Giant telescope links London, New York
LONDON, England (CNN) -- As the first splinters of sunlight
spread their warmth on the south bank of the River Thames on Thursday,
it became clear that after more than a century, the vision of Victorian
engineer Alexander Stanhope St. George had finally been realized.
In all its optical brilliance and brass and wood, there stood the
Telectroscope: an 11.2-meter-(37 feet) long by 3.3-meter-(11 feet) tall
dream of a device allowing people on one side of the Atlantic to look
into its person-size lens and, in real time, see those on the other
side via a recently completed tunnel running under the ocean. (Think
19th-century Webcam. Or maybe Victorian-age video phone.)
And
all the credit goes to British artist Paul St. George. If he had not
been rummaging through great-grandpa Alexander's personal effects a few
years ago, the Telectroscope might still exist only on paper, hidden
away deep inside some old box.
But fortunately, St. George could
not bear that thought and thus decided he should be the one to finish
what his great-grandfather had started. It was quite simply the right
thing to do. Plus, it would make a pretty cool public art exhibit. Send us your videos, images or stories
During the twilight hours Tuesday, massive dirt-covered metal drill
bits miraculously emerged -- one by the Thames near the Tower Bridge
and the other on Fulton Ferry Landing by the Brooklyn Bridge in New
York -- completing the final sections of great-grandfather Alexander's
transatlantic tunnel.
The drills were removed Wednesday night
and replaced with identical Telectroscopes at both ends, allowing
Londoners and New Yorkers to wake up Thursday, look over to the far and
distant shore and stare at each other for a while (the telescope-like
contraption permits visual but not vocal communication).
Of course, only part of this story is true.
St. George is an artist in Britain who does have a grandfather -- minus the great prefix -- named Alexander.
And the trans-Atlantic tunnel is really a trans-Atlantic broadband
network rounded off on each end with HD cameras, according to Tiscali, an Italian Internet provider handling the technical side of the project.
As for the Telectroscope, well, it was a fanciful idea that, according
to St. George, came about from a typo made by a 19th-century reporter
who misspelled Electroscope, a device used to measure electrostatic
charges - as Telectroscope.
"The journalist also misunderstood
what it was about and wrote in the article that it was a device for the
suppression of absence," St. George said. "The accidental hope captured
their imagination, and lots of people at the end of the 19th century
thought it was a great idea."
The Telectroscope captured St.
George's imagination five years ago, when he began pondering how to do
a project on the childhood fantasy of digging a hole to the opposite
side of the Earth. And because the artist also happens to have an
expertise in Victorian chronophotography -- a precursor to
cinematography -- he had a slight idea of where to look for the proper
equipment.
"We all have that idea in our head if we could make a
tunnel to the other side of the Earth," St. George said."But we are not
all crazy enough to actually try and do it."
St. George was
crazy enough to actually try and do it, but he realized he could not do
the digging alone. So about two years ago, he pitched the idea to
Artichoke, the British arts group responsible for taking the Sