Jack The Ripper
The captain received the letter about two o’clock yesterday afternoon. It came by mail, and the envelope bore two stamps. There was also two cents due on the letter. Capt. Ryan did not notice where the letter was postmarked and, after taking a copy of it, sent it to police headquarters.
CHARACTER & GADGET GLOSSARY
Hey, lots of fiction authors take liberties with history for the sake of an exciting story. We’ll change details about famous people, invent new technologies, imagine wars, aliens, monsters or whatever, all to keep the reader glued to the page.
And while your humble author is guilty as charged, in researching Ripper, more often than not, I found the truth pretty fascinating in its own right. As a result, many of the gadgets, as well as details regarding the historical people appearing in the novel, are historically accurate. What was real and what wasn’t? Some of the answers may surprise you!
Jack the Ripper
Yep, the world’s first internationally famous serial killer did indeed exist, was never caught, and his identity remains a mystery that has fueled many books, novels and films. The details regarding his heinous crimes in London are all true, including the theoretical sixth victim, Alice McKenzie. Two of the letters the killer supposedly wrote appear in the novel verbatim. The New York City murders are entirely fictitious, but in 1895 Jack was still very much on everyone’s mind. More than one newspaper article from the period wonders if some grisly killing was actually old Jack in action, and the July 20, 1889, letter published by the New York Times did, in fact, exist. As far as anyone knows, however, he did not have a son, and given his attitude toward women, I think it unlikely. Was the Ripper ever in New York? Maybe. One suspect, Francis Tumblety, returned there after the Whitechapel murders, and, at Scotland Yard’s request, the police kept him under surveillance.
Allan Pinkerton
The exciting career of America’s first private detective is much as Mr. Hawking describes, including his debilitating stroke, his remarkable recovery and his battles with his sons for control of the agency he created. And the Pinkerton Detective Agency really is credited with coining the term “private eye.” Past that, I did make up the stuff about Mr. Pinkerton leaving copious cash to the fictional agents Hawking and Tudd to establish the New Pinkertons, but I like to think he’d have been fond of the idea.
Teddy Roosevelt
Having seen this boisterous gap-toothed man whom the Teddy Bear was named after portrayed in films like Night at the Museum, I always figured all the shouting and derring-do were an exaggeration. Nope. The real-life Teddy Roosevelt is the most exciting figure I’ve ever had the pleasure to read about. I’ve kept the details about him and his life accurate, even quoting him when feasible. He did indeed serve as New York City police commissioner, and actually did lean out the window of the Mulberry Street headquarters and scream Yieee! to attract the attention of the press. He later became assistant secretary of the navy, vice president, and, when President McKinley was assassinated, president of the United States. Even all that is only half his story. A big-game hunter, he actually went on an expedition to find a monster.
Alice Roosevelt
A flamboyant figure and trouble for her dad throughout her life, Teddy Roosevelt’s eldest daughter is often quoted as saying, “If you can’t say anything good about someone, sit right here by me.” I think the quote sums her up nicely, though I doubt she originally said it at the young age she does in this book. It is possible such a lively gal might’ve practiced the line on someone like Carver. She’s also known for saying, “I have a simple philosophy. Fill what’s empty. Empty what’s full. And scratch where it itches.”
Sarah Edwards and the Midnight Band of Mercy
The creepy cat-killer Carver meets while searching for his lost father is another of those things that are simply too strange to have been made up. The Midnight Band of Mercy was made up of thirty or so middle and upper class women who spent their evenings putting cats to death, often unconcerned with whether they were pets or not. When Mrs. Edwards was found with a basket full of chloroform and dead cats, she was arrested. When asked what right she had to be killing cats, she replied, “I found the cats out after eight o’clock last evening, and they haven’t any right to be.” Charges were brought in 1893, and the group officially disbanded.
Alfred Beach Pneumatic Subway
The New Pinkertons’ headquarters is a complete fabrication. Not so the amazing train leading to it. The Beach Pneumatic Transit System existed exactly as described. In 1870, it could indeed be entered from Devlin’s Department Store on the corner of Broadway and Warren Street. In its first year, over 400,000 passengers rode the short dead-end track. It was rumored Beach never acquired funding to continue the system because he failed to bribe the corrupt government, but more reliable sources say he couldn’t get the financial backing due in part to a stock market crash. America’s first subway was immortalized in the Beatles-esque tune “Sub-Rosa Subway,” by Klaatu, as well as enjoying a brief appearance in Ghostbusters II. Though it no longer exists, in 1912 the station and track were excavated to make room for a new subway. With a little hunting, photos of the cylindrical car can be found on the Web.
Pneumatic Elevator
I thought I’d made this up. But it seemed such a reasonable enough extension of the pneumatic subway, I couldn’t be sure. So, as I was fact-checking for this glossary, I checked the Web and came upon a few current companies that actually build these machines. They’re more properly called vacuum elevators, but the principle is the same. They’re generally used in private homes for a single passenger. There is no record of them being around in 1895, though.
