The Wells Bequest (22 page)

I won the science fair blue ribbon in the History of Science category. I built an automaton based some sketches in Leonardo's notebooks for improving his knight's arm motion. Jaya jumped up and down and hugged me, knocking me over. Ms. Kang beamed at me, and my family all banged me on the back, even Dmitri. They were relieved that I was finally acting like a Novikov. I didn't tell them that there were only two other entries in the category.

Mom approves of Jaya. She says she's entrepreneurial.

Jake complained so much about how sucky I'd gotten at Gravity Force III that I built a robot to play it with him. Half the time, it beats him. The other half, it just draws bubbles around all the ships. “This thing is as bad as you are,” he tells me.

Jaya keeps talking about visiting the past or the future, but for now we're living in the present.

“You know what the trouble with you is, Cubby?” Sofia said to me the other day. “You're too happy.”

N
ikola Tesla really existed in our world. He really did have a laboratory at 33–35 South Fifth Avenue, which really did burn to the ground in a fire that started around 3 a.m. on March 13, 1895. The next morning, Tesla told a reporter from the
New York Times,
“I am in too much grief to talk. What can I say? The work of half my lifetime, very nearly; all my mechanical instruments and scientific apparatus, that it has taken years to perfect, swept away in a fire that lasted only an hour or two. How can I estimate the loss in mere dollars and cents? Everything is gone. I must begin over again.”

Tesla really was great friends with Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens), who really did write the books and stories mentioned. He's a wonderful writer; you should read them.

Tesla was also friends with the actress Lillie Langtry and other celebrities of the time. His relationship with Thomas Edison was more complicated. The older inventor was Tesla's mentor and boss, but the relationship soured after Edison promised Tesla $50,000—a fortune at the time—for improving Edison's inefficient dynamo. Tesla worked on the problem for nearly a year and solved it, but when he asked Edison for the money, Edison refused, saying, “Tesla, you don't understand our American humor.”

Louis Latimer really existed, and all his inventions mentioned are real. I don't know whether he was a member of the Electric Club or whether he and Tesla were friends, but they certainly moved in the same circles.

H. G. Wells and Jules Verne were real people too, and they really did write the famous books mentioned. Their books are very exciting; you might like them.

Robert W. Chambers's novel
The Green Mouse
is also a real book. The New York Public Library had a copy on Stack 7 in their Central Research Division when I worked there as a page in high school. My supervisor knew I loved the books on Stack 7, mostly popular fiction from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and he would put me there on slow days so I could read them. I don't exactly recommend
The Green Mouse
—it's pretty racist—but I would love to get my hands on that machine!

The Czech playwright Karel Capek coined the term
robot
in a play called
R.U.R.,
which stands for Rossum's Universal Robots.

The Electric Club really existed, with a clubhouse as described at 17 East 22nd Street, just east of where the Flatiron Building is now. However, in our universe the club went bankrupt in 1893 and was forced to auction off the clubhouse and its fixtures. (Electric chandeliers sold for a fraction of what they had cost the club because not many homes or businesses were wired for electric lighting back then.) I imagine that in Leo and Jaya's universe, a wealthy backer—perhaps Edison or Westinghouse—was able to keep the club in its East 22nd Street home for at least a few more years.

There is no record in our universe of Tesla giving a lecture on March 12, 1895, but he did lecture on other occasions and he insisted that women be allowed to attend, even at venues that usually excluded them. All the views and inventions that he describes in his lecture are taken from his published writings, interviews with him, and contemporary descriptions of his work. However, some are from later in his career.

He really did claim to be working on a death ray. Nobody knows whether he ever succeeded in building one in our universe.

In 1895, New York City really did have elevated steam railroads, horse-drawn stagecoaches, and many other forms of transportation, including steam-powered cable cars.

Readers of
The Grimm Legacy
often ask me whether the New-York Circulating Material Repository really exists. Not in our universe, as far as I know. If any of you ever find one where it does exist, I hope you will tell me.

