Dell Magazine Authors - Analog SFF, December 2009

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Published since 1930

First issue of Astounding January 1930 (c)

One of John W. Campbell's most famous editorials in Astounding looked at what was once a popular basis for science-fictional plotsand why it probably wouldn't work in reality. He was right, but I don't think he went far enough.

The idea was that human scientists or engineers would get their hands on a technological artifact from their own future, or from an alien civilization, and figure out how it worked and how to duplicate or even improve on it. In No Copying Allowed (November 1948), John demonstrated the improbability of this premise with a simple hypothetical example.

Suppose, he suggested, that a late 1940s guided missile screamed across a 1920 sky and into the hands of a team of U.S. Army Signal Corps engineers. It represents a technology less than thirty years beyond their own, but it's full of things they can't understand. It flies much faster than anything they've seen, yet doesn't seem to have an enginejust a simple pipe, open at both ends. We'd recognize it as a ramjet, but they don't yet have that ideanot surprising, since a ramjet won't even work unless it's already moving faster than anything that could be built in 1920. It's made of alloys of unfamiliar composition and structure, and contains electronic components that they can recognize, in a general way, but not reproduce, such as printed circuits and tiny vacuum tubes, resistors, and capacitors. There are also mysterious little objects made of solid germanium and functioning as amplifiers, but exact copies made with the purest available germanium do nothing (because, we would say, they lack the necessary doping with tiny amounts of just the right impurities).

And so on.

Looking back at John's scenario from sixty years after he wrote his editorial, we have a different perspective in at least two major ways. First, wildly advanced and incomprehensible as his 1948 missile would have seemed to engineers of less than thirty years earlier, it now looks pretty quaint to us. It used vacuum tubes, for one thinga technology now so widely forgotten that many young scientists and engineers have never seen one. (Several years ago, a young physicist at Bell Labs told me he'd always regarded vacuum tubes as rather mysterious substitutes for transistors; which, in reverse, is pretty much how I felt about transistors after having learned vacuum tubes first.) Those mysterious germanium amplifiers in Campbell's hypothetical specimen were transistors, but they were discrete transistors, something we seldom see anymore. If the engineers who built and launched that missile in 1948 got hold of one of our missilesor even many of our toys!they would have found it full of high-level integrated circuits, each the size of one of their transistors, but incorporating millions of them (plus associated circuitry). But they would have been hard put to recognize them as such, and had no hope of building anything similar.

The second way in which John's example looks different to us is that his engineers were trying to analyze and reproduce the inner workings of the gadget that had fallen into their midst. I think they would have had trouble long before that point. Even the external controlswhat we would now call the user interfacewould have been less than intuitive. And even if those of 1948 would have been reasonably easy for a user of 1920 to figure out, the ones we use now would surely have been baffling for at least a goodly while.

Consider what controls on electronic devices typically looked like in 1920 or 1948. In 1920, most units would have a simple set of functions and a simple set of controls, each with a single function and a straightforward correlation with that function. A radio, for example, would be designed to receive a signal within a single rather narrow band of radio frequencies, demodulate it to extract the audio-frequency signal the radio wave carried, and amplify that audio signal to drive a headphone or speaker at the desired volume. The controls would be an on-off switch, a tuning dial, and a volume control. Tuning was typically done with a variable capacitor rotated by a knob directly coupled to a circular dial to indicate frequency, or driving a string to move a pointer along a linear frequency scale. Either way, there was one knob that did nothing except select frequency and one indicator that did nothing except show the frequency. If other indications were needed, such as signal strength, that was done by an analog meter, with a needle pointing to the current value of that variable on a printed scale. The on-off switch could be a toggle or slide, or a push-button, or a rotary switch that clicked off counterclockwise and on clockwise. The closest such a device was likely to get to combining functions in one control was fairly common but simple: a rotary or push-button on-off switch might be combined with the volume control in a single knob. That made straightforward sense since off can be thought of as the ultimate stage of down and on as the first step up. With that semi-exception, each control did one and only one operation, and there was no other way to do that.

Things hadn't changed all that drastically by 1948, which is probably why Campbell didn't mention the additional difficulty I'm pointing out today. But they had changed significantly. Electronic devices had become more versatile and controls had begun multitasking to accommodate that fact. A radio might now cover not just a single AM band, but several of widely different frequency ranges (broadcast and shortwave), plus another using frequency modulation (FM). It might also have an input allowing a phonograph record to be played through its audio stages. So it would need at least one selector switch, most likely a rotary switch with a knob pointing to AM, FM, SW1, SW2, SW3, or PHONO. The tuning dial would still have one pointer but several parallel scales, each labeled to correspond to one of the selector positions, so it wouldn't be too hard to figure out which of the several simultaneous indications was relevant. The volume control would still be a volume control, regardless of the selector position. There might also be a tone control, or perhaps two (treble and bass). If the radio was powered up and working, the function of each control could quickly be determined by experiment, even if the experimenter couldn't read the markings. If it was not powered, there'd be more guesswork involved.