All the Talk Of The Market (ATOM!): Curious anachronisms

[Spectre_of_Pithecanthropus]

(Disclaimer: In spite of the long-winded setup, this thread is not about the Heinlein novel, but I need to discourse on it to some extent in order to provide context.)

I’m sure there are many here who have read The End Of Eternity by Robert Heinlein. It’s essentially a time-travel story in which “Eternity” is all the future from about 2800 CE to some point millions of centuries in the future, up and down which certain people, called “Eternals”, have the privilege of traveling at will. Near the end of the story, one of the characters–I forget why–has to travel back before the earliest point of Eternity to a point in the 1920s, effectively stranding himself in the past. He’s expecting the arrival of another Eternal and is supposed to advertise his presence so the newcomer will be able to contact him. So he takes out a small display ad in a newspaper:

ALL
TALK
OF THE
MARKET

the idea being that only another visitor from the future will understand the word “atom”, though it does seem curious for Heinlein to suggest that this would work at a time when the foundations of nuclear physics had already been laid down by Rutherford, Bohr, and many others.

Whatever, it doesn’t matter. I only bring it up because it’s slightly reminiscent of something I just discovered in my 1960 World Book, in the “Transportation” article:

Peak Oil!

Of course, it is true that M. King Hubbert propounded the peak oil idea in 1956, but I’ll bet many more people in the 1920s knew what an atom was, than knew about peak oil. The idea of peak oil was probably known to some of Hubbert’s fellow petroleum engineers, but hardly anyone else. What’s more, Peak Oil is rather odd as the name of an oil company, even a fictitious one in an encyclopedia illustration. You don’t go drilling for oil on mountaintops, do you? So there it is, peak oil being mentioned in a general encyclopedia, at least as early as 1960.

Obviously, this is just a striking coincidence, even if I did check the list of contributors to make sure that Hubbert’s name wasn’t included in it.

What similar “anachronisms” have you noticed in old pictures, books, or other material?

[Terminus_Est]

The End of Eternity is by Isaac Asimov.

That is all.

[Oakminster]

That ain’t a Heinlein novel. Wikipedia seems to think it’s by Isaac Asimov.

[muldoonthief]

Guys, don’t you get it? Spectre is a stranded Eternal. In his version of Reality, Heinlein wrote The End of Eternity and the robot stories too.

BTW, in the novel, the A T O M was superposed over a drawing of a mushroom cloud, a full decade before the first atom bomb. That was what Harlan noticed in the newspaper.

[CalMeacham]

O my Og! Shakespeare was a stranded Eternal!
In Romeo and Juliet he writes:

O, then, I see Queen Mab hath been with you.
She is the fairies’ midwife, and she comes
In shape no bigger than an agate-stone
On the fore-finger of an alderman,
Drawn with a team of little atomies
Athwart men’s noses as they lie asleep;

Act I, Scene IV

A tip of the hat to Robert Ripley, Believe it or Not…

[Flywheel]

NM

[Spectre_of_Pithecanthropus]

Asimov, yes! Mea culpa, but can we please now consider this side issue dealt with?

[BobArrgh]

I haven’t read the book, but “Peak” could have been the name of the person who started an oil-drilling company.

[Spectre_of_Pithecanthropus]

@BobArrgh

I haven’t read the book, but “Peak” could have been the name of the person who started an oil-drilling company.

Perhaps he also invented several popular garden or farm implements, among them Peak’s Pike.

[robert_columbia]

@Spectre_of_Pithecanthropus

Perhaps he also invented several popular garden or farm implements, among them Peak’s Pike.

Also, many people don’t know that the former long-time el presidente of Cuba was a lubricants engineer before becoming a revolutionary. Ever wonder why we call it Castro oil?

[robert_columbia]

@Spectre_of_Pithecanthropus

…What similar “anachronisms” have you noticed in old pictures, books, or other material?

One very famous “anachronism” is the Credit Card in Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward: 2000-1887, an 1888 SF novel. What he describes is more of a stored value card than a true “credit” card in the modern sense, but he predicts a cashless society.

[boffking]

@Spectre_of_Pithecanthropus

What’s more, Peak Oil is rather odd as the name of an oil company, even a fictitious one in an encyclopedia illustration. You don’t go drilling for oil on mountaintops, do you?

Explain this then: http://www.peakauto.com/products/motor-oil/
I think I have a bottle of PEAK 5W-30 in my garage somewhere.

[Spectre_of_Pithecanthropus]

@muldoonthief

BTW, in the novel, the A T O M was superposed over a drawing of a mushroom cloud, a full decade before the first atom bomb. That was what Harlan noticed in the newspaper.

I did forget about the mushroom cloud picture, so the episode in the story makes more sense now.

[Spectre_of_Pithecanthropus]

@boffking

Explain this then: http://www.peakauto.com/products/motor-oil/
I think I have a bottle of PEAK 5W-30 in my garage somewhere.

I suppose it’s the same as “Acme”, which is almost the same thing. Obviously then “Peak Oil” isn’t such a bizarre name after all.

[cmkeller]

In reading an old Bloom County collection, I saw one of the characters referred to as a “Dilbert” in a strip that was published prior to the onset of Scott Adams’s “Dilbert” comic strip.

[Spectre_of_Pithecanthropus]

I can see where Dilbert has likely been a male given name for a long time, albeit a rare one and (for the bearer) an unfortunate one.

It must be a variant of Delbert, which is more common (but that’s still not saying much).

[Steve_MB]

@cmkeller

In reading an old Bloom County collection, I saw one of the characters referred to as a “Dilbert” in a strip that was published prior to the onset of Scott Adams’s “Dilbert” comic strip.

From Scott Adams’ blog FAQ:

7. How did Dilbert get his name?

I developed Dilbert as a doodle during my corporate years. He had no name, but my coworkers thought he needed one. So I had a “Name the Nerd” contest on my cubicle whiteboard. My boss at the time, Mike Goodwin, wrote down “Dilbert,” and I closed the contest. We had a winner.

After I submitted Dilbert for syndication, Mike sheepishly told me that he realized why Dilbert seemed such a good name for a comic. He was looking through his Dad’s old military artifacts and realized he had seen a Dilbert comic before. Since WWII, a comic called Dilbert had been used by military pilots in the context of telling them what not to do. A “Dilbert” was synonymous with a pilot who was being an idiot. It was too late for me to turn back at that point. I kept the name Dilbert, and I never heard from the family of the original artist. Obviously they are aware of my version of Dilbert. I appreciate that they evidently decided to not make it an issue.