Michael Swanwick, science fiction writer and winner of the Nebula and five Hugo Awards, remembers this conversation with Will: Will Jenkins told me that Heinlein had wanted him as a member but had been overruled by the top brass because he had only a grammar school education. However, Heinlein did arrange to informally pass along problems that he and the other writers were stuck on. One of these was the problem of the submarine periscope.
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This resulted in one of Will’s favorite stories. Early in the war, before radar, there had been a problem with the wake that a submarine left when it surfaced and moved through the water. Will had a very simple solution. He took a stick, tied some ribbons to it, and when they trailed out behind the stick, they prevented the eddies from forming.
Will knew his boyhood friend Cornelius “Neely” Bull was a good friend of Admiral Ernest J. King, fleet admiral during World War II. He wrote Bull telling him about the thought and asking: “What should I do? ... Should I send him a model? I observed I would take great pleasure out of imagining him and Admiral King playing with one of my ribbon-decorated sticks in the bathtub. I particularly stressed the bathtub angle.” Bull turned the letter over to the admiral who turned it over to the Bureau of Naval Construction. When the report came back, both Neely and Will were pleased with the top sheet.
It said: “The inventor speaks of experimenting with this device in a bathtub. What I would like to know is, when he was experimenting with this device in a bathtub, what did he use as a periscope?” In May 1945, Astounding Science-Fiction published “First Contact.” It turned out to be, along with “Sidewise in Time,” one of the most influential stories in science fiction history. The story raised the question: “When a human ship meets an alien one in a far off nebula, neither side has reason to trust the other with the location of its mother world. How to ensure both ships can safely leave for home without letting the other know its home world location, and yet be able to keep contact?”
First, you have to establish communication. Robert Silverberg talks about
“First Contact” and this problem in “Reflections: Hic Rhodus, Hic Salta,” published in the January 2009 issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction. He refers to the story:
“We’ve hooked up some machinery,” says Tommy, “that amounts to a mechanical translator.” After some plausible-sounding engineering talk about frequency modulation and short-wave beams, Tommy goes on to tell his captain, “We’ve agreed on arbitrary symbols for objects, sir, and worked out relationships and verbs and so on with diagrams and pictures. We’ve a couple of thousand words that have mutual meanings. We set up an analyzer to sort out their short-wave groups, which we feed into a decoding machine. And then the coding end of the machine picks out recordings to make the wave groups we want to send back.
When you’re ready to talk to the skipper of the other ship, sir, I think we’re ready.”
Silverberg goes on, “If this is not the first use in science fiction of that handy gadget, the electronic translating machine, it is certainly one of the earliest and best. From then on, spacefarers voyaging into alien territory in 96
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the pages of magazines like Astounding and Galaxy routinely uncorked their translating machines as needed, thus allowing them to get on to their interstellar tasks and the authors to get on to their story’s plot requirements.... All very convenient for us writers.”
The story line was part of a general move to more psychological themes in science fiction, and not only has “First Contact” been reprinted innumerable times, but it launched a subgenre of first contact stories of its own.
Twenty years later after the story’s initial publication, Will reported an amusing anecdote in a letter to Jo-an on January 9, 1963: Arthur C. Clarke — you know his stuff— in a hospital in Australia, had somebody from the Russian Embassy bring him some Russian science fiction to read.
One book was by Ivan Yefrimov titled, “The Heart of the Serpent.” It’s a future story of space travelers who detect the ship of an alien intelligent race coming toward them. What do they do? They read and discuss by name Murray Leinster’s “First Contact.” But they decide there is no danger, because a race capable of space travel must have developed an ideal Communist state and so must be peace-loving and amiable persons eager to be true friends!
A posthumous Retro Hugo for 1946 was awarded to “First Contact” for Best Novelette at the World Science Fiction Convention held in Los Angeles, August 30 to September 2, 1996. “The Ethical Equation” was nominated for Best Short Story on that occasion. Will’s daughter Betty DeHardit and granddaughter Beth DeHardit were there to accept the award for him.
The practice of awarding Retro Hugos was started in 1996 to honor people and works that would have been eligible fifty years before a current World Science Fiction Convention. No Hugos were awarded at the World Science Fiction Convention in 1946, as they were not instituted until 1953. Retro Hugos have been awarded only three times, in 1996, in 2001, and in 2004.
The year after “First Contact,” Astounding Science-Fiction published another groundbreaking story — one whose startling inventiveness would not be clear for more than fifty years. It was “A Logic Named Joe” (Appendix A), first published in the March 1946 issue of Astounding Science-Fiction.
That issue already included a Leinster story, “The Adapter,” so it appeared in the back of the magazine under “Will F. Jenkins.” Readers, recognizing it as exceptional, rated it number one for that issue, ahead of longer stories written by well-known science fiction authors, including Will himself.
In the following years, it was reprinted in a number of magazines, anthologies and adapted for radio. It is generally accepted as the first home computer story.
