The Forever Engine (35 page)

HISTORICAL PERSONAGES

The following characters in the novel are based, loosely, on historical personages. All other characters are entirely fictitious. These are listed in their order of appearance in the novel.

John Tyndall (1820-1893)

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Tyndall was a prominent mathematician and physicist known for his work in diamagnetism, thermal radiation, and atmospheric processes. His greatest contribution may have been a series of seventeen books which popularized physics for laymen. In 1888 he had just retired from his position as professor of physics at the Royal Institution of Great Britain, due to advanced age and declining health.

The X Club

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Odd as it may sound, the X Club was very real. It consisted of nine gifted scientists who supported the theory of natural selection and the principles of academic liberalism—which they defined as “devotion to science, pure and free, untrammeled by religious dogma.” The nine members were Thomas Henry Huxley (the founder/organizer), George Busk, Edward Frankland, Thomas Archer Hirst, Joseph Dalton Hooker, John Lubbock, William Spottiswode, Herbert Spenser and John Tyndall. The club formed in the 1860s. By the 1880s the nine men had all become prominent in their fields, and quite influential. Despite a degree of jealousy from non-members, all of the members of the historical X Club died of natural causes.

William Thomson,

1st Baron Kelvin (1824-1907).

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Most widely know for his work on temperature (the Kelvin scale is named after him) Thomson was also a renowned mathematician and engineer. He was instrumental in the successful completion of the Atlantic Cable (which also made him very wealthy), and he invented the adjustable compass adopted by the Royal Navy in the 1880s, which was designed to compensate for magnetic variation and the amount of iron used in naval hulls. His greatest contribution to modern science was to lead the movement to segregate physics from the other natural sciences by organizing it around study of the heating and cooling of the universe.

His feud with the X Club membership was based on differences over Darwin’s theory of natural selection. Thomson rejected Darwin’s theory based on his calculation of the age of the Earth. His calculations were flawed, but the error was not discovered until the first years of the Twentieth Century. There is no reason to believe Thomson discovered his own error during his life.

Thomson was made the 1st Baron Kelvin in our world in 1892. In this world his contribution to the expedition against Tesla accelerated that award by three years.

General Sir Redvers Buller, VC (1839-1908)

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Buller rose to prominence in the mid- and late-1800s in the series of colonial wars the British Army fought. He won his Victoria Cross in the Zulu War and by 1888 had been made Quartermaster General of the army and had a seat on the powerful Army Board. In the novel his career is sidetracked by the murder of Colonel Rossbank, and Buller’s reassignment to military intelligence. In fact, his historical career progressed without serious interruption until the Second Boer War, at the turn of the century. A series of defeats of troops under his command led the government to retire him, a scapegoat for the public’s broad dissatisfaction with the Army’s performance in the war.

Buller was tall and heavy-set, naturally strong but tending to fat in his middle years. His speech was abrupt, and he was short-tempered, irritable, and inclined to sound like the stereotypical gobbling British senior officer. The historical Buller was, in fact, one of the inspirations for the fictitious Colonel Blimp. For all that, Buller was very sharp, practical-minded, and not much inclined to sentimentality, at least at this stage of his life.

Albert Edward, Prince of Wales

(AKA Baron Renfrew),

later King Edward VII (1841-1910)

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Crown prince and heir apparent to the British throne, Albert Edward was estranged from his mother, Queen Victoria (who blamed him for his father’s death) and largely kept out of government and the affairs of state, at least on a formal level. He cultivated a public reputation as a playboy, and he kept company with some of the most beautiful and notorious women of Europe. He traveled frequently, ostensibly for pleasure, and went under the title “Baron Renfrew” on his unofficial junkets.

In fact, Albert Edward was an intelligent and politically sophisticated man, using his reputation for unconventional behavior to travel where official representatives of Britain would not, and associate with those they could not. He had a remarkably egalitarian view of the world and made speeches on the subject of religious and racial tolerance which reflected a sensibility more in keeping with society a century later than that of his own time. In 1910 his support of progressive causes brought him into conflict with the conservative majority in the House of Lords when they refused to pass “The People’s Budget.” At that time Edward VII considered appointing additional Lords to insure passage of the bill, but died that year before carrying through his plan. Some believe his death was brought on, in part, by stress from the looming constitutional crisis.

Albert Edward stayed in Dwight, Illinois, in 1860 while traveling under the name Baron Renfrew. Renfrew Park in Dwight is named in his honor.

Nikola Tesla (1856-1943)

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Tesla’s early years unfolded largely as related in the story, except that his sisters were not victims of typhoid. Tesla was as brilliant and creative as depicted in the novel. While quite eccentric, and increasingly paranoid in later life, he never displayed the capacity for violence with which the novel credits him. Chalk that up to the alternate universe.

Tesla displayed mounting symptoms of obsessive-compulsive disorder as he grew older, including a well-documented preoccupation with the number three. As depicted in the novel, he remained celibate for most of his life, and he also developed a hypersensitivity to light and sound as he aged.

His lifelong preoccupation with projected power may very well have led him to develop an energy weapon. Late in his life, his interests turned to development of exactly this sort of directed-energy beam weapon, which he called a “teleforce” weapon.

The novel’s theoretical basis for Tesla’s “force-bearing aether” as related to the Higgs Field is an extrapolation from Tesla’s writing on a “field of force” and somewhat from his dynamic theory of gravity, at least so far as it is understood at all. This, combined with his occasional interest in “free energy,” would have made the Forever Engine a natural for him.

Tesla’s choice of a location for his artificial lake is an obvious one. In the 1960s Yugoslavia dammed the Uvac River near Kokin Brod and created Lake Zlatarsko, the third largest lake in modern Serbia, on the same site as that in the novel.

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