Indeed, as the twentieth century of our Lord unfolded, Tesla served for many cinematistes as the very archetype of the deranged natural physicist or “mad scientist.” So it was that, in 1913, Tesla returned from his adopted America to the land of his birth to devote himself to constructing a mechanism that would ensure he never be chained in Bedlam’s urine-spattered halls: the electrical neurheographiton (nyu-REY-o-GRAPH-i-ton, lit., brain-wave writer).
Function of the Electrical Neurheographiton
Mr. Tesla’s electrical neurheographiton (1914) was the forerunner of the electro-encephalogram and the electro-convulsive malady-eraser, and the estranged nephew of the intravenous mercury phrenological brain engine (known popularly as the “liquid silver guillotine”).
Tesla “ionically enthralled” by his electrical neurheographiton.
A massive mechanical device consisting of a generator and the most sophisticated magnetic-electrical scanner in the world at that time, the neurheographiton beamed electrical energy into a patient’s cranium via a “healing helmet.” The “electrical balm” demonstrably and immediately undercut the mania, enthusiasm, apostasy, anarchism, and other emotional morbidities of Tesla’s numerous test subjects, apparently via relieving them of the burden of painful and traumatic memories (such as the recollection of childhood, adolescence, adulthood, and dotage), priming the patient’s brain for emotional “rewriting” with whatever “biographical” data the therapist deemed appropriate. Following a single usage on himself, Tesla declared to his assistant, Mr. Igor Hynchbeck, that, “I’m cured, cured, cured, cured, cured, cured, cured, cured, cured, cured of all my obsessive impulsions! Absolutely, absolutely, absolutely, absolutely, absolutely, absolutely, absolutely, absolutely, absolutely, absolutely, absolutely, absolutely, absolutely, absolutely, absolutely, absolutely, absolutely, absolutely, absolutely, absolutely, absolutely, absolutely, absolutely, absolutely, absolutely, absolutely, absolutely, absolutely free of all of them!”
Electrophantasmic Discharges
A type of energetic pollution arising from the neurheographiton’s manifold and highly charged internal mechanisms were what Mr. Tesla described in his Apologia Electronika as “electrophantasmic discharges”—plasmic fields that “disgorged horizontal ejaculations of lightning of a most disturbing and slaughterous composition.” These discharges also warped light into phantasms that mimicked recognisable objects and people with resolute credibility. Such apparitions chiefly consisted of:
a. A Bosnian Coarse-Haired Hound eating a clown composed entirely of human kidneys.
b. A massive bust of influential English occultist Aleister Crowley that transmogrified into “a field of bunnies dancing with all the glee of becandied children.”
c. A politely dressed Central European man offering a 1907–24 issue Hotchkiss No. 4 Paper Fastener (i.e., a stapler) to an unseen coworker.
Controversy and a Continent Torn Asunder
That final apparition proved most unfortunate for Gavrilo Princip, a nineteen-year-old Bosnian Serb and subject of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. On June 14, 1914, a hungry fifty-eight-year-old Tesla, desperate for a wealthy sponsor after so many investors had deserted him in favour of archrival American electro-tycoon Thomas Edison, sought to attract the royal patronage of Austrian archduke Franz Ferdinand.
An overly enthusiastic Mr. Tesla bade his assistants wheel his neurheographiton into the streets of Sarajevo near Tesla’s laboratory in search of the archduke’s motorcade. Mr. Tesla planned to project its “plasmic balm” directly through the air and into the crania of the manifold madmen and wild women who prowled the city at all hours of the day and night, so as to prove his device’s capacity to unleash a torrent of industrialism among the newly sane, for the betterment of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
Nikola Tesla ca. 1890, well before the majority of his troubles.
Tesla, a fine statistician in his own right, predicted the likelihood of the neurheographiton unleashing an electrophantasmic discharge as less than 1 per cent. Alas for Tesla, and even more for the archduke and the archduchess, that 1 per cent manifested as a crackle of electrons that bored directly through their bodies like any American accent through any English gathering. And, unfortunately for Gavrilo Princip, the electrophantasm happened to resemble him down to the last detail, with the apparitional stapler appearing to be, to all mortified onlookers, a Browning FN model 1910 pistol.