In Isaac Asimov Presents the Best Science Fiction Firsts (Beauford Books, 1984), Asimov says the story was “written in a time when the first computer was just coming into being, a truly prophetic piece of speculation.”
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Page from the original manuscript of “A Logic Named Joe” with line “logics changed civilization.”
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Page from original manuscript of “A Logic Named Joe” with paragraph on logics giving potentially harmful information.
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In the story, the protagonist explains how Joe works: You know the Logics set-up. You got a Logic in your house. It looks like a vision-receiver used to, only its got keys instead of dials and you punch the keys for what you wanna get. It’s hooked in to the Tank, which has the Carson Circuit all fixed up with relays. Say you punch “Station SNAFU” on your Logic. Relays in the Tank take over an’ whatever vision program SNAFU is telecastin’ comes on your Logic’s screen. Or you punch “Sally Hancock’s Phone” an’ the screen blinks an’ sputters an’ you’re hooked up with the Logic in her house an’ if someone answers you got a vision-phone connection. But besides that, if you punch for the weather forecast or who won today’s race at Hialeah or who was mistress of the White House durin’ Garfield’s administration or what is PDQ and R sellin’ for today, that comes on the screen too. The relays in the Tank do it. The Tank is a big buildin’ full of all the facts in creation and all the recorded telecasts that ever was made — an’ it’s hooked in with all the other Tanks all over the country — an’ everything you wanna know or see or hear, you punch for it an’ you get it. Very convenient.” Joe Rico says of the story:
No discussion of Murray Leinster’s contribution to the SF field is complete without touching on “A Logic Named Joe.”
Many people wrongly believe that Science Fiction’s main purpose is to predict the future. Still it is wonderful to find an example of an accurate prediction, especially one that was so uncannily accurate. At a time in which the world had about 10 electronic computers
, he wrote a story about a future in which every household has a personal computer and is connected to an internet-like system.
If this story had been written in 1956, 1966 or 1976 it would have been known as the most predictive story in the genre, but it was written in 1946!
David Ferro and Eric Swedin, of Weber State University in Utah, discuss
“A Logic Named Joe” in their article “Towards Investigating the Importance of Science Fiction in the Historical Development of Computing.” The article begins:
With notable exceptions the bulk of science fiction (SF) missed the possibilities of some of the most innovative and influential technologies of the 20th century. These innovations include personal computers, networks, the internet and world wide web, and online resources. This paper surveys some of that literature, especially a noteworthy exception —“A Logic Named Joe”— to kick-off the discussion of techno-scientific development and, more specifically, computer development.
Despite the stereotype that “Science Fiction imagines and science makes it so,” for a long time SF was thought not to have predicted the rise of technologies like the internet, world wide web, and personal computers. SF published and filmed in the first 2⁄3 of the twentieth century continually had larger machines and/or more powerful robots that acted as intelligent agents....
“A Logic Named Joe” in many ways predicted the rise of the internet, personal 100
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computers, and the convergence of interactive computing, television, and teleph-ony. Like many stories it plays with the idea of a “naturally occurring” sentient mechanism — in other words, the machine just somehow “woke up a bit more” when it was created. The difference is the almost prosaic presentation of the machine as a networked appliance. The protagonist himself is portrayed as an
“average Joe” computer technician who has a first-person style that evokes a 1940s plumber....
The creativity and prescience displayed in the creation of this story is astounding. In 1946, the public might have known of one electronic computer: the ENIAC. It was the size of a room. An army of women who flipped thousands of switches handled the input of the machine. Its output was hundreds of blinking lights on its front panels. Among many other things, Leinster saw instead an easy-to-use keyboard and screen interface on a machine the size of a breadbox linked to millions of other similar machines. A computer that size would not exist until the 1970s. The internet would not exist until 1969, the world wide web, not until the 1980s, and the combination would not become commonplace until the 1990s....
Our question is: did such a forward-looking story actually affect those developments?
Drs. Ferro and Swedin studied the William F. Jenkins papers at the Syracuse University Special Collections Research Center where they are deposited.
They said they found no direct correspondence linking those developing computer technologies with this or any other stories. But they found “a continuing effort on the part of Jenkins and other authors to maintain science and scientific veracity and uphold those ideas in the fictional form they termed SF,” and additionally found “evidence of the interaction and mutual support between scientific and SF worlds.”
Ferro and Swedin’s work highlights this connection to the computer world. They point out that, in that world, servers are named for characters and locations in SF novels and movies, and SF language is used in technical conversations. Many scientists have credited SF with their career choices.
They quote SF writer and editor Ben Bova as saying “everyone who landed on the moon read science fiction.”
When thinking about computers and artificial intelligence, one can’t help but wonder about the possibility of replicating the human brain. W. Daniel Hillis is one of several who pursued this goal. He even founded a company called Thinking Machines Corporation in 1982 and developed powerful parallel computing systems. It went out of business in 1994, and its hardware and parallel computer division were acquired by Sun Microsystems.
