Mostly when people cite anachronisms they cite the blatant anachronisms that show up in books and movies: Roman soldiers wearing wristwatches, jet contrails in the skies in movies supposedly set in the Old West.
But sometimes things that seem to be anachronisms are not. I recently found one in a Nero Wolfe novel set in 1950, “Murder By The Book.” In it, Archie flies out to Los Angeles to interview a witness, and shortly after he arrives he finds that Nero had wired him to ask if he’s arrived safely.
When I read it, I was puzzled: the story was explicitly set in 1950. Telephones were a well established technology, they had used them throughout the story. So why did Wolfe wire (i.e., send a telegram) to Archie? And why did Archie get on the phone and wire Wolfe that he had arrived safely?
Next day, it came to me. It was purely a matter of money. The 1950s were the heyday of the Bell Telephone monopoly, and the long distance charges would have been TREMENDOUS. It would have been MUCH CHEAPER to send a telegram.
Someone living in 1950 and reading the novel when it came out would probably have known that as a matter of course. But to me it was a weird anachronism.
Anybody encounter oddities like that when reading or watching TV or movies? And does anybody know of a term for this sort of phenomenon? It’s not REALLY an anachronism, just seems like one.
I was reading a fictional story that took place on the USS Maine – the one that blew up in Havana harbor and helped launch the Spanish-American War – and it mentioned the ship’s turbines.
Turbines? Nonsense, I thought; it would have had triple expansion pistons.
Nope! Turbines! Doggone!
(The movie “The Sand Pebbles” depicts a ship, built at a later time and involved in a later conflict, with pistons, and that was part of what misled me.)
Early in “The Last of the Mohicans” you get a lovely pan shot along the front of the wood-palisade fort in the forest. Just as you get to the end, you see the ends of the wooden baulks, with very obvious signs of circular-saw marks.
Again, I thought, “Oh, that’s wrong!” Such a fort, I thought, would have consisted of ax-hewn wood, not sawn wood. But again, oops: there were sawmills in the region at the time, including some with circular saws.
Mark Twain said it best: “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.”
Turbines were definitely in use around the turn of the 20th century; engineers had already figured out it was an efficient way of reusing the steam from reciprocating piston engines.
The Titanic had a turbine engine in between its reciprocating ones; unfortunately, it contributed to the cause of the accident by shutting off when the latter were reversed, depriving the rudder of its slipstream.
Hoping that this is not going too far off-course: a matter in a work of fiction which looks like, and apparently actually is, an anachronism; which has long bothered me a bit.
In George MacDonald Fraser’s Flashman’s Lady, set in 1843: Flashman and his wife Elspeth are being treated to a luxurious cruise to the Far East in the private yacht of an acquaintance of Flashy’s, a wealthy and seemingly highly generous businessman (who later turns out to be a villain). The yacht sets out from the Thames in London; early in the voyage, one of the ladies in the party discovers that she has forgotten to bring along, her favourite perfume. The too-munificent-to-be-true yacht-owner lands the lady’s personal maid at Portsmouth, with instructions to go up to London, retrieve the missing stuff, and travel with it to Plymouth, rejoining the boat there.
According to the narrative, the maid performs this Portsmouth – London – Plymouth run by rail. Although Britain’s rail network grew quite rapidly from its inception at the end of the 1820s, as at 1843 many big towns were not yet served by rail – Portsmouth got its first rail service (linking with London, indirectly) in 1847; and Plymouth ditto, in 1848.
One takes it that the unfortunate maid would have had to cover the rail-less parts of her route, by stage-coach. Perhaps that is “understood” in the text, with the author thinking a long-winded explanation of essentially a minor, nitpicky detail, not worth getting into. Usually in the Flashman novels, Fraser’s research is meticulous and highly accurate, even down to small things – especially in the earlier books, which include Flashman’s Lady – in the last few of the series IMO, the author’s advanced age began to show a little.
Sherlock Holmes’ stories were set in a time when London had the world’s first regularly operating subway system, but Holmes never takes it, preferring to use cabs. I think “The Underground” is mentioned only once or twice in the entire series.
Similarly, London had telephones in Holmes’ day, but neither Holmes nor any of his clients appear to ever use it or refer to it. Holmes, like Nero Wolfe in your example, invariably sent telegrams.
The refusal of Holmes (and, of course, Doyle) neglecting these inventions was significant enough to a later generation that Nicholas Meyer in his Holmes pastiche The Seven Per Cent Solution felt he had to have Watson explain why Holmes never used either of them.