Princip’s absolute innocence—Princip’s whereabouts were verified by more than a dozen eyewitnesses at a local Bohemian “cheese shop” (opium den)—was of no defense, largely because, since age eleven, he’d told any Sarajevan who would listen to him that he longed for nothing more than the chance to execute “any Austrian royalist bastard I can get my grimies on.” Indeed, Princip had only a fortnight previously completed a tattoo across his back (employing, ironically, another of Mr. Tesla’s inventions, the electrographic somatic autodecorator), depicting himself decapitating Austrian emperor Franz Josef I with a cricket bat.
A Second Try in America
Fearing that it was only a matter of time before the authorities connected the archduke’s accidental death (and the subsequent Great War that engulfed all of Europe) to the neurheographiton and to him (or assumed that Princip had been Tesla’s human weapon aimed at the archduke), Mr. Tesla returned to the United States to resume developing his mentation engine.
But Tesla quickly found that his funding troubles were as dire as ever. While his protracted conflict with Edison yielded him nothing but grief, his failed lawsuit against Guglielmo Marconi over the patent for radio left him even further in debt.
Aleister Crowley, in mushroom cap, during the majority of his troubles.
The following decades were unkind to Mr. Tesla, consisting of quixotic struggles that included a rapid opposition to the League of Nations and increasingly violent claims that “secretive operatives ensconced inside black submarinal vessels patrolled the very oceans, seas, lakes, and rivers in order to spy upon us all with their telescoping looking-glasses!” Tesla developed impulsions, including the unquenchable urge to orbit buildings three times before he entered them, to have a stack of three folded napkins at every meal, and to produce neither less nor more than three bowel emissions at every 3 A.M. and 3 P.M. precisely. Finally, on March 3, 1933, Mr. Tesla’s maddened certainty that he would win himself a sponsor granted him dividends. Word of his achievements and theories won him patronage of a Mr. Allen Dulles and a Mr. J. E. Hoover. For them, he constructed the Electrical Neurheographiton, Mark 2, which Tesla promised could not only rewrite mental histories but read them, making his device a deception-detector and espionage-recognition motor.
But, alas, patronage for Tesla was not to be. Mr. Tesla, in a bid to impress his sponsors that his device was no mere quackery or hocus-pocusion, arranged a private demonstration for Mr. Dulles and Mr. Hoover. While posterity does not record the contents of what Tesla revealed, Mr. Dulles was said to have quipped to a young Senator John Kennedy that Mr. Hoover found enormous distaste for Tesla’s “sartorial speculations” about Mr. Hoover’s leisure hours.
Triumph and Death of Tesla, and the Disappearance of the Neurheographiton
Effectively indexed by the elites who could fund his research, Mr. Tesla embarked on a new odyssey: touring the United States with the smaller, more portable Electrical Neurheographiton, Mark 3, as part of “Genius Nikola Tesla’s Electric Circus,” announcing “electrical exorcism of various mental afflictions and neurological maladies.” Mr. Tesla eventually made enough money (and trade in chickens and illicit spirits) from his circus to fund his various researches for the remainder of his life, including into “electro-transdimensional portals.”
Finally tendering “exclusive” sales of the technical specifications of the Mark 4 to Warner Bros. Studios, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, and United Artists in 1939, Tesla departed from public life, offering occasional anti-Relativity screeds while devoting most of his time to developing a “teleforce projector,” or death
ray.
On January 12, 1943, Mr. Tesla was claimed to have died, although reports were conflicting. Many in Hollywood conjectured immediately that assassins in the pay of Big Cinema had done in the Serbian genius for selling them “exclusive” rights to a device whose blueprints contained, in tiny print, the phrase “I have omitted an explanation only for the motive unit which makes the entire machine work, in fear that the alchemists of celluloid might enthrall their nation and the world with ludicrous tales of vacuous lives.” Others believed that Mr. Tesla’s madness finally claimed him, inflicting him with a Jovian “brain burst” that produced not Minerva but rather a puddle of bloodied grey matter upon Tesla’s hotel room floor. Among the modern-day Fraternal Society of Teslic Scientific Investigators, there remains the belief that Tesla’s “corpse” was an electrophantasmic discharge that had merged with organic materials in the hotel room to produce a permanent simulacrum of Tesla, while the “real” man departed from this world to explore the Universe, unhindered by the constraints of mortals.
