Applied Phlebotinum is a TV tropes term for an expedient plot device, when some substance is needed to get things going, but there’s nothing real that quite works, or whatever is real runs the risk of being wrong or obsolescent in the future, so the writers either make something up, or are purposefully vague. Usually, it ends up being risible within about 10 years (see: almost any movie from the 1950s set in the 1980s or 90s) anyway.
However, sometimes filmmakers get really lucky. Hitchcock got so lucky, he found himself being questioned by the CIA when he picked an obscure and rare element as his MacGuffin for Notorious, completely unaware of how to make an atomic bomb, and only vaguely aware that uranium was important, but not why. He has spies searching for a large stash of hidden uranium, which they find in bottles in a wine cellar.It actually plays better now than it did with original audiences in 1946, who didn’t know what went into a bomb either.
In 1935, in the movie Magnificent Obsession (no spoiler; it all happens in the first 10 minutes), a respected doctor dies, while a not so nice playboy lives, because they are in need of medical care at the same time-- the doctor has had a heart attack, and the playboy has carelessly wrecked his sailboat, both while at the same country club, and the lifeguards there only possess one lifesaving “machine,” which they use on the playboy, because he’s closer, or has his accident a couple of minutes before the doctor goes down, or something.
When I first saw the movie, my mind automatically translated “machine” to defibrillator, which makes perfect sense. However, I found out later the first use of an external defibrillator on a human was in 1947.
Anyone know of any other lucky guesses in old movies?-- or books or TV for that matter.
In Star Trek: The Old Stuff, the sound that the communicator makes when somebody gets a call turns out to be exactly the kind of noise that makers of medical monitoring equipment had been trying to develop for alarms. They wanted something that would cut through background chatter without sounding like a telephone was ringing, and it had never occurred to them to manufacture a simple “beep”. They contacted the producers of the show and asked how they made the sound. Thus we have the sounds of pagers and medical devices and other things that go “beep”.
Also, in The Mote in God’s Eye, published in 1974, is set in the way far future with starships and everything, everybody carries around a personal computing device that is, for all intents and purposes, a smartphone.
Could say the same for The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. The marvelous device that led Ford to Earth to meet Arthur and start the story is essentially a smartphone with a downloadable version of Space-Wikipedia on it.
In both the short story “Lost Legacy” (1941) and the juvenile novel “Space Cadet” (1948), Heinlein equips his characters with “pocketphones”. He also has both characters ditch their phones for a while, just because always being reachable was a pain in the ass. Nice bit of foresight on Heinlein’s part.
Star Trek’s PADDs. Tablets are so ubiquitous now but who would think just a few years ago that someone would actually want a device that is the combination of a smart phone that doesn’t make calls and a laptop that doesn’t do all those laptopy things?
The story about Hitchcock and Uranium is weird. The use of Uranium (and Plutonium) in the making of atomic weapons was thoroughly detailed in the Smyth Report, published August 12, 1945 and widely sold.
It would have been practically impossible after August, 1945 to not know about Uranium and The Bomb.
But, apparently the screenplay used Uranium a couple months before that. The story that Hitchcock told of being tailed by the FBI may be just fluff, however. He never seemed to have been questioned by the FBI. And certainly not the CIA.
That Uranium was an unusual element, radioactive and all, was widely known for decades before. Since Germany fell in May, 1945, maybe there were some stories floating around about Germany’s atomic projects. Perhaps via Norwegian sources. Hence the Nazis and Uranium storyline.
The New York Times spent all of 1939, 1940, and 1941 printing articles about uranium. They kept running headlines about atomic power and the ability of uranium to be used for peace and to make the biggest weapon ever. So did every other major news source. Anybody who could read would be told, in long articles by skilled science writers, about the inevitable future.
When the war came, the government clamped down. The *Times *did not mention uranium again until 1944 and that was in a different context.
It’s said that the public has a very short memory, and this proves it more than anything else. Even so, it’s impossible that the public didn’t know what uranium meant after August 1945. *Time *magazine alone ran 60 articles mentioning uranium between then and the end of 1946.
Hitchcock was a storyteller. He told a story about his story. Don’t confuse that with reality.
As for lucky guesses. H. G. Wells in The World Set Free has nuclear fission discovered in 1933 and the first atomic-powered electrical plant in 1955, both remarkably accurate. He coined the term atomic war in that novel. It was written in 1913 and published the next year.
That’s not Applied Phlebotinum. That’s just a MacGuffin. Applied Phlebotinum needs to be, you know, applied, and have an effect. If one of those spies drank from the wine bottle, and then turned into a rampaging monster, THAT would be Applied Phlebotinum (as well as unique among Hitchcock’s filmography).
Exactly right. It’s a MacGuffin because you can change the uranium to industrial diamonds with a simple ctrl-c ctrl-v, and the movie is exactly the same.
Phlebotinum is stuff like dilithium crystals that power your warp core to make your spaceship go. How does it work? Very well!
Or it’s the brain-rape technology from “Dollhouse” that lets you edit and replace human personalities. Without the brain-rape there’s no series. There’s no need to explain exactly how the tech works, or even have it always work consistently. But the premise of the show is brain-rape.
You can have the phlebotinum in the hands of the bad guys and the good guys are trying to stop them, or the phlebotinum in the hands of the good guys who use it to stop the bad guys, or both sides can have it and you have phlebotinum vs phlebotinum battles.
And so you have things like the Barsoom novels, where technology works on radium, plus various rays of various sorts. You know, like the buoyancy ray that you can store in tanks to keep your airships floating. A use of radium-as-phlebotinum that would stand the test of time would be using radium as a power plant, or a radium bomb. Radium used to make rifle cartridges not so much.