Science Fiction by Gaslight: A History and Anthology of Science Fiction in the Popular Magazines, 1891-1911

by Sam Moskowitz (ed. )

  There was a jar to the stalk and blossom as the professor fell within. He went head first into the tube, or eating apparatus of the strange plant, his legs sticking out for an instant, kicking wildly. Then he disappeared entirely.

  Adams didn’t know whether to laugh or be alarmed.

  He mounted the ladder, and stood in amazement before the result of the professor’s work as he looked down into the depth of the gigantic flower, increased a hundred times in size.

  He was aware of a strange, sickish-sweet odor that seemed to steal over his senses. It was lulling him to sleep, and he fought against it. Then he looked down and saw that the huge hairs or filaments with which the tube was lined were in violent motion.

  He could just discern the professor’s feet about three feet below the rim of the flower. They were kicking, but with a force growing less every second. The filaments seemed to be winding about the professor’s legs, holding him in a deadly embrace.

  Then the top cover, or flap of the plant, closed down suddenly. The professor was a prisoner inside.

  The plant had turned cannibal and eaten the man who had grown it!

  For an instant, fear deprived Adams of reason. He did not know what to do. Then the awful plight of his friend brought back his senses.

  “Professor!” he shouted. “Arc you alive? Can you hear me?”

  “Yes,” came back in faint and muffled tones. “This beast has me, all right.”

  Then followed a series of violent struggles that shook the plant.

  “I’ll get you out. Where’s an ax? I’ll chop the cursed plant to pieces!” cried Adams.

  “Don’t! Don’t” came in almost pleading tones from the imprisoned professor.

  “Don’t what?”

  “Don’t hurt my pet!”

  “Your pet!” snorted Adams angrily. “Nice kind of a pet you have! One that tries to eat you alive! But I’ve got to do something if I want to save you. Where’s the ax?”

  “No! No!” begged the professor, his voice becoming more and more muffled. “Use chloroform.”

  “Use what?”

  “Chloroform! You’ll find some in the closet.”

  Then Adams saw what the professor’s idea was. The plant could be made insensible, and the imprisoned man released with no harm to the blossom.

  He raced down the ladder, ran to a closet where he had seen the professor’s stock of drugs and chemicals stowed away on the occasion of former visits, and grabbed a big bottle of chloroform. He caught up a towel and ran back up the ladder.

  Not a sign of the professor could be seen. The plant had swallowed him up, but by the motion and swaying of the flower Adams knew his friend was yet alive.

  He was in some doubt as to the success of this method, and would rather have taken an ax and chopped a hole in the side of the blossom, thus releasing the captive. But he decided to obey the professor.

  Saturating the towel well with the chloroform, and holding his nose away from it, he pressed the wet cloth over the top of the blossom where the lid touched the edge of the bloom.

  There was a slight opening at one point, and Adams poured some of the chloroform down this. He feared lest the fumes of the anesthetic might overpower the professor also, but he knew they would soon pass away if this happened.

  For several minutes he waited anxiously. Would the plan succeed? Would the plant be overcome before it had killed the professor inside?

  Adams was in a fever of terror. Again and again he saturated the towel with the powerful drug. Then he had the satisfaction of seeing the lid of the pitcher plant relax.

  It slowly lifted and fell over to one side, making a good-sized opening. The strong filaments, not unlike the anus of a devil fish, Adams thought, were no longer in uneasy motion. They had released their grip on the professor’s legs and body.

  The spines which had pointed downward, holding the plant’s prey, now became limber.

  Adams leaned over. He reached down, grasped the professor by the feet, and, being a strong man, while his friend was small and light, he pulled him from the tube of the flower, a little dazed from the fumes of the chloroform the plant had breathed in, but otherwise not much the worse for his adventure.

  He had not reached the water at the bottom of the tube, which fact saved him from drowning.

  “Well, you certainly had a narrow squeak,” observed Adams as he helped the professor down the ladder.

  “I did,” admitted the botanist. “If you had not been on hand I don’t know what would have happened. I suppose I would have been eaten alive.”