Documentation released following the dissolution of Yugoslavia at least identifies the path that Mr. Tesla’s inventions took following their master’s putative death. Farmer and amateur inventor Mr. Rhett Greene tracked down every working or dysfunctional electrical neurheographiton and, by means of wagon train, transported their many parts back to his “robotorium” (barn) in the then Dominion of Newfoundland, where he, without success, laboured for several years to make them work. Then, on Christmas Day 1947, Yugoslavian agents forcibly entered Mr. Greene’s barn under cover of darkness and extracted all of Mr. Tesla’s creations they found there.
The Lambshead Imperative
Dr. Thackery T. Lambshead, who had long enjoyed Mr. Tesla’s invectives against Dr. Einstein’s theories of special and general relativity, in 1997 tracked the remains of Tesla’s most bizarre device (that had actually worked) to the Sub-Basement 6 of the Marshal Josip Broz Tito Museum of Yugoslavian Civilisation. Apparently long-forgotten, the neurheographiton had been used to produce an indiscernible, global, mental domination, viz., to effect the export and sale of the Yugo. Because the Bosnian-Herzegovinian state held no interest in the ravings of a Serbian “madman,” Lambshead was able to acquire the entirety of the Tesla collection for the sum of 100 marka (about US $66). By the conditions of Dr. Lambshead’s will, Lambshead’s estate lent Tesla’s materials to the Slovenian National Museum of Electrical Engineering (L2010.01), where they were nearly destroyed in a terrorist attack by members of the Church of Electrology.
St. Brendan’s Shank
Documented by Kelly Barnhill
Museum: The Museum of Medical Anomalies, Royal College of Surgeons, London
Exhibit: St. Brendan’s Shank
Medium: Copper, silver
Date: 1270s (?) (disputed)
Origin: The monks of the Isle of St. Brendan, also known as the Isle of the Blessed (disputed); the Faroe Islands (undisputed point of collection)
St. Brendan’s Shank is a small device—eight inches long from tip to tip—made from thirty-seven interlocking copper globes, circular hinges, a narrow headpiece (with burrowing snout), and a winding key connected to a clockwork interior (silver alloy and iron). The device itself has an uncannily efficient winding system—a single turn of the pin sets its lifelike wriggle in motion for days, even months, at a time. More than one biologist has noted the device’s astonishing mimicry of the movements, behaviors, and habits of a tiny subspecies of the Turrilepad, or armored worm, called the Turrilepus Gigantis, found in the North Sea and other cold-water locations. Like its prehistoric cousins, the segmented body of the Turrilepus Gigantis was covered in a tough, calcitic armor, had a sharp, burrowing snout, and exhibited a distinct lack of fastidiousness when it came to its diet.
The name of the Shank originates with the brethren of the Order of Brendan, although not from the saint himself. St. Brendan (called the Navigator, the Voyager, and the Bold) was no inventor, being far more interested in the navigational utility of the heavenly stars, the strange insistence of the sea, and, in one famously preserved quotation, the curious hum of his small boat’s leather hull against the foamy breasts of the ocean’s waves: “So like the suckling child, I return, openmouthed, to the rocking bosom of the endless sea.” He was not a man of science, nor of medicine, nor of healing. He was known for his ability to inspire blind devotion and ardent love in his followers, who willingly went to the farthest edges of the known world to found fortresses of prayer, only to have their beloved abbott leave them behind.
One such monastery existed for many centuries on the cliffs of the Isle of St. Brendan—also known as the Isle of the Blessed—a lush, verdant island once inhabited by a strange pre-Coptic civilization that had since vanished, leaving only a series of man-made saltwater lakes that appeared to have some religious significance. The monks soon added to the many strange tales surrounding the place, for it was said that the monks themselves would never die unless they left the island.
