The Certainty of a Future Life in Mars written by L. P. Gratacap
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L. P. Gratacap >> The Certainty of a Future Life in Mars
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13 The Certainty
of a Future
Life in Mars
_Being the Posthumous Papers of_
BRADFORD TORREY DODD
EDITED BY
L.P. GRATACAP
BRENTANO'S
1903
PARIS
CHICAGO
WASHINGTON
NEW YORK
PREFACE BY EDITOR.
The extraordinary character of the story here published, which some
peculiar circumstances have fortunately, I think, put into my hands,
will excite a curiosity as vivid as the incidents of the narratives are
themselves astonishing and unprecedented. To satisfy, as far as I can, a
few natural inquiries which must be elicited by its publication, I beg
to explain how this unusual posthumous paper came into my possession.
It was written by Bradford Torrey Dodd, who died at Christ Church, New
Zealand, January, 1895, after a lingering illness in which consumption
developed, which was attributed to the exposure he had experienced in
receiving some of the wireless messages his singular history details. I
was not acquainted with Mr. Dodd, but some information, acquired since
the reception of his manuscript, has completely satisfied me, that,
however interpreted, Mr. Dodd did not intend in it the perpetration of
a hoax. His scientific ability was undoubtedly remarkable, and the facts
that his father and himself worked in an astronomical station near
Christ Church; that his father died; that his acquaintance with the
Dodans was a reality; that he did receive messages at a wireless
telegraphic station; that he himself and his assistants fully accredited
these messages to extra-terrestrial sources, are, beyond a doubt, easily
verified.
A mutual friend brought me Mr. Dodd's papers, which I looked over with
increasing amazement, culminating in blank incredulity. On rereading
them and considering the usefulness of giving them to the public, I have
been influenced by two motives, the desire to satisfy the fervently
expressed wish of the writer himself and the reasonable belief that if
they are preposterously improbable their publication can only furnish a
new and temporary and quite harmless diversion, and that if Mr. Dodd's
experiment shall be in some future day successfully repeated his claims
to distinction as the first to open this marvelous field of
investigation will have been honorably and invincibly protected.
L.P. GRATACAP.
CONTENTS.
Posthumous Papers of Bradford Torrey Dodd
Note by Mr. August Bixby Dodan
Note by the Editor
The Planet Mars--By Giovanni Schiaparelli
POSTHUMOUS PAPERS
OF
BRADFORD TORREY DODD.
THE CERTAINTY
OF
A FUTURE LIFE IN MARS.
CHAPTER I.
In the confusion of thought about a future life, the peculiar facts
related in the following pages can certainly be regarded as helpful.
Spiritualism, with its morbid tendencies, its infatuation and deceit,
has not been of any substantial value in this inquiry. It may afford to
those who have experienced any positive visitation from another world a
very comforting and indisputable proof. To most sane people it is a
humiliating and ludicrous vagary.
At the conclusion of a life spent rather diligently in study, and in
association especially with astronomical practice and physical
experiments, I have, in view of certain hitherto unpublished facts,
decided to make public almost incontrovertible evidence that in the
planet Mars the continuation of our present life, in some instances, has
been discovered by myself. I will not dwell on the astonishment I have
felt over these discoveries, nor attempt to describe that felicity of
conviction which I now enjoy over the prospect of a life in another
world.
My father was the fortunate possessor of a large fortune, which freed
him of all anxieties about any material cares, and left him to pursue
the bent of his inclination. He became greatly interested in physical
science, and was also a patron of the liberal arts. His home was stored
with the most beautiful products of the manufacturer's skill in fictile
arts, and on its walls hung the most approved examples of the painter's
skill. The looms of Holland and France and England furnished him with
their delicate and sumptuous tapestries, and the Orient covered his
floors with the richest and most prized carpets of Daghestan and
Trebizond, and of Bokhara.
