Magitechnology For The Moderns
BRENDAN CATHCART
It is my conviction that we still use magic on a day-to-day basis. Come now, there’s no need to wave your middle finger in the air with some incantation of the expletive sort issuing from deep within your bowels. I’m talking practicality. I’m talking banality. I’m talking picking up your telephone and being struck wide-eyed dumb by the voice of your friend Tony telling you about his best-friend’s hot mom. Why should this occasion such a profound response? Because his voice is travelling instantaneously from St. Vital into your ear in North Kildonan. You should be flabbergasted. And no, I am not receiving any form of clandestine remuneration from Johnny- Phone-Company for this article.
To say that nobody really believes in magic anymore would be to overstate the case. First of all, there are definitely people that do: Wiccans, Voodoo practitioners, shamans, Christians (prayer, don’t forget), etc.. Secondly, how many common sense-empiricist-rationalist-atheist people — in North America alone — watched with excited envy when Harry Potter and Ron Weasley flew a car across the countryside? Uh huh, or how about when the Care Bears shot magic shapes out of their stomachs to defeat Wizard No-Heart? Western culture may not believe in magic anymore, but the desire for it to exist sure hasn’t ceased. Cartoons, television shows, comics, books, movies and live-action Dungeons and Dragons games are chock full of characters and situations of the magical sort. This, however, is entirely beside the point; I’m not talking desire, I’m talking practicality.
Televisions. Telephones. Computers. Fax Machines. A-bombs. Nintendo. Light-bulbs. DVDs. Washers and dryers. The list goes on. Before saying “um . . . ” with a roll of the eyeballs, let’s first take a look at what some of these wonders actually do.
First of all, there’s the television. Wikipedia states that “Television is a telecommunication system for broadcasting and receiving moving pictures and sound over a distance.” These transmissions travel either through the air, through metal or optical cables, or by radio signals and satellites. Old news, I know. But the first televisions were only made possible because Paul Nipkow discovered a way to scan images with a spiral-perforated disk that divides a picture into a mosaic of points and lines, and Willoughby Smith discovered in 1873 that Selenium is an ideal element for photoconductivity. Selenium is number 34 on the atomic chart, but it’s not something you can dig up in your backyard. Listen to this process: “Commonly, production begins by oxidation with sodium carbonate to produce sodium selenite. The sodium selenite is then acidified with sulfuric acid producing selenous acid. The selenous acid is finally bubbled with sulfur dioxide producing elemental selenium.” If I have ever heard a recipe for turning lead into gold, that was just it. If that doesn’t sound like the language of alchemy, then I don’t know what does.
And then there’s the telephone. On the 10th of March in 1876, Alexander Graham Bell spoke these words into a liquid transmitter: “Mr. Watson, come here, I want you.” The words instantly converted into an electrical voltage signal and traveled through wires to an electromagnetic receiver where they were then reconverted into words. This groundbreaking demonstration of telephony sounds remarkably similar to the notion of telepathy. I’m aware that there might be a slight ontological leap between these two forms of communication. However, if you’ll allow me to oversimplify a little, maybe all telepathy was missing was the proper wiring. Clearly the use of wires is precisely what makes telephony and telepathy different, but essentially these spindly copper apparatuses make it possible to manipulate electricity (the forces of nature) into carrying messages from one person’s mouth into another person’s ear. Stupendous.
Of course, we can’t forget about computers. Did you know that Windows XP is not a gigantic monolith forged from black stone in the dark heart of Silicon Valley? It may be venerated as such, but the operating system is actually 40 million individual lines of code written in a language called C++. Unfortunately, the computer doesn’t exactly speak C++, so it converts the language into 1s and 0s. Yes, it is true that some things actually existed prior to computers, and it turns out that the binary numeral system happens to be one of those things. Interestingly, binary was employed in 11th century Chinese Taoism, African divination called Ifá, and medieval European Geomancy. For the 20th and 21st Centuries, C++ is the “Alakazaam!” that got binary to bend steel into car shapes, perform mathematical calculations we would never be capable of with a pencil and paper, and to create astounding visual wonders that we watch in darkened rooms called theatres.
Instead of blanketing these occurrences of the fantastic with the stultifying word “technology,” let’s recognize their roots and instead call them products of “magitechnicology.” So now that we all know that technology and magic are not mutually exclusive terms, should we go out and conquer evil Lord [insert name of nemesis here]? Possibly, but I was angling more for some dumbfounded amazement at the magitechnicological world we so modernly live in. Besides, neither you nor I are pulling the ethereal strings out of the air; it is the inventors and programmers that are conjuring them up and placing them fully formed into our hands.
