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"I have been a soreheaded occupant of a file drawer labeled 'Science Fiction' and I would like out, particularly since so many serious critics regularly mistake the drawer for a urinal."
- Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
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| Poison Space Cloud (Etheric Poison) | ||
| A deadly cloud of gas large enough to envelop the solar system. |
This is a grand conception, and occasioned the publication of many similar stories.
Again there was silence. It was broken by the high trill of the telephone-bell.
"There is one of our bacilli squeaking for help," said he with a grim smile. "They are beginning to realize that their continued existence is not really one of the necessities of the universe."
He was gone from the room for a minute or two. I remember that none of us spoke in his absence. The situation seemed beyond all words or comments.
"The medical officer of health for Brighton," said he when he returned. "The symptoms are for some reason developing more rapidly upon the sea level. Our seven hundred feet of elevation give us an advantage
Was this just the product of Doyle's prodigious imagination? Or had scientists described a similar phenomenon?
"You will conceive a bunch of grapes," said he, "which are covered by some infinitesimal but noxious bacillus. The gardener passes it through a disinfecting medium. It may be that he desires his grapes to be cleaner. It may be that he needs space to breed some fresh bacillus less noxious than the last. He dips it into the poison and they are gone. Our Gardener is, in my opinion, about to dip the solar system, and the human bacillus will in an instant be sterilized out of existence."
| "Poison!" I cried.
Then, even as I said the word, my mind flashed back over the whole morning's experiences, past Lord John with his buffalo, past my own hysterical tears, past the outrageous conduct of Professor Summerlee, to the queer happenings in London, the row in the park, the driving of the chauffeur, the quarrel at the oxygen warehouse. Everything fitted suddenly into its place. "Of course," I cried again. "It is poison. We are all poisoned." "Exactly," said Challenger, rubbing his hands, "we are all poisoned. Our planet has swum into the poison belt of ether, and is now flying deeper into it at the rate of some millions of miles a minute. Our young friend has expressed the cause of all our troubles and perplexities in a single word, 'poison.'" |
| Technovelgy from The Poison Belt,
by Arthur Conan Doyle. Published by The Strand Magazine in 1913 Additional resources -
|
Where did Doyle get his ideas about enormous gas clouds in local space? It's possible that he read the works of Edward Emerson Barnard (1857-1923), who was an American astronomer renowned for his extensive work in observational astronomy, particularly in the study of dark nebulae, comets, and the Milky Way's structure.
From around 1889, Barnard pioneered deep photography of the sky, finding many 'holes in the Milky Way'. At first he compared them to sunspots, but by 1899 was prepared to write: "One can scarcely conceive a vacancy with holes in it, unless there is nebulous matter covering these apparently vacant places in which holes might occur". These holes are now known as dark nebulae. The first direct detection of cold diffuse matter in interstellar space came in 1904, when Johannes Hartmann observed the binary star Mintaka and deduced that a cloud of interstellar matter must lie in his line of sight to the star.
In 1919, Barnard published "A Photographic Atlas of Selected Regions of the Milky Way," which included 349 dark nebulae, now known as Barnard Objects or B (Barnard) numbers. However, his first significant publication on dark nebulae came in 1913 with his paper titled "Dark Regions in the Sky Suggesting an Obscuration of Light," which appeared in the Astrophysical Journal (read the preface to his Atlas).
There was an earlier news event that might also have prompted his story, about Halley's Comet, which appeared in 1910. French astronomer Camille Flammarion speculated in the media that cyanogen gas in the comet's tail could "impregnate the atmosphere and possibly snuff out all life on the planet" if Earth passed through it. Some newspapers added that maybe acetylene gas might be involved, creating a panic.
Compare to the galactic damping field from Brain Wave (1953) by Poul Anderson, the more modestly-sized meteoric dust cloud from Secret of the Buried City (1939) by John Russell Fearn and the Concentrated Cosmic Radiation from The Face of the Deep (1942) by Edmond Hamilton.
Similar space clouds have menaced Earth in novels like "Exit Earth" by Martin Caidin and in the short story "Transience" by Arthur C. Clarke. See also The Black Cloud (1957) by Fred Hoyle.
See also The Cosmic Cloud (1931) by Bruno Burgel.
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More Ideas
and Technology from The Poison Belt
More Ideas
and Technology by Arthur Conan Doyle
Tech news articles related to The Poison Belt
Tech news articles related to works by Arthur Conan Doyle
Poison Space Cloud (Etheric Poison)-related
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- We Live In A Space Cloud
- Tunnel Of Magnetized Filaments May Enclose Solar System
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| Reflect Orbital Offers 'Sunlight on Demand' And Light Pollution |
| Chrysalis Generation Ship to Alpha Centauri |
| The First Space Warship For Space Force |
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