Poe in Cyberspace: Technology, Magic, and Quack Physics

Arthur C. Clark’s famous third law, that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, was anticipated in Edgar Allan Poe’s use of the opposite notion, that magic can be indistinguishable from sufficiently advanced technology. The heroine of “The Thousand and Second Tale of Scheherazade” plays the game of using circumlocutions to describe examples of recent technology to the skeptical king, who rejects them all as fanciful Arabian Nights tales, but the reader is reassured by Poe’s footnotes that all the descriptions are of real inventions. The sketch, a satire on progress and skepticism in science, appeared in Godey’s Lady’s Book in February 1845, with the epigraph, “Truth is stranger than fiction.”

The 1840s were an era of rapid technological developments in communications that resulted in a small information revolution. The telegraph system in Poe’s era produced a radical cultural transformation that has been compared in its impact to cyberspace today. Tom Standage presses the case in The Victorian Internet (New York: Walker, 1998) by arguing that the mid-nineteenth-century electric telegraph was even of greater historical importance in its time than the Internet is today because for the first time it empowered people to communicate with each other over any distance in real time. Previously, tardy communications could produce awkward time warps: for example, the Battle of New Orleans in the War of 1812 was famously fought on January 15, 1815, two weeks after the Treaty of Ghent had ended the war.

In Poe’s sketch, Scheherazade plays the parlor game of offering tongue-in-cheek circumlocutions for such very recent inventions as (to use Poe’s terms) the Electro Telegraph (1837), the Electro Telegraph Printing Apparatus (1838), and the Daguerreotype (1839), as well as for Babbage’s Calculating Machine (the 1820s) and the Voltaic Pile or electric battery (1800). Scheherazade describes a “nation of mighty conjurors” in which one inventor “created a man out of brass and wood, and leather, and endowed him with such ingenuity that he would have beaten at chess, all the race of mankind” (Maelzel’s Automaton chess-player). Another magi constructed “a creature that put to shame even the genius of him who made it; for so great were its reasoning powers that, in a second, it performed calculations of so vast an extent that they would have required the united labor of fifty thousand fleshly men for a year” (Babbage’s Calculating Machine, mentioned in Poe’s article on Maelzel). “But a still more wonderful conjuror,” Scheherazade continues, “fashioned for himself a mighty thing that was neither man nor beast, but which had brains of lead, intermixed with black matter like pitch, and fingers that it employed with such incredible speed and dexterity that it would have had no trouble in writing out twenty thousand copies of the Koran in an hour” (the printing press) (Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe, vol. 3: Tales and Sketches, 1843–1849, 2 vols., ed. Thomas Ollive Mabbott [repr., Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000], 2:1166).

In another example, some magicians “by means of a fluid that nobody ever yet saw, could make the corpses of his friends brandish their arms, kick out their legs, fight, or even get up and dance at his will” (the Voltaic Pile, similar to the Galvanic battery described by Poe in “Loss of Breath,” “Premature Burial,” and “Some Words with a Mummy”). “Another inventor had cultivated his voice to so great an extent that he could have made himself heard from one end of the earth to the other” (Morse’s telegraph demonstration from Washington to Baltimore, May 24, 1844). “Another had so long an arm that he could sit down in Damascus and indite a letter at Bagdad” (Morse’s printing telegraph). “Still another directed the sun to paint his portrait, and the sun did” (the Daguerreotype, discussed by Poe in Alexander’s Weekly Messenger of January 15 and May 6, 1840) (Mabbott, 2:1167).

Perhaps the most amazing development in the technology of the 1840s were the changes in cosmology produced by recent observations in astronomy...