Punch was not an inventor himself; he never even put a hat on the market; but almost every new invention or discovery prompted him to indulge in forecasts, often farcical or fantastical, but, when read in the light of subsequent views, sometimes proving that he prophesied better than he knew. This is specially true of the development of scientific warfare. The warship of the future, designed by Sambourne in 1875, is not nearly so wonderful as some of the "blisters" of the late war. In the following year the eighty-one-ton guns made at Woolwich prompt an account of an imaginary sea-fight in which battleships engage at fourteen miles distance. In 1879 Victor Hugo declared that the twentieth century would see war abolished, along with capital punishment, monarchy, dogmas and frontiers. Punch replied with a satirical forecast, in Hugo's manner, of a twentieth-century invasion of Paris based on the pacificist assumption that, given non-resistance, it would result in a "fraternal walk-over." The Channel Tunnel scheme, revived in the early 'eighties, was the subject of much discussion and debate, until in 1883 the Joint Select Committee of the Lords and Commons decided by a majority that it was inexpedient to give Parliamentary sanction to a submarine communication between England and France. In 1881 Punch notes the acute divergence of views between various experts, and the military opposition headed by the Duke of Cambridge and Lord Wolseley. He summed up the views of the majority in a picture of Britannia saying that she was glad to lunch with Sir Edward Watkin—the indefatigable champion of the scheme—any day, but drew the line at the tunnel. Early in 1883, under the heading, "After it is Open," Punch, in a vein of laboured and fantastic irony, records the evidence given before a "Channel Tunnel Closing Committee." Here by a complete change of front Lord Wolseley is represented as urging the maintenance of the tunnel, and John Bright as opposing it—both on account of the unforeseen consequences of its having been made. The alternative and subsequent scheme of a ferry or bridge is dealt with in 1890 by Du Maurier in a picture of a cross-Channel gigantic Pullman car labelled, "Electric Plate-glass Express." Du Maurier's fantasies were always fascinating, but the nightmare element robs them of any pretence to realism. This applies also to the "Tale for the Submarines in A.D. 2086" with Sambourne's illustration, published in February, 1886. The forecast of a naval battle given in 1891 under the title "Who'd be a Sailor? A Story of Blood and Battle," is a slightly more circumstantial attempt to realize the possibilities of marine warfare fifty years later. Punch's description of the devastating effect of high explosives is not too extravagant, though it is meant to be farcical. Points of more real interest in this fantasy are the idea of a Federation of Anglo-Saxon nations—England, the Dominions and the United States—and the well-merited recognition by name of the late Mr. Stead as an advocate of the maintenance of Great Britain's naval supremacy.
"UNDER THE SEA!"
(A Tale for the Submarines in A.D. 2086)
"Mr. Nordenfeldt, if he has not actually made a discovery that will revolutionize naval warfare, is on the track of one."—Daily Paper.
Gas v. Electricity
In 1881 Punch published a cartoon with the title "What will he grow to?" in which King Steam and King Coal are seen sulkily contemplating the new and portentous infant Electricity. The question has only been partially answered in the ensuing forty years, but Punch found ample material for comment and speculation in the achievements of the 'seventies and 'eighties. In his "Ode to the Coming Light" in 1878 delight is expressed at the possibility of a clean substitute for gas. Yet he showed a wise caution as well as true foresight in the verses accompanying the cartoon inspired by the slump in gas shares in the same year. The notion that gas is likely to go utterly to the wall is discouraged, and the panic-stricken share-holders typified by the silly birds clustering round the Electric Lighthouse are advised not to knock their brains out against the "Edison Light." Things would work themselves out right in the end, and they did. Night has not yet been turned into day, though a football match was played by electric light at Sheffield more than forty years ago, and fresh comfort for holders of gas shares was furnished in 1882 when the eminent Dr. Siemens recommended the use of gas stoves for cookery. The Electric Exhibition in 1881 is celebrated in an explosion of jocular optimism; and in a burlesque fantasia on electricity in the house in 1883, Punch anticipates the time when everything will be done by electricity—shaving, boot-cleaning, carpet-beating—down or up to an "Electric Family Prayer Reader," though not without frequent accidents, as when the last-named machine gives the same chapter of Genesis three mornings running. It was in the same year, by the way, that sixpenny telegrams were first introduced—one of the many vanished privileges which inspire envy in the harassed Georgian citizen.
References of the telephone abound through these years. The prevailing temper of Punch is shown in one of his earliest allusions to what he calls "The Coming Agony," in 1877. An experiment in long-distance telephoning is described in which a newspaper reporter is quoted as saying, "On putting the instrument to my ear, I felt somewhat as if a regiment of the line had fired a volley, at a hundred yards, into that member." The Almanack of 1878 has a page of telephone pictures, illustrating bottled composers and singers—Gounod, Patti, Nilsson, Santley, Henschel and De Soria—talks with the antipodes, etc. Mary starts a "tallyphone" in the kitchen to converse with her young man; and in another picture, suggested by the phonograph, Du Maurier foreshadows the coming of the gramophone. A more friendly note is struck in the article "Good-bye, Telephone," in 1881, lamenting that vested interests were, by legal decision, ousting the telephone in order to perpetuate the inefficiency of the telegraph:—
We may read about scientific progress, but we must go abroad to see it. The wire that misspells a message, and the street Arab who delivers it at his leisure, are all we shall get in this country till the day when we are conquered by the Irish.