But even more marked than his love for art was his passion for physical
science. His opportunities for the indulgence of this taste were
unlimited, and the reinforcement of his natural aptitude by his great
means enabled him to carry on experiments upon a scale of the most
magnificent proportions. These experiments were made in a large
building which was especially built for this object. It contained every
facility for his various new designs, and in it he anticipated many
advances in electrical science and in mechanical devices, which have
made the civilization of our day so remarkable. I recall distinctly as a
boy his ingenious approximation to the telephone, and even the recent
advances in wireless telegraphy, which has been the instrumentality by
which my own researches in the field of interplanetary telegraphy have
been prosecuted, had been realized by himself.
It was in the midst of a life almost ideally happy that the blow fell
which drove him and myself, then a boy and his only child, into a
retirement which resulted in the discoveries I am about to relate. My
father's devotion to my mother was an illustration of the most beautiful
and tender love that a man can bear toward a woman. It was adoration.
Though his mind was employed upon the abstruse questions of physics
which he investigated, or edified by new acquisitions in art, all his
knowledge and all his pleasure seemed but the means by which he
endeavored to gain her deeper affection. She indeed became his companion
in science, and her own just and well regulated taste constantly
furnished him new motives for adding to his wide accumulations of art.
I can recall with some difficulty the day when with my father in a room
immediately below the bedroom in which my mother was confined he awaited
the summons of the doctors to see his wife for the last time. It was a
rainy day, the clouds were drifting across a dull November sky. Through
an opening in the trees then leafless, the Hudson was visible, even then
flaked with ice, while an early snow covered the sloping lawn and
whitened the broad-limbed oaks. I remember indistinctly his leading me
by the hand through the hallway up the stairs, and softly whispering to
me to be quite still, entered the large room dimly lit where my mother,
attended by a nurse and a doctor, lay on the white bed. I remember being
kissed by her and then being led from the room by the nurse. My father
doubtless lingered until all was over, and the dear associate of his
life, whose tenderness and charity had made all who approached her
grateful, whose genial and appreciative mind had supplied the stimulus
of recognition he needed for his own studies, passed away. After that I
seemed dimly to recall a period of extreme loneliness when I was left in
charge of a private instructor, while my father, as I later learned,
bewildered by his great loss, and temporarily driven into a sort of
madness, wandered in an aimless track of travel over the United States.
On his return the sharp recurrence to the scenes of his former happiness
renewed the bitterness of his spirit, and he reluctantly concluded to
abandon his home. His own thoughts had not as yet clearly formed any
decision in his mind as to where he would go or what he would do. It was
inevitable, however, that he should revert to his scientific
investigations. He found in them a new solace and distraction, but even
then his passion for research would not have sufficed to adequately meet
his desperate desire to escape his grief, if in a rather singular manner
there had not come to him an intimation of the possibilities of some
sort of communication with my mother through these very investigations
in electricity and magnetism in which he had been engaged.
I had become quite inseparable from him. He found in me many suggestions
in face and manner of my mother, and particularly he was interested in
my peculiar lapses into meditation and introspection which in many ways
suggested to him a similar habit in her. On one occasion when, as was
his wont, before we finally left the old home at Irvington, he had taken
me in the summer evenings to the top of the observatory, then situated
about half a mile west of the Albany road, we had both been silently
watching the sun sink into a bank of golden haze, and the black band of
the Palisades passing underneath like a velvet zone of shadow, I turned
to my father and in a sudden access of curiosity said:
"Father, if mother had gone to the Sun, would she speak to us now with a
ray of light?"
My father smiled patiently, half amused, and then standing and looking
at the sun's disk, disappearing behind the Jersey hills, said, "My son,
it was a curious thought of a well-known French writer, Figuer, who lost
his son, who was very dear to him, that his soul with armies and hosts
of other souls, had departed to the sun and that they made the light and
heat of this great luminary, and this wise man felt some comfort in the
thought that the heat and light of the sun as he felt himself bathed in
radiance and warmth were emanations from his boy, and his eyes and body
seemed then in a figurative, and yet to him, very real way,
communicating with his boy. You smile. I know it is with interest. Let
me read to you from Figuer's singular book what he has written about
it."
He disappeared and left me also standing and looking upward at a faint
wreath of cloud, tinged in rosiness, which floated almost in the
zenith. I was then about eleven years old, precocious for my years and
gifted with a sympathy for occult and difficult subjects that became
only intensified through the peculiar concentrated companionship I had
from day to day, and month to month enjoyed with my father.