  “Unless you could have cut yourself out of the side of the flower with your knife,” observed Adams.

  “What! And killed the plant I raised with such pains?” ejaculated the professor. “Spoil the largest Sarracenia Nepenthis in the world? I guess not. I would rather have let it eat me.”

  “I think you ought to call it the cannibal plant instead of the pitcher plant,” suggested Adams.

  “Oh, no,” responded the professor dreamily, examining the flower from a distance to see if any harm had come to it. “But to punish it, I will not give it any supper or breakfast. That’s what it gets for being naughty,” he added as if the plant were a child.

  “And I suggest that when you feed it hereafter,” said Adams, “you pass the beefsteaks in on a pitch-fork. You won’t run so much danger then.”

  “That’s a good idea. I’ll do it,” answered the professor heartily.

  And he has followed that plan ever since.

  Far-Out Humor

  Prior to World War I the public regarded inventors and their inventions as exceedingly funny, and an entire school of science fiction based on this viewpoint came into existence. Albert Levering, an artist who illustrated a number of such stories, portrays the breeder of a super all-purpose ant carrying one suitable for lobster {ant) tails as described in The Hybrid Hyperborean Ant by Roy L. McCardell from Hampton’s Magazine December 1910.

  Hamptons Magazine

  June, 1910

  AN EXPERIMENT IN GYRO-HATS

  by Ellis Parker Butler

  ELLIS Parker Butler always maintained that his fame was confined to a single story, Pigs is Pigs, published in The American Magazine in 1905, and said to have been written at the suggestion of the editor, Ellery Sedgwick. The story was a hilarious commentary on the obtuseness of an express agent who insisted on applying a livestock rate instead of a pet rate to a shipment of guinea pigs. The consignee refuses to pay and as the argument waxes and wanes the guinea pigs continue to do what comes naturally, until the express office is completely disorganized by them.

  While Pigs is Pigs certainly caught the public’s fancy and has remained in print in one place or another ever since its publication, Butler’s hundreds of other stories were also extremely well received. It was a common thing to see a single short story by Butler issued as a 50-cent hardcover book and enjoy a wide sale. Additionally, collections of his stories not only became popular sellers, but also enjoyed library respectability.

  An Experiment in Gyro-Hats is a perfect example of the scores of humorous invention stories which were so popular in the pulp adventure magazines after the turn of the century. It was published in Hampton’s Magazine for June 1910, and it richly deserves to be preserved for posterity. The story displays the real feel for humor possessed by the author, lifting it far above the average.

  It was reprinted as a thirty-one-page hardcover book by The Q and C Co., New York, with five well-executed line drawings by Albert Levering, taken from Hampton’s Magazine. The book, though undated and uncopyrighted, would seem to have appeared before World War I. It is not listed in bibliographies of Butler’s published works.

  Ellis Parker Butler quite probably was a radio enthusiast, for he wrote sixteen humorous stories for Hugo Gernshack’s Radio News during 1923 and 1924, displaying an intimate knowledge of the art as it was practiced in those innocent days. When Hugo Gernsback began publication of Amazing Stories, he reprinted two s
tories by Butler. The first, An Experiment in Gyro-Hats, which appeared in the third issue, June 1926, with a full-page illustration by science fiction artist Frank R. Paul, very similar to one by Albert Levering for Hampton’s Magazine, showed the inebriated inventor walking perpendicularly on a metal picket fence. The other was Solander’s Radio Tomb from the December 1923 Radio News. Published in Amazing Stories, June 1927, Solander’s Radio Tomb perfectly fitted its period, telling of an eccentric millionaire who had a radio station set up to broadcast sermons, hymns, and inspirational sayings from his tomb after his death. The entire plan functions well until the government reassigns the radio wavelengths and a permanent diet of red-hot jazz replaces the more solemn program.

  Ellis Parker Butler died September 13, 1937 at the age of sixty-eight, perhaps not a great author, but a well-loved author whose name is remembered with affection.

