-to-point soldered connections. Industrial reality was still a flow diagram, yes, getting bigger and more complex, but its stages in relation to one another could nevertheless be understood as a whole. What was more important is that they could be seen as being processes linked to hand and brain and hence to family and society. The computer chip had not yet arrived to utterly demolish the common visible social processes of the past, and workers were not yet taken to work in curtained buses to places like Area 51, where they made things that appeared to have no connection with any other thing in any significant sense.
This previous world could be measured and predicted. Names, prices, addresses, and complete social identities had not yet vanished into numbers and bar codes. But what the philosopher Hobbs called the Leviathan, that is the living body of mind, mechanism and society, was being changed utterly, becoming more complicated by the techno-consumer hour.
Thus our prototypes and the people who make them live on the same high unstable edge of new inspirations. In failure and success, bitterness and disappointment, one theme connects all these heroes and heroines and their machines. They are thinkers. In the media maelstrom, it is indeed a miracle that any such creature as the cerebral survives, clinging to the single branch of any single tree. Perhaps it is because there are so few thinkers they are almost invisible to predators. At any time, like prototypes indeed, thinkers exists only in tens of scores. The rest are quietly vegetating, avoiding the risks of tragedy, the pains of disaster and the responsibilities of growth. The prototypal thinkers are always an elite, a privileged few whose often-fragmentary recall is that they were indeed once alive in a far more whole sense. They respond to half-heard fragmentary signals from these lost and noisy channels from other lives. Their half-completed sketches and diagrams, their wretched lives themselves are smoke-rings put out in the hope that their lost tribes of time will see them and locate them.
A few years before his death, Charles Babbage was visited by the Cambridge mathematician John Fletcher Moulton. In a speech to the Napier Tercentenary in Edinburgh in 1914, Moulton recalled his visit:
“In the first room I saw the parts of the original Calculating Machine, which had been shown in an incomplete state many years before and had even been put to some use. I asked him about its present form. 'I have not finished it because in working at it I came on the idea of my Analytical Engine, which would do all that it was capable of doing and much more. Indeed the idea was so much simpler that it would have taken more work to complete the Calculating Machine than to design and construct the other in its entirety, so I turned my attention to the Analytical Machine.' After a few minutes talk we went into the next workroom where he showed and explained to me the working of the elements of the Analytical Machine. I asked if I could see it. 'I have never completed it,' he said, 'because I hit upon the idea of doing the same thing by a different and far more effective method, and this rendered it useless to proceed on the old lines.'
Then we went into the third room. There lay scattered bits of mechanism but I saw no trace of any working machine. Very cautiously I approached the subject, and received the dreaded answer. 'It is not constructed yet, but I am working at it, and will take less time to construct it altogether than it would have taken to complete the Analytical Machine from the stage in which I left it.'
I took leave of the old man with a heavy heart."
Colin Bennett April 2006