This narrative may be inadvertently classed with those ephemeral
fictions in which the reader is constantly conscious that the dialogue
and the incidents are veritable creations. It may here be asked how
could I recall with any literalness the conversations and events of a
time so long past. I do not pretend or wish it to be thought that these
interviews with my father are here literally related. That, of course,
is beyond the limits of reasonable probability. But I do insist that in
the following pages the occurrences described are very faithful
transcripts of those connected with the peculiar inquiry and experiments
my father and myself began, and brought to a startling conclusion.
Although conducted in the form of an imaginative story the reader is
importuned to give them his most implicit credence.
My father soon returned with the small volume of Figuer and read, I
imagine, that passage which runs as follows in Chapter XIII:
"Since the sun is the first cause of life on our globe; since it is, as
we have shown, the origin of life, of feeling, of thought; since it is
the determining cause of all organized life on the earth--why may we not
declare that the rays transmitted by the sun to the earth and the other
planets are nothing more or less than the emanations of these souls?
that these are the emissions of pure spirits living in the radiant star
that come to us, and to dwellers in the other planets, under the visible
form of rays?
"If this hypothesis be accepted, what magnificent, what sublime
relations may we not catch a glimpse of, between the sun and the globes
that roll around him; between the Sun and the planets there would be a
continual exchange, a never broken circle, an unending 'come and go' of
beamy emissions, which would engender and nourish in the solar world
motion and activity, thought and feeling, and keep burning everywhere
the torch of life.
"See the emanations of souls that dwell in the Sun descending upon the
earth in the shape of solar rays. Light gives life to plants, and
produces vegetable life, to which sensibility belongs. Plants having
received from the Sun the germ of sensibility transmit it to animals,
always with the help of the Sun's heat. See the soul germs enfolded in
animals develop, improve little by little, from one animal to another,
and at last become incarnated in a human body. See, a little later, the
superhuman succeed the man, launch himself into the vast plains of
ether, and begin the long series of transmigrations that will gradually
lead him to the highest round of the ladder of spiritual growth, where
all material substance has been eliminated, and where the time has come
for the soul thus exalted, and with essence purified to the utmost, to
enter the supreme home of bliss and intellectual and moral power; that
is the Sun.
"Such would be the endless circle, the unbroken chain, that would bind
together all the beings of Nature, and extend from the visible to the
invisible world."
From that moment, moved more and more by the strangeness of the fancy,
which evidently fascinated him, he buried himself in the indulgence of
the thought of the possibility of some sort of communication with his
wife. Singularly and fortunately he did not have recourse to the
fruitless idiocy of spiritualism, nor engage in that humiliating
intercourse with illiterate humbugs who personate the minds of men and
women almost too sacred to be even for an instant associated in thought
with themselves.
In 1881 electrical science had well advanced toward those perfected
triumphs which give distinction to this century. Electric lighting was
well understood, the Jablochkoff and Jamin lamps were then in use, the
incandescent and Maxim light, or arc light were employed, and indeed the
panic caused by Edison's premature announcement of the solution of the
incandescent system of lighting had then preceded by two years, the
excellent results of Mr. Swan in England in the same field. Edison's
first carbon light and his original phonograph were exhibited toward the
end of 1880 in the Patent Museum at South Kensington.
The daily News of New York in April of 1881 published the victory of the
Edison Electric Lighting Company over the Mayor's veto in words that may
be read to-day with considerable interest. It said "the company will
proceed immediately to introduce its new electric lamps in the offices
in the business portion of the city around Wall Street. It consists of a
small bulbous glass globe, four inches long, and an inch and a half in
diameter, with a carbon loop which becomes incandescent when the
electric current passes through. Each lamp is of sixteen candle power
with no perceptible variation in intensity. The light is turned on or
off with a thumb screw. Wires have already been put into forty
buildings."
My father had anticipated the incandescent light in its fuller later
development and had used, before it was announced by Prof. Avenarius of
Austria, a method of dividing the electric current, by the insertion of
a polariser in a secondary circuit connected with each lamp, a method,
it need not be said to electricians, now utterly obsolete.