  THE idea of a gyro-hat did not come to me all at once, as some ideas come to inventors; and in fact I may say that but for a most unpleasant circumstance I might never have thought of gyro-hats at all, although I had for many years been considering the possibility of utilizing the waste space in the top of silk hats in some way or other. As a practical hat dealer and lover of my kind, it had always seemed to me a great economical waste to have a large vacant space inside the upper portion of top hats, or high hats, or “stove-pipe” hats, as they are variously called. When a shoe is on, it is full of foot, and when a glove is on, it is full of hand; but a top hat is not, and never can be, full of head, until such a day as heads assume a cylindrical shape, perfectly flat on top. And no sensible man ever expects that day to come.

  I had, therefore, spent much of my leisure in devising methods by which the vacant space above the head in high hats might be turned to advantage, and my patents ranged all the way from a small filing cabinet that just occupied the waste space, to an extensible hat rack on the accordion plan that could be pushed compactly into the top of the top hat when the hat was worn, but could be extended into a hat and coat rack when the hat was not in use. This device should have been very popular, but I may say that the public received the idea coldly.

  My attention had been for some time drawn away from this philanthropic work by certain symptoms of uneasiness I noticed in my daughter Anne, and my wife and I decided after careful consideration that Anne must be in love, and that her love must be unhappy. Otherwise we could not account for the strange excitability of our usually imperturbable daughter. As a practical hat dealer my time has been almost exclusively devoted to hats and, as a good wife, my companion’s attention has been almost exclusively devoted to her husband, while Anne was usually so calm and self-contained that she did not take my attention from my hat business at all. But when such a daughter suddenly develops signs of weeping and sighs and general nervousness, any father, no matter how devoted to the hat trade, must pay attention.

  One of the primary necessities of a dealer in good hats is calm. An ordinary hat dealer may not need calm. He may buy his hats as another dealer buys flour, in the bulk, and then trust to advertisements to sell them; but I am not that kind of hat dealer. Hat dealing is an art with me, and great art requires calm and peace in order that it may reach its highest development. When I buy hats I do not think of dozens and dollars. No, indeed; I think of noses and ears. To be able to buy of a manufacturer a hat that will make the pug nose and big ears of a man I have never seen seem normal and beautiful when that man enters my store and buys a hat, requires calm. And no hatter can have calm in his soul while his daughter is love sick and unhappy. I demand happiness about and around me, and I must have it. So I told my wife, and I told her so most emphatically, and I informed her that Anne must become happy at once.

  Perhaps you can imagine the shock I received when my wife, after making the necessary inquiries of Anne, informed me that Anne was indeed in love, and in love with Walsingham Gribbs. It was not because Walsingham Gribbs had never bought a hat of me that I was shocked. Bad hats are a common failing of mankind, and a man will try a hundred hatters before he at last comes to me.

  The trouble was deeper than this. The thing that staggered me was that Walsingham was a staggerer. (This is a joke, but I hold that a hatter has as good a right to make a joke as the next man.)

  That my daughter had fallen in love with Walsingham Gribbs without having met him was altogether to her credit. She first saw him when she was crossing the ocean (for she travels where she pleases, my hat business affording her such pleasures) and that he reeled and staggered about the boat did not impress her, for it was a stormy trip and everyone aboard reeled and staggered, even the captain of the boat. But when she returned to New York and saw Walsingham Gribbs on the firm pavement of Fifth Avenue, she had a harsh, cruel disillusionment. Walsingham Gribbs reeled and staggered on terra firma.

  I am glad to say that my daughter saw at once the impossibility of the daughter of a high-class hatter mating with a permanent staggerer

  As she realized this, she became sad and nervous, thus creating an atmosphere in my home that was quite opposed to the best high-class hatting, irritating my faculties and threatening to reduce me to the state of a mere commercial hatter.

  Further investigation only made the matter seem worse, for quiet inquiries brought out the information that Walsingham Gribbs had been staggering since the year his father died. He had been constantly in a reeling, staggering state since his twentieth birthday. For such a man reform is, indeed, impossible. And what made the case more sad was that all proof seemed to point to the fact that Walsingham Gribbs was not a “bounder” nor a “rounder,” two classes of men who occasionally acquire a stagger and a reel in company with hearty boon companions.

