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" I think that computers today allow us one last opportunity to provide something like a level playingfield in America."
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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?
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. Comment/Join this discussion ( 0 ) | RSS/XML | Blog This | Additional
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