Professor Challenger’s ‘electric brougham’

I should have spotted the clue. I must have read The Lost World, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, at least five times, before the penny dropped. In chapter five, “Questions!”, the irascible yet ingenious anti-hero, Professor George Challenger (a kind of scientific equivalent of Sherlock Holmes), has agreed to give a lecture at London’s Zoological Institute, wherein he intends to reveal his radical and sensational new theories on evolution.

Conan Doyle describes the arrival of Challenger’s audience: “When we arrived at the Hall we found a much greater concourse than I had expected. A line of electric broughams discharged their little cargoes of white-bearded professors, while the dark stream of humbler pedestrians, who crowded through the arched doorway, showed that the audience would be popular as well as scientific.” And once more, as the riotous meeting closes and a team of fact-checkers are elected to verify Challenger’s claim that dinosaurs still survive on an isolated  South American plateau, the author mentions the “electric brougham”: “Then, amid a mixture of groans and cheers, Professor Challenger’s electric brougham slid from the kerb….”

Contemporary governments around the world are desperately trying to persuade consumers to switch from petrol or diesel, to buying hybrid or electric cars, in their relentless battle against C0₂ emissions. Yet in 1912, the year of writing, here was the creator of Sherlock Holmes describing what appeared to be a town car running on electricity.

Chess, in its own modest way, may be indicative of greater dangers, external to the game: small symptoms, with far wider implications. Thomas Mann’s  Death in Venice (also from 1912, sometimes described as one of the most important works of the twentieth century) brilliantly exposes in microcosm, those very ante-Bellum discontents which engaged the Dadaists and other avant garde movements. Sigmund Freud eventually delineated them in 1929 with his Das Unbehagen in der Kultur (“Civilisation and its Discontents”).

In my opinion, the English parallel to Mann’s masterpiece is Conan Doyle’s subsequent Prof. Challenger novel, The Poison Belt, 1913, the original cover of which depicts the hero, Professor George Challenger, as the spitting image of World Chess Champion Wilhelm Steinitz (whose reign lasted from 1866-1894, dates claimed by Steinitz himself). I am convinced that Sir Arthur encountered Steinitz during dinners at Simpson’s-in-the-Strand, where the great master was often to be found. Short of stature, with a massive domed forehead, shaggy beard, clearly discernible upper body strength, and the powerful mind of a brilliant intellectual. The multiple resonances are irresistible.

To quote Milton’s  Paradise Lost, Book II, “to compare great things with small”, Sir Arthur adduces a blurring of the (sic) Frauenhofer Lines  in the spectrum, as a portent of something far more hazardous. The fictitious Professor Challenger writes: “I have read with amusement, not wholly unmixed with some less complimentary emotion, the complacent and wholly fatuous letter of Professor XXX which has lately appeared in the columns of The Times, upon the subject of the blurring of Frauenhofer’s lines in the spectra, both of the planets and of the fixed stars. He dismisses the matter as of no significance. To a wider intelligence it may well seem of very great possible importance — so great as to involve the ultimate welfare of every man, woman and child upon this planet.”

Sherlock Holmes visits Simpson’s  twice “for something nutritious,” particularly urgent for Holmes, after he has been starving himself in the story The Dying Detective. But what of electric broughams? What exactly are they?

The first full-sized electric car was, amazingly, created in 1832, by the Scottish inventor Robert Anderson. It was an electric-powered carriage, with non-rechargeable power cells.

Then, in 1835, Thomas Davenport unveiled a small locomotive that was powered by an electric motor.

In 1884 Thomas Parker built the first electric production car (above) in London that used his own high-capacity rechargeable batteries.

That success put electric vehicles in the mainstream and made them the preferred method of transport due to their quiet nature, ease to drive and lack of pollutants. In fact, they were loved so much that, between 1900 and 1912, one third of all vehicles on US roads were powered by electricity.

As you can imagine, that success attracted the attention of many notable people, the most important being Thomas Edison. Edison loved electric cars so much that he praised them as the “superior mode of transportation” and quickly began studying better ways to build electric batteries. Meanwhile the Austro-Bohemian engineer Ferdinand Porsche worked on his electric wheel hub motor and then, in 1900, he attached it to a new car and supplemented it with an internal combustion engine, thus creating the world’s first hybrid vehicle. It was called the Lohner-Porsche Mixte. The Porsche Taycan and Porsche’s range of hybrids have a much longer history than you may have originally thought.

Electric cars enjoyed a heyday that lasted until 1908 when Henry Ford introduced the world to the Ford Model T, otherwise known as the world’s first affordable motor car. Easier to refuel and competitively priced, the Ford Model T was a huge success and it ultimately spelt the end of the electric car’s popularity. The Ford Model T was such a runaway success that Henry Ford had sold 15million by 1927, just 19 years after its release.

In the following games we can see what happened when the great World Champion Steinitz met a challenger:

Wilhelm Steinitz vs. Mikhail Chigorin

Johannes Zukertort vs. Wilhelm Steinitz

Wilhelm Steinitz vs. Emanuel Lasker

Raymond Keene’s  book “Fifty Shades of Ray: Chess in the year of the Coronavirus”, containing some of his best pieces from The Article, is now available from Blackwell’s. Meanwhile, Ray’s 206th book, “Chess in the Year of the King”, with a foreword by The Article contributor Patrick Heren, and written in collaboration with former Reuters chess correspondent, Adam Black, has just appeared and is also available from the same source or from Amazon

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