Story of the Month

Wireless
I’m guessing that the very title of this story could puzzle younger readers—I mean those under forty. ‘No wires? So ? What’s that about?’ When I was growing up ‘the wireless’ was what later became called ‘the radio’—‘radiogram’ if your radio came built into a cabinet that also held a ‘ gramophone’ for playing records. All terms from the past. But in 1902, when this story was first published, using radio waves to send messages through the air without the need for wires or cables still seemed almost magical. Kipling, who was always fascinated by the potential of new mechanical inventions—he was among the earliest car-owners, for instance—made sure to make the acquaintance of Marconi, the man who had invented this new device. He invited Marconi to his home for lunch in 1899, the year Marconi had had proved you could send messages across significant distance by sending a transmission across the English Channel. Of course the potential value of this new technology in terms of national defence pleased Kipling. But as a writer, he had a special interest of his own. How did ideas, images, turns of phrase, rhythms, the inspirations for poems and stories come into his head? Where did they come from? He knew that at certain times, as he wrote, he could feel himself possessed by an alien power, which he called his ‘daemon’. Though he had no time for the mediums who claimed to speak with the dead, nor for the activities of the Society for Psychical Research, he was engaged by the thought that there might be messages carried on the air to be picked up. In ‘Wireless’ he plays with the possibility that the experience of one man and the charged language he found to express that might be carried almost magically across time and space, to be picked up by another, who shared some features in common with him. He takes a poem written by John Keats eighty years earlier and builds a story to suggest that it can be picked up out of the air, without wires or cables, by another man then living. This ‘receiver’ is enabled, as it were, by certain coincidences: like Keats, he works as a druggist and like the poet he longs for the woman, Fanny by name in both cases, to whom he’s engaged. This daring fantasy is braced by the background presence of a real-life attempt at radio transmission, which repeatedly fails before meeting with success. In terms of design and construction, it’s a tour de force. Yet I’m still not sure how I feel about this famous story. Is it too clever to make you share the sense of barely credulous awe that the writer claims to feel as he observes the Keats ‘message’ coming through? At the very least, it makes me marvel at Kipling’s ingenuity.

Wireless

I’m guessing that the very title of this story could puzzle younger readers—I mean those under forty. ‘No wires? So ? What’s that about?’ When I was growing up ‘the wireless’ was what later became called ‘the radio’—‘radiogram’ if your radio came built into a cabinet that also held a ‘ gramophone’ for playing records. All terms from the past. But in 1902, when this story was first published, using radio waves to send messages through the air without the need for wires or cables still seemed almost magical.

Kipling, who was always fascinated by the potential of new mechanical inventions—he was among the earliest car-owners, for instance—made sure to make the acquaintance of Marconi, the man who had invented this new device. He invited Marconi to his home for lunch in 1899, the year Marconi had had proved you could send messages across significant distance by sending a transmission across the English Channel.

Of course the potential value of this new technology in terms of national defence pleased Kipling. But as a writer, he had a special interest of his own. How did ideas, images, turns of phrase, rhythms, the inspirations for poems and stories come into his head? Where did they come from? He knew that at certain times, as he wrote, he could feel himself possessed by an alien power, which he called his ‘daemon’. Though he had no time for the mediums who claimed to speak with the dead, nor for the activities of the Society for Psychical Research, he was engaged by the thought that there might be messages carried on the air to be picked up.

In ‘Wireless’ he plays with the possibility that the experience of one man and the charged language he found to express that might be carried almost magically across time and space, to be picked up by another, who shared some features in common with him. He takes a poem written by John Keats eighty years earlier and builds a story to suggest that it can be picked up out of the air, without wires or cables, by another man then living. This ‘receiver’ is enabled, as it were, by certain coincidences: like Keats, he works as a druggist and like the poet he longs for the woman, Fanny by name in both cases, to whom he’s engaged. This daring fantasy is braced by the background presence of a real-life attempt at radio transmission, which repeatedly fails before meeting with success.

In terms of design and construction, it’s a tour de force. Yet I’m still not sure how I feel about this famous story. Is it too clever to make you share the sense of barely credulous awe that the writer claims to feel as he observes the Keats ‘message’ coming through? At the very least, it makes me marvel at Kipling’s ingenuity.

“Wireless”