Jeff Hawkins, who created the Palm Pilot and the Treo, has developed software that more closely works like the human brain. In 2004, he wrote a book, On Intelligence, outlining his theories and in 2005, along with Donna Dubinsky and Dileep George, founded Numenta, an artificial intelligence Seven • The New York Years: The 1940s
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program based on those theories. Hawkins has been quoted as saying, “When you are born, you know nothing.”
Will made a similar statement, “A baby starts out with a mind that is blank of information and ideas,” when he began to record his exploration into the subject. In 1954, eight years after the publication of “A Logic Named Joe,” Will wrote an article, “To Build a Robot Brain” (Appendix B), which was printed in the April 1954 issue of Astounding. It was undoubtedly one result of his many luncheon discussions with John Campbell, an obvious next step in their scientific and philosophical discussions following the publication of “A Logic Named Joe.”
Will’s thesis was similar to Hawkins’. Babies develop their human brains by assimilating data fed to them through their senses. Will a computer develop a near-human brain if you continually feed it data?
Will begins by saying, “The technician will use the tools and assemble the parts. Before that the physicist-engineer will design the parts. But even before that, the philosopher has to design the concept!” He introduces the possibility that a computer may — or may not — suddenly become sentient.
He starts by saying that the story of Casey and the suddenly speaking computer is an “honest-to-Hannah” true one.
Rear Admiral Grace Hopper is credited with telling Will about the humorous incident in the early 1950s. She was working as a programmer for Univac at the time and was already a legend in the computer community.
Will was writing a script for a television interview with her.
She was a mathematics teacher at Vassar in 1943 when she joined the Naval Reserve and was quickly put to work on projects for the Mark series of computers. Soon she became a leader in computer software development and began working toward her goal of making computer programming more user-friendly. She developed the compiler to that end.
An article in Time magazine (April 16, 1984), credits Admiral Hopper with spreading the practice of saying “there’s a bug in it” when there is a computer glitch. When she was at Harvard in 1945, a two-inch moth was actually pulled out of the computer she was working on. She has been called “Amazing Grace” because of her astonishing achievements. She retired with the rank of rear admiral at the age of 80.
Will said this experience with Admiral Hopper gave him the idea of writing a popular book on computers, one that would be anecdotal and directed to a general audience rather than engineers. He tried to interest publishers but was unsuccessful. However, it also gave him a good lead-in for this article.
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he sits alone at night in a huge building minding a massive, early 1950s computer. Suddenly:
Against all precedent, the electric output typewriter was clicking furiously before the problem was solved. A loudspeaker made a din. The thinking machine was working the typewriter and had turned on the loudspeaker alarm to call Casey on the run. He got to the typewriter in a hurry. Its keys still clicked.
They stopped indignantly, as he read:
“Casey, you blank-blanked-son-of a so-and so, you forgot to change the spool to Number Two.”
Casey’s hair stood on end, and he wanted to run. He thought for a moment that the machine had come alive on him and was bawling him out.
Two seconds later he was hopping mad, of course. As soon as he thought, he knew what had happened. The man who’d prepared the two spools of tape had known Casey would run the problem through. So, at the end of the first tape, he’d zestfully included instructions for the machine to blast the loudspeaker and type that abuse to Case
y, before the normal signal for change-of-spools came on. When those instructions-on-tape took effect, Casey’s tranquil ease was shattered.
Will suggests one answer to the question of how to build a human brain that is neither conclusively science or fiction, but one that reflects his own background and history: “You learned it in Sunday School.” Will appeared in Astounding seventeen times during the 1950s. He and John Campbell continued to meet regularly, and undoubtedly many ideas for stories were exchanged. Campbell presented one in a letter to Will on August 25, 1952 (Perry A. Chapdelaine, Sr., collection, The John W. Campbell Letters, Vol. I ).
Dear Will,
I’ve got an idea that would, I think, make a lovely story. The only trouble is that it takes an extremely deft touch to handle the thing. Maybe you’d like to play with it, and I hoped you would. You’re the only one I know of who could do it; as I see it, it would be somewhat similar, in tenor and mood, to that “Historical Note” [ Astounding, February, 1951] item you did. The idea, essentially, would be this: Nature will, you know, answer any questions anyone asks. Nature has no race, political, or religious biases, so far as anyone has detected to date.
Further, nature invariably answers the question correctly.
Now let’s imagine that Nature can be communicated with directly. For our story, we have a nature talker machine invented, whereby a direct wire to Nature can be set up. Only we won’t refer to Nature as such.
You teletype into the machine any questions, any problems, and immediately get the answer. Naturally, military defense takes over the teletyper. There is a certain amount of confusion, because the answer is always exactly correct for exactly the question you ask, but you may be asking a question other than the one you think you are. For instance, if a chemist in the old days has asked something about “phlogiston” he’d have gotten the correct answer to what he actually meant, which wouldn’t have been what he thought he was getting. In other Seven • The New York Years: The 1940s
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words, the only limitation on the teletype is that you must know exactly what you are asking. Some limitation is clearly necessary, or the story goes haywire.
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