It is getting on for ten years since I offered FT the full story of this affair. It was ignored. It is not, essentially, a tale of technology. It begins with a hoax but the innocent man who spread it around the world met a tragic fate.
"The Visions of Hannibal Gilbert" occupied me for a long time, when reason suggested I should be doing more profitable things.
It may be worth unleashing it now, though it may not be quite the story expected.
This is one version of the abstract I prepared:
"The story of Doctor Guidrah's Electroscope is rich in colourful characters and events. It begins with an enticing account of high-definition 3D Television and potential two-way visual telephony as demonstrated in Melbourne in 1882! That turns out to be a mirage but we set off on the trail of Guidrah and the cleric who sent this prophetic vision around the world, almost by accident. The cryptic name of Guidrah leads us to a miser and millionaire whose antics included church-vandalism and ploughing up football fields. He dies happily enough in the arms of his young second wife, whose own spectacularly horrible death was read as a stern lesson in social climbing. There ends the blackly comedic first half of our lantern-show.
"Most of the tale concerns the rise and fall of an ambitious, New Zealand cleric, his Masonic architect-partner and subsequent death in Wellington harbour. Between them, they built a most unusual church in an unlikely spot. Who were their friends and enemies? We see why it was in no one's interests to investigate responsibility for his sad death, which was hidden in plain sight. After we have seen their visionary project crumble in the Christchurch earthquake of 2011, the end seems desolate. However, the last section is a vindication of Hannibal Gilbert's original vision, when a surprising find in a Parisian archive enables us to witness the very miracle promised in the opening paragraph. It is the best and most appropriate twist-ending this story could have.
"Briskly told and drawn from hundreds of old newspaper clippings, The Visions of Hannibal Gilbert is a story that has never before seen the light of day. It has enough dramatic incidents to fill a novel but it is all entirely true. The author has woven together the known facts, deftly painting in the background of scientific, religious, financial and social upheaval that lay behind the supposedly staid world of Victorian life in the colonies."
I think, at this distance, I can bear to part with the whole thing gratis.
I may take a day or two to check for developments online but, I am happy to upload it on this thread.
Here, to be going on with, is the opening:
1: Madame Blavatsky on TV
"If the invention, and its experiment are no fiction - and we do not see why they should be then science is, indeed, on the verge of a partial discovery of adept powers . . . " [The Theosophist, June, 1893]
For Madame Blavatsky, to hear reports of time and space annihilated by electricity was a vindication of spiritualism; seers had been doing the same thing for centuries without the aid of technology. "Vibrations of light," were very much on Madame Blavatsky's wavelength, so when she hailed the invention of television in 1883, she might be thought to be indulging her weakness for science fantasy. All too often, her accounts of experiments turned out to be wishful-thinking, attributed to her mysterious Ascended Masters. The latest exciting report, which promised a stereoscopic, high-definition experience and a two-way system, a sort of Victorian Skype, was, however, not a communication from Hoot Koomi and his ilk but drawn from a paragraph which had appeared around the world in mainstream papers. Here is The Times, 24th March, 1883:
". . . it was now proved to be possible to convey, by means of electricity, vibrations of light - not only to speak with your distant friend, but actually to see him . . . a trial of this wonderful instrument had taken place at Melbourne, in the presence of some 40 scientific and public men, and . . . it had been a great success. Sitting in a dark room, they saw projected on a large disc of white burnished metal the race course at Flemington, with its myriad of active beings. Minute details stood out with perfect fidelity to the original, and as they looked at the wonderful picture through binocular glasses, it was difficult to imagine that they were not actually on the course itself . . . "
The earliest appearance of the tale I can trace is in The Press, New Zealand, of Thursday, 30th November, 1882. The lecture had been given by the Rev. Hannibal John Congdon Gilbert in his own parish of Phillipstown, near Christchurch, on Tuesday, 28th November 1882 and the demonstration by Doctor Guidrah had taken place in Melbourne exactly four weeks earlier.