The rooms of our physical laboratory at Irvington were almost all lit by
electric lamps constructed somewhat on the principle of Edison's, but
using platinum wires, and the old residents of that village may recall
the singular, lonely house half hidden in broad sycamores, sending out
its electric radiance late at night while my father and frequently
myself, then a boy of thirteen years, worked at experimental problems in
physics.
My father gave my precocity for science a very successful impetus and
left me at his death fully in possession of the ideas and projects he
cherished. Amongst these projects, one partially realized, was the
acceleration of plant growth by means of electric light, and heating by
electricity.
Dr. Siemens of England, it may be recalled, had very ingeniously
experimented upon the influence of the electric light upon vegetation.
In a paper read by that distinguished man before the Society of
Telegraph Engineers in June, 1880, he referred to his conclusion that
"electric light produces the coloring matter, chlorophyll, in the leaves
of plants, that it aids their growth, counteracts the effects of night
frosts, and promotes the setting and ripening of fruit in the open air."
I find in an old note book of my father's, dated 1879, "chlorophyllous
matter in leaves encouraged by electric energy, presumably by the blue
rays." In heating and cooking by electricity my father had made some
progress though he had not in 1880 employed his time in this direction.
Perhaps more remarkable than anything else presenting my father's great
scientific ingenuity was his improvements of the dynamo and the
invention of a new successful small traction engine.
In 1880 the complete distinction between alternating and direct currents
had not been made, and the device of a successful converter, for the
change of the former comparatively inert to the latter's dynamic
condition, only dreamed of. Yet in my father's notebook I find this
suggestive sentence: "It seems possible to devise an apparatus which
would deliver from an alternating circuit a direct current to a direct
current circuit."
I have dwelt somewhat upon my father's scientific acquirements and
genius in order to impress upon the reader the strictly legitimate
training I received in scientific procedure, and I have instanced
somewhat the status of his scientific development in 1880, because it
was at that time that he concluded to leave Irvington and locate his
laboratory and observatory elsewhere. And for the sake of his
astronomical interests he determined to find some place peculiarly well
fitted, on account of its atmospheric advantages, for astronomical
observations. It is necessary likewise to recall some of the facts then
known to astronomers and my father's own theories, in order to weave
into a logical sequence the incidents leading up to my positive
demonstration of a future life for some of our race in the planet Mars.
Astronomy had a great charm for my mother. Her enthusiasm was soon
communicated to my father who found his wealth was a requisite in
establishing the observatory he had erected at Irvington and in its
equipment. Telescopes are expensive playthings.
The Lick Observatory was begun in 1880 and my father through
correspondence with the directors of the University of California had
learned many of the details pertaining to this great project. Influenced
by the splendid prospects of this undertaking my father determined if
possible to surpass it. He wrote to Fiel of Paris and expected to be
able to secure an objective of 4 feet diameter, exceeding that of the
Lick Observatory by one foot, a hopeless and as it proved an utterly
abortive design. He spent an entire year in New York after leaving
Irvington examining the various possible locations for his new
observatory. The requisites were nearness to the equator, an equable
climate, elevation and a clear atmosphere. During this year my father
heard that Prof. Hertz of Berlin had generated waves of magnetism and
that it was hoped that these might ultimately prove efficacious as a
means of direct communication between distant points without the
introduction of wire conductors.
This thought of communicating with distant points without fixed
conductors greatly impressed my father and led him along a line of
speculation upon which finally rested my own success in securing the
messages detailed in this book from the planet Mars.
I recall that one evening in the winter of 1881 while he was yet engaged
in making preparations for his departure from the United States to New
Zealand, which he finally chose for the erection of his laboratories,
and especially his observatory, I heard him read with the greatest
satisfaction of the attempt made in the siege of Paris to bring the
besieged French into telegraphic communication with the Provinces by
means of the River Seine.