W
hen Polly Shulman asked me to create call numbers for the objects in
The Grimm Legacy
and
The Wells Bequest,
I was excited but a bit nervous. As a librarian, I had created plenty of call numbers for books, DVDs, and the other things you normally find in libraries, but I had never tried doing it for objects before.

How do you assign a call number to magic slippers or to a time machine?!

Because Polly wanted the repository to work just like a real library, I thought the best approach would be to examine the objects the same way I examine books.

When my library gets a new book, I enter the author, title, and other basic information into a database called a catalog. Then I skim the book to figure out what it's about. It isn't always easy to do this quickly, especially if the book is really interesting! After that, I enter three to five subjects—standardized words that describe the topics of the book—into the database.

Finally, I have to decide where the book belongs and assign it a call number. This process, called classification, is the most difficult step. While a book can have many topics, it can only be put in one place in the library. For example, when dealing with a guidebook to London, a librarian has to decide whether to put it with other guidebooks or with books about London. Fortunately, there are systems that help librarians do this. For the repository, we decided to use Dewey decimal classification, the system used in most public libraries.

Dewey decimal classification divides all knowledge into topics and then gives those topics numbers. To determine the right call number for a book, the librarian just has to consider the book's main topic and then find the number most closely associated with that topic. (For example, in most libraries, a London guidebook's main topic would be travel and not London, putting it with other guidebooks.)

The problem in the repository is that objects don't have topics! I dealt with this by giving the objects the same call numbers that a book about those objects would have. Thus, I gave the niddy noddy (I had to look that up in a dictionary) on page 67 the same number Dewey gives to books about spinning yarn (746.12).

The niddy noddy also has a Cutter number (S53). Cutter numbers are based on the name of the book's author and make sure that two books never have the same call number. I had to play with this too. Here
S53
stands for “Shaker” since I decided that this was a Shaker niddy noddy.

The time machine was a big challenge because Dewey decimal classification doesn't provide a call number for books about time machines. In the end, I decided to use the number for relativity theory (530.11). I don't know how the Wells time machine works, but I figured it must have something to do with Einstein's theory of relativity! The Cutter number for the time machine (Z8485) is a code that tells the pages and librarians in the repository that machine is in the oversize collection (indicated by
Z
) and comes from Wells's
Time Machine
(84 = We; 85 = Ti).

If you want to create call numbers for the important objects in your life, check out a book on the Dewey decimal classification in your local library.

I had a great time working with Polly on
The Grimm Legacy
and
The Wells Bequest,
and I hope I will get to assign call numbers to all the great objects in future books about the repository.

—Cyril Emery

JULY 2012

T
ime travel is full of pitfalls, many more of which I would have fallen into if not for the generous, painstaking, hilarious help I had from friends, family, colleagues, and strangers, who variously read drafts, uncovered paradoxes, coined terms, corrected my British, provided counsel, poked fun, and helped hunt for the Time Traveller's house: Abby Amsterdam, Robert Butler, Mark Caldwell, Catherine Clarke, Liz Cross, Peter Derrick, Lisa Dierbeck, Stefanie Gerke, Erin Harris, John Hart, Katherine Keenum, Dick Kerr, Sara Kreger, Ruth Landé, Anne Malcolm, Shanti Menon, Miriam Miller, Laurie Muchnick, Alice Naude, Sharyn November, David Prentiss, Lisa Randall, Maggie Robbins, Andrew Scott, Alix Kates Shulman, Teddy Shulman, Andrew Solomon, Greg Sorkin, Owen Thomas, Richard Tuck, Sophy Tuck, Chelsea Wald, Howard Waldman, Jaime Wolf, and Scott York.

I'm especially grateful to David Bacon, who suggested a visit to Tesla's lab; to Anna Christina Büchmann, who kept me going through thick and thin; to Cyril Emery, who conducted me safely through Verne novels and Dewey decimal numbers alike; to Tom Goodwillie, who read endless drafts and suggested a mathematical solution to the problem of oversize storage; to Dee Smith, who bought colored pencils to sketch the death ray; and to my wise and patient editor, Nancy Paulsen; my endlessly supportive agent, Irene Skolnick; and my dear, funny, beloved husband, Andrew Nahem.