  In short, no one had ever seen Walsingham Gribbs take a drink in public, and I was forced to conclude that he was of that horrid type that drinks alone—”Alone but with unabated zeal” as that great poet, Sir Walter Scott, has remarked in one of his charming poems.

  If all these investigations of mine were conducted without the knowledge of Walsingham Gribbs, you must admit I did only what was right in keeping them secret from him; for since he had never met my daughter he might have considered the efforts of a perfect stranger to peer into his life as being uncalled for. My wife did what she could to comfort Anne, but Anne sadly replied that she could never marry a man that staggered and reeled day in and day out. Thus day by day she became more sad, and I became so upset that I actually sold a narrow-brimmed derby hat to a man with wide, outstanding ears.

  Of course this could not go on. No high-grade hat business could support it, and I was standing in my shop door looking gloomily out when I chanced to see Walsingham Gribbs stagger by. I had seen him many times, but now, for the first time I noticed what I should have noticed before—that he invariably wore a high hat, or “topper,” as our customers like to call them.

  I observed that the shape was awful, and that the hat badly needed the iron, and then my mind recurred to the old problem of the vacant space in the top of top hats; but I found I could not concentrate. Whenever I tried to think of top hats I thought of Walsingham Gribbs in one of them, staggering and reeling up the street, and gradually the thought came that it would be an excellent idea should I be able so to use the space in the top of Walsingham’s hat that he would no longer stagger and reel, and then the thought of the gyroscope hat came to me.

  I admit that at first I put the idea aside as futile, but it came back again and again, and at length it seemed to force me into enthusiasm. I dropped everything and went to work on the gyro-hat.

  The gyroscope is, as everyone knows, a top, and I might have called the hat I invented a top hat, except that any tall cylindrical silk or beaver hat is called a top hat, so I was forced to adopt the name of gyro-hat.

  A gyroscope is not an ordinary top. It is like a heavy fly wheel, revolving on an axis; and if it is spun, the speed of the revolutions maintains the axis in the perpendicular. A huge gyroscope is used to steady the channel steamers, whic
h would otherwise stagger and reel. A gyroscope has just been adopted to the monorail cars, and so long as the gyroscope gyrates the monorail car cannot stagger or reel. If a proper gyroscope was placed on the end of a knitting needle and gyrated at full speed, that knitting needle could be stood on end and it would not fall over.

  Therefore, if a gyroscope was placed in the top of a top hat, and the top hat firmly fastened to the head of a man, and the gyroscope set going, that man would remain perpendicular in spite of anything. He could not stagger. He could not reel. He could walk a line as straight as a crack.

  When I had completed this gyro-hat I showed it to my wife, and briefly explained what it was and what I meant to do with it. The small but wonderfully powerful motor and the gyroscope itself were all concealed inside the hat, and I explained to my wife that Walsingham Gribbs need but fasten the hat firmly on his head and he would never stagger again. At first my wife seemed doubtful, but as I went on she became enthusiastic.

  The only thing she disliked was the method of fastening the hat to the head, for, as it was quite necessary that the hat be very firmly fixed to the head, I had sewed ear tabs to the hat, and these I tied firmly under my chin. My wife said she feared it would require some time to persuade the public to take to silk hats with ear tabs, and that the sight of a man in a silk hat with ear tabs would be a sign that he was a staggerer. She wanted another method of holding the hat on the head.

  “Vacuum suction,” I said, for I am quick to catch an idea. A man has to be, in the hat business. “But,” I added, “where would you get the vacuum? A man cannot be expected to carry a can of vacuum, or whatever he would need to carry vacuum in, around with him; especially the kind of man that would need the gyro-hat.”

  “My dear,” said my wife, after a minute of thought, during which we both studied the gyro-hat, “I have it! Let the hat make its own vacuum. If the hat is lined with air-tight aluminum, and has a rubber sweat-band, and an expulsion valve, the gyroscope motor could pump the air out itself. It could create its own vacuum.”