St. Brendan’s Shank, made of interlocking copper pieces, with over thirty springs to keep the pieces in tension with one another.
It was here that the idea for the Shank appears to have originated, although the sophistication of the device has led to theories of outside collusion. Some, for example, believe that the device shows evidence of workmanship common to the Early Middle Period of Muslim scientific flowering in the 1200s, specifically the influence of the (nonmonastic) brothers known as Banu Musa, and their Book of Ingenius Devices. Given the amount of traveling the monks did over the centuries, it is not impossible that they came into contact with either the Banu Musa or equivalent.
Whether or not this legend is true, it seems incontestable that the development of the Shank followed eventually from an event in 1078, when the lonely order on the island found itself an unwilling host to the unstable and murderous son of Viking despot Olaf the Bloodless, King of Jutland. The arrival of the young Viking on the isle was recorded in the sagas of a bard known only as Sigi, who was present with the Viking entourage accompanying the prince.
“The son of Olaf, upon hearing tell of an Isle populated by the Monks-Who-Cheated-Death, became inflamed by desire to find the place and conquer its secrets. The Isle, like a coward, made itself difficult to find, but the Prince did give chase through storm, through mist, and through ice until at last, the Isle was in our sights. We arrived with swords in hand, slicing open the first two monks who greeted us, as a demonstration of force and might. It was in this way that we learned that the Monks-Who-Cheated-Death had only cheated the death of cowards and slaves—a death in a bed, a death of age, a death of sickness. The death of Men cannot be cheated, nor can their Magics wish it away. And nothing, not even their craven God, is mightier than a Jutland sword. The monks knelt and trembled and wailed before us.”
This account is contradicted in part by the journal of Brother Eidan, abbott of the order since the departure of their founder-saint: “The children of the children of the men who once laid waste to our homeland arrived upon our shores unexpectedly. They were tired and hungry and sick at heart. Our souls were moved to pity and we welcomed them with open arms. Their demands seemed beyond our abilities or strength to fulfill, but we had no choice but to try, as otherwise they would have put us all to the sword.”
The prince suffered from a wasting disease that Sigi and other chroniclers had either covered up or had judiciously neglected to mention—this was the real reason the prince had come to the monks’ island. What followed appeared to consist of a series of ablutions in the icy waters of the island’s western bay. The monks told the prince they staved off death by stripping naked, bearing their skin to the morning light, and plunging into the water. Of course, if their other accounts are to be believed, any longevity, possible or impossible, came simply from prayer and from other essential properties of the island.
Nevertheless, after the young man stripped, winced, and shivered, submerging his body every morning for a full week, a mir
acle occurred. The son of King Olaf emerged from the water a new man, naked and shining, blessed with strength and health. “My disease is devoured and vanquished,” he cried, and the Viking horde gave a halfhearted cheer. They left the island in a relatively unpillaged condition. No account tells of exactly how the prince was cured, however, despite the first reference in the literature to a “creature of healing.” Nor is there any explanation for the prince’s eventual death two years later, except for an obscure fragment from Sigi referring to “bleeding.” Perhaps coincidentally or perhaps not, Brother Eidan died prior to the prince’s recovery, and his successor, Brother Jonathan, notes only that “he made his sacrifice for our sake, and would that such a sacrifice not need be made again.”1
A medieval representation of St. Brendan and his followers worshipping atop a floating sea monster.
The subsequent bleeding caught no one’s attention, but news of the incredible healing spread slowly throughout Europe, with the result that many an expedition put forth into the northern seas. However, the island proved ridiculously difficult to find again. Many tried and failed, some sailing to their deaths. From these attempts grew the legend that the isle moved across the seas, from charted waters to the uncharted danger of “Here be dragons.” Over the centuries, it would reportedly be sighted in view of the Canaries, in the midst of the Hebrides, off the coast of Newfoundland, and once apparently passed so close to Iceland that the bards sang of “waving at the holy men,” interpreted by some scholars as a reference to extreme drunkenness instead.
The Thackery T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities Page 3
