In Other Worlds - Margaret Eleanor Atwood [80]
When I got as far as the Grand Academy of Lagado I felt right at home. In addition to being the golden age of bug-eyed monsters, the late 1940s was also the golden age of dangerous chemistry sets for children—now prohibited, no doubt wisely—and my brother had one. “Turn water to blood and astonish your friends!” proclaimed the advertisements, and this was no sooner said than done, with the aid of a desirable crystal named—as I recall—potassium permanganate. There were many other ways in which we could astonish our friends, and short of poisoning them, we did all of them. I doubt that we were the only children to produce hydrogen sulphide (“Make the smell of rotten eggs and astonish your friends!”) on the day when our mother’s bridge club was scheduled to meet. Through these experiments, we learned the rudiments of the scientific method: any procedure done in the same way with the same materials ought to produce the same results. And ours did, until the potassium permanganate ran out.
These were not the only experiments we performed. I will not catalogue our other adventures in science, which had their casualties—the jars of tadpoles dead from being left by mistake in the sun, the caterpillars that came to sticky ends—but will pause briefly to note the mould experiment, consisting of various foodstuffs placed in jars—our home-preserving household had a useful supply of jars—to see what might grow on them in the way of mould. Many-coloured and whiskery were the results, which I mention now only to explain why the Grand Academy “projector” who thought it might be a brilliant idea to inflate a dog through its nether orifice in order to cure it of colic raised neither of my eyebrows. It was a shame that the dog exploded, but this was surely a mistake in the method rather than a flaw in the concept; or that was my opinion.
Indeed, this scene stayed with me as a memory trace that was reactivated the first time I had a colonoscopy and was myself inflated in this way. You had the right idea, Mr. Swift, I mused, but the wrong application. Also, you thought you were being ridiculous. Had you known that the dog-enlarging anal bellows you must have found so amusing would actually appear on Earth two hundred and fifty years later in order to help doctors run a tiny camera through your intestines so they could see what was going on in there, what would you have said?
And so it is with the majority of the experiments described in the Grand Academy chapters of Gulliver’s Travels. Swift thought them up as jokes, but many of them have since been done in earnest, though with a twist. For instance, the first “projector” Gulliver meets is a man who has run himself into poverty through the pursuit of what Swift devised as a nutty-professor chase-a-moonbeam concept: this man wants to extract sunbeams out of cucumbers so he can bottle them for use in the winter, when the supply of sunbeams is limited. Swift must have laughed into his sleeve, but I, the child reader, found nothing extraordinary in this idea because every morning I was given a spoonful of cod liver oil, bursting with vitamin D, the “Sunshine Vitamin.” The projector had simply used the wrong object—cucumbers instead of cod.
Some of the experiments being done by the projectors interested me less, though they have since contributed to Swift’s reputation for prescience. The blind man at the Academy who’s teaching other blind people to distinguish colours by touch was doubtless intended by Swift to represent yet more foolishness on the part of would-be geniuses, but now there are ongoing experiments involving something called the BrainPort—a device designed to allow blind people to “see” with their tongues. The machine with many handles that, when turned, cause an array of oddly Chinese-looking words to arrange themselves into an endless number of sequences—thus writing masterpieces eventually, like the well-known