Researching the Story—Or Down The Rabbit Hole
“In another moment down went Alice after it, never once considering how in the world she was to get out again. The rabbit-hole went straight on like a tunnel for some way, and then dipped suddenly down, so suddenly that Alice had not a moment to think about stopping herself before she found herself falling down a very deep well.”
—Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
The theme for Xchyler Publishing’s steampunk anthology competition was “Around the World in 80 Days.” Coming from a background in the software field, I immediately seized upon the idea of data moving around the world rather than the main characters.
That turned out to be the only part of my original story concept that actually made it into “Dots, Dashes, and Deceit.”
I’d planned something completely different, involving some weird technology for handling data transmission across the oceans. I recognized that I knew very little about about telegraphy in the real world in that era, and needed to do some quick research to figure out how to marry my own ideas into the real-world technology.
Why bother? After all, this is steampunk, right? You make your own rules! But for me, a big part of the fun is grounding the fantasy in reality, so that you can’t really tell where one ends and the other begins. It gives the fantastic elements some heft, and makes it easier for a reader to suspend their disbelief.
So I began what I thought would be some quick research. A couple hours, I thought, no more. After all, I knew the basics. I just needed to understand how the telegraph system of 1880 worked in the United States.
Like Alice chasing the rabbit, I had no idea just how far my quick excursion would take me.
What I discovered was that the real technology of that era was more advanced than what I’d envisioned in my story. The first transatlantic telegraph cable between North America and Europe was completed in 1858. It didn’t function very long, but more companies laid several more cables over the next few years. By 1880, communication across the Atlantic Ocean was expensive, but speedy and commonplace.
Commercial fax machines were used in the 1860s, renting time on the telegraph cables—a decade before the invention of the telephone.
I bought and read the book, The Victorian Internet, by Tom Standage. So much for a quick excursion on Google! The book is written for the technology layman, and details the worldwide expansion of the telegraph. Throughout the book, the author draws parallels with the modern telecommunications industry.
I was fascinated. So much of what I assumed to be uniquely modern issues in the Internet age had their genesis more than a hundred years earlier. Wire fraud? Online romances? Encrypted secrets? Hackers? Complaints about latency (lag)? They were all there by the late 19th century.
By this point, I’d dedicated many hours into research, and the only practical result was that it had utterly destroyed my original story concept. I’d fallen through the rabbit hole and didn’t know where I’d land. But I was so fascinated by the subject matter that I didn’t want to stop. Besides, all of these discoveries were rich sources of story ideas.
What I was missing at this point was an idea of how all this great technology looked from the trenches. What was the average day in the life of a telegraph operator like?
For the answer to this question, I discovered a delightful romance novel written in 1879 entitled Wired Love – A Romance of Dots and Dashes by Ella Cheever Thayer. Thayer had been a telegraph operator at one time, and drew upon her experiences to write this novel, which went on to become a best-seller for several years. It is a delightful story about a young woman working as a telegraph operator in a small town. Her conversations with a new telegraph operator in another town down the line sparks into something of an online romance.
In the novel, they flirt “online”—much to the annoyance of at least one of the other operators along the line, as everyone on the line can hear what is being “said.” There is a question of the real gender of the person on the other line. There’s an attempt at what would be considered identity theft today. When the protagonist finally meets the real man on the other side of their online relationship, she finds it more comfortable to “text” him (via Morse code) than to talk face-to-face.
It was a fun book to read, even 125 years later. It gave me that grounding in the life of a telegraph operator of the era.
Out of all of this reading and research, a couple of character ideas emerged: Winnie, a telegraph operator, and Joshua, a mute savant who can communicate by Morse code. I fictionally tweaked the technology in a relatively minor way (by steampunk standards, anyway), so that machines have started replacing human telegraph operators. They can transmit and receive messages far faster than a normal human. This renders Winnie’s skills obsolete.
But Joshua, an unusual young man, can interpret the high-speed Morse code unaided. While ‘eavesdropping’ at the telegraph station, he’s discovered a dangerous secret.
So how much of all this research found its way into Dots, Dashes, and Deceit? Very little.
It was tempting to launch into lengthy paragraphs of exposition so I could share all this fascinating information that I’d learned. Instead, it merely informed my writing. While telegraphy is central to the story, that trivia about how a telegraph operator works, their jargon, the technology, and information on how the industry worked (with my fictional alterations) is buried deep into the background. It rarely surfaces at all except by way of some assumptions that I’ve made and, I hope, a consistency that rings true to the reader.
But even though the many hours of research and reading may be invisible to readers, “Dots, Dashes, and Deceit”could not have existed without it. That’s how research works sometimes. But hey, at least I get to talk about all the cool stuff I learned here on the blog!
Software engineer, video game developer, and father, Jay Barnson is a transplant to the state of Utah from the east coast. He grew up on a diet of science fiction and fantasy ranging from Howard, Heinlein, and Tokien to Lucas and Spielberg. His wife and daughters had to drag him to his first steampunk convention. And now they can’t drag him away from the genre.
Barnson’s short story, “Dots, Dashes and Deceit,” is included in Terra Mechanica: a Steampunk Anthologyslated for released May 31, 2014.
Follow Barnson on the web:
Webpage | Blog | Facebook | Twitter | Google + | LinkedIn | Goodreads