Speaking Tube
The speaking tube used in Tudd’s New Pinkerton office was a popular means of communicating on ships and in offices as early as the 1700s. They were made from metal, rubber or even linen and remained in widespread use during the early twentieth century.
Office Periscope
Carver is wowed by a peek at the street through a dim mirror that Tudd describes as a periscope. While the view mirror, the curved tubes described, and the distance involved are all literary license, periscopes, consisting of angled mirrors in an enclosure, have been around for ages. Johannes Gutenberg, better known for his printing press, sold them way back in the 1430s to pilgrims so they could see over the heads of crowds at religious festivals.
Pneumatic Tube
The idea of delivering something by using air to suck it through a tube was invented by William Murdoch, around 1799. Everyone loved it, but it wasn’t very useful until the capsule was invented in the mid-1800s. Then you had something. Pneumatic tubes quickly became popular in businesses and remained in popular use until around 1960.
Phonograph
There were a few fascinating early precursors, but Edison’s successful device for recording and playing back sounds dates to 1877. Fairly widespread by 1895, and used by businessmen to record dictation, the general public saw them mostly in the parlors described by Carver, where people would listen to music recorded on a cylinder for a nickel.
Stun Baton
In terms of available technology, Carver’s stun baton is the only real anachronism. To stun a man, approximately two million volts are required, and the batteries to handle such a load did not exist at the time of this story. For comparison, the zinc-carbon cell, first marketed in 1896, produced a mere 1.5 volts. It wasn’t until the 1970s that stun batons appeared. But hey, secret lab with a lot of funding? Who knows what you can do.
Auto–Lock Pick
Lock-picking is as old as locks (four thousand years plus), but as far as I know, I made up Carver’s handy-dandy auto–lock pick. Today there are electric lock picks available that speed the process, so there’s no reason a mechanical version wouldn’t be feasible, but if it came in a kit, I’d hate to be the one to assemble it.
Electric Taxi
While it may well be the way of the future, the electric car was also th
e way of the past. Not many realize it, but there was a thirty-year competition between the noisy, smelly gas engines and their quieter, battery-driven counterparts. The battle lasted from the 1890s through the 1920s. After some fine-tuning, the gas engine provided such greater range and speed, it won out. The electric taxis that appear in the book first appeared in New York City a mere two years later, in 1897, but if a secret detective agency can’t get a few advance models, who can?
Hawking’s Train Device
The brass device of many pieces and screws that Albert Hawking spends hours diligently cleaning and assembling is, sadly, completely fictitious. That said, it doesn’t strike me as impossible. In the early days, train operators changed tracks by whacking the switcher’s lever with any old stick as they passed, and there’s no reason I know of why the cars couldn’t be decoupled with the correctly shaped tool.
Automatic Guns
A bit of fancy. The motors and other mechanics required to build the weapons certainly existed at the time, but a windup gun strikes me as an oddly dangerous thing to have around.
Police Headquarters Phone Switch
As the book mentions, once Alexander Bell’s patent on the telephone ran out, there was a mad rush of companies providing service, kind of like cell phones today. The big difference was that you needed wires to connect all the phones. Larger offices like police headquarters went crazy trying to keep up and always had their own phone switch. The version Carver uses is an early model from the time, described in an old catalog I discovered during my research.
Analytical Engine
While I take liberties by imagining it manipulating a large database, the analytical engine, the world’s first general-use, steam-powered computer, is real, on paper anyway. It was designed in 1837 by English mathematician Charles Babbage, but sadly never built during his lifetime. According to his plans, the program would be input through thick cardboard punch cards (used at the time to automate looms, like the roller on a player piano). For the output, the machine would have a printer and a little bell to indicate when it was finished. Babbage assembled small parts of it before his death in 1871. In 1910, his son, Henry, built a larger piece and used it to print out an (incorrect) answer to a mathematical problem. It wasn’t until 1991 that the London Museum of Science built a fully working version. Pictures are available online, and if I may editorialize for a moment, it’s the coolest-looking thing ever—putting the steam in steampunk.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Ripper has been a wild and wonderful trip through time and myth, my ticket provided by three equally wild and wonderful people. Joe Veltre’s done a great job repping my books for many years now and did me a particular solid by putting me in touch with the intrepid and eternally enthusiastic Pete Harris and quintessentially savvy Philomel editor Michael Green. Pete’s support and Michael’s guidance made working on this book extremely gratifying.
Scouring through history and nineteenth-century technology also put me in touch with some terrific reference works. I studied old maps, train schedules, telephone-switching manuals and more too numerous to name. I do want to make special note of four particular works. In terms of reality, there’s the exhaustive Complete History of Jack the Ripper by Philip Sugden (Constable & Robinson, 1994) and the wonderfully evocative Commissioner Roosevelt by H. Paul Jeffers (Wiley & Sons, 1994). On the fiction side, I greatly enjoyed two novels set in 1890s NYC, The Alienist by Caleb Carr (Random House, 2006) and the lesser-known but no less worthy read The Midnight Band of Mercy by Michael Blaine (Soho Press, 2004).
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