It was proposed to send powerful currents into the River Seine from
batteries near the German lines and to receive in Paris upon delicate
galvanometers, such an amount of their current as had not leaked away in
the earth. Profs. Desains, Jamin, and Berthelot were interested in these
experiments, although the suggestion had been made by M. Bourbouze, and
after some interruptions when the attempt was to be carried out, the
armistice of Jan. 14, 1871, brought their preparations to a close.
How often my father spoke of these attempts, and half smilingly on one
occasion as we watched the starry skies "thick inlaid with patterns of
bright gold" said to me: "It seems to me within the reach of possibility
to attain some sort of connection with these shining hosts. If we must
assume that the disturbances on the Sun's surface effect magnetic storms
on ours, it is quite evident that a fluid of translatory power or
consistency exists between the earth and the sun, then also between all
the planetary inhabitants of space, and I cannot see why we may not hope
some day to realize a means of communication with these distant bodies.
How inspiring is the thought that in some such way upon the basis of an
absolutely perfect scientific deduction we might be brought into
conversational alliance with these singular and orderly creations, and
actually look upon their scenes and lives and history, and bring to
ourselves in verbal pictures a presentation of their marvellous
properties."
I think it was on this occasion that my father expressed his thought
upon some form of interplanetary telegraphy in a manner that left it in
my own mind a very impressive and majestic idea. He had read at some
length the address of Sir William Armstrong before the British
Association in 1863, when that distinguished observer speaks of the
sympathy between forces operating in the sun, and magnetic forces in the
earth and remarks the phenomenon seen by independent observers in
September, 1859. The passage, easily verified by the reader, was to this
effect:
"A sudden outburst of light, far exceeding the brightness of the sun's
surface was seen to take place, and sweep like a drifting cloud over a
portion of the solar surface. This was attended by magnetic disturbances
of unusual intensity and with exhibitions of aurora of extraordinary
brilliancy. The identical instant at which the effusion of light was
observed was recorded by an abrupt and strongly marked deflection in the
self-registering instruments at Kew."
My father then pausing and walking impetuously across the room
declaimed, as it were, his views:
"Here we are, a group of limited intelligent beings circumscribed by a
boundless space, and placed upon a speck of matter which is whirled
around the sun in an endless captivity, bound by this inexorable law of
gravitation, like a stone in a sling. About us in this ethereal ocean
floats a host of similarly made orbs, perhaps, in thousands of cases,
inhabited by beings throbbing with the same curiosity as our own to
reach out beyond their sphere, and learn something of the nature of the
animated universe which they may dimly suspect lies about them in the
other stars. Why must it not be part of this immeasurable design which
brought us here, that we shall some day become part of a celestial
symposium; that lines of communication, invisible but incessant, shall
thread in labyrinths of invisible currents these dark abysses, and bring
us in inspiring touch with the marvels and contents of the entire
universe."
He turned to me and gazing intently at my upturned face which I am sure
reflected his own in its enthusiasm and delight, continued: "You, my
son, and I, will put this before us as a possible achievement and work
incessantly for that end. Prof. Hertz has generated these magnetic
waves; we will; and by means of some sort of a receiver endeavor to find
out a clue to _wireless telegraphy_." These closing remarkable words
were actually used by my father, and in view of the marvellous
realization of Marconi's hopes in that direction, as well as my own
stupendous success in reaching the inhabitants of Mars, was a distinct
prophecy.
It was a few months later that my father completed all of his
arrangements in regard to the disposition of his investments, and
perfected the necessary arrangements for being constantly supplied with
funds by his bankers in New York. He also had agreed upon the apparatus
to be forwarded, expecting to be largely supplied at Sydney in new South
Wales, as it was from this point he intended to sail or steam to New
Zealand. Much of the equipment for his observatory was to come from
Paris, and he relied upon intelligent assistance both in Sydney and
Christ Church, in New Zealand, for the erection and furnishment of his
various houses.
He finally concluded to place his station on Mount Cook at an elevation
of 1,000 feet upon a well protected plateau, which was described to him
by a Mr. Ashton who had extensive acquaintance and some five years'
experience in New Zealand. We found this position ideal, and in the
perfection of all the conditions necessary for our experiments possessed
by it, made the realization at that time utterly unsuspected by either
of us, of our final designs, commensurately more simple.
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