The anachronism for me would be the relatively slow speed of the yacht. I thought sailing ships ran faster than that. My thought would be that with all the stops and the shopping the maid would arrive at the rendezvous point long after the yacht did. I know very little about that period in England, though.
I thought that Holmes did use (or at least mention) the telephone in one later story. I don’t remember which one, but it was significant enough for Leslie Klinger to point it out in his notes in The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes.
I have pondered a bit about that, but ended up feeling that it would probably have boiled down to pretty much an equal match. Sailing vessels can go quite fast when all is in their favour, but are basically at the mercy of what wind, tide, etc. are doing. I’d presume that the yacht would have waited as long as necessary at Plymouth, if it got there first; and / or maybe the party called in and spent time at some nice intervening place.
People have criticized the Will Smith movie Wild Wild West because a black US marshal would have been unheard of at that time. But there were black US marshals like Bass Reeves. Some claim he was the inspiration for The Lone Ranger.
I’ll have to check my copy of Klinger’s annotated version (and Baring-Gould’s), both of which are at home. But I don’t recall Holmes himself ever actually using a phone. It might have been someone else in the story.
In any event, even if it was Holmes, the use was so remarkable that it was worth a footnote. In the rest of the Canon Holmes relies on the telegraph.
One of the more interesting aspects of Holmes pastiches is that they often bring in some of these developments – I know of one where an airplane figures in the plot, and another where motion pictures do. But Holmes remains unaffected by it all. Doyle DID write a story in which a phonograph record lay behind the mystery, but it wasn’t a Sherlock Holmes story (“The Japanned Box”). Otherwise, I think the Canon is free of such recordings.
One factor Doyle didn’t completely overlook was fingerprints (Heck, even Mark Twain had used them, in Puddin’head Wilson). Typically, his use of fingerprints in The Norwood Builder was to demonstrate how they could be misused, and lead to a false result. R. Austin Freedman did something similar later with his The Red Thumb Mark. You have to wonder if he had Norwood in mind when he wrote that.
Exactly. As you say, one of the notable things about the Holmes stories is how staunchly Victorian they remain in their atmosphere. Despite Starrett’s famous claim that “it is always 1895,” Holmes stories continued well into the 20th century. But you’d never know it just from reading them.
It’s always a bit surprising to me to remember that the last Holmes story was published in 1927. Heck, movies were well-established by that time, but you’ll never see Holmes stop into a cinema, either.
By the time of that final Holmes story, writers usually regarded as part of a new generation, like Agatha Christie, Margery Allingham, and Philip MacDonald, had already begun publishing, and the so-called “Golden Age of Detective Fiction” was well underway. S.S. Van Dine and Dashiell Hammett were waiting in the wings. It’s weird to think of Holmes lingering that long, but he did.
A sailing ship can go fast in the open sea, but navigating a river is a slow process. Winds are tricky and light, and if they’re against the direction you want to go, you have to tack constantly. Then there’s the issue of tide (though a ship would time its departure for when the tide is going out).
Once the ship reached the channel, it could make up time (depending on the right wind and tides), but the yacht is unlikely to be as fast as a train. The fastest clipper ships hit about 33 mph, but that was only done a handful of times. Most sailing ships were far slower and certainly no faster than a train of the era. The train would have a shorter trip. Even the stagecoach leg would not have been enough to cause too much of a slowdown.
As I mentioned above, Holmes pastiches do bring in technological advances. One of the stories in The New Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (published in 1987 on the centenary of Holmes’ first appearance in Beeton’s) has Sherlock Holmes meeting a young Charlie Chaplin (!) and vsiting a crude cinema, where the film is projected on a bedsheet covered with gelatin (apparently a real practice)
As mention by William Goldman in the forward to “The Princess Bride” he got into a big fight with a studio suit on “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” about the line:
The studio guy thought it was anachronistic, but bifocals were quite well established at that point in history.
Beat me by 3 minutes, Telemark. So I’ll just add Goldman’s wonderfully snarky comment: “So we shook hands and parted enemies, but the line stayed in the movie.”
There are a number of claims of wristwatches and sneakers in movies like Spartacus… and in the stills and image captures available even until DVDs, they certainly looked like that. I think nearly all of these have been debunked as HD copies of the films shows them to be era costume pieces.
The technology for newspaper ‘wirephotos’ existed at least that early. It was deadly, deadly slow, though. I can remember at least one movie of the 1970s or so where the action turned on the bad guy reveal slllloooowwwwwwllllyyyyyy coming out of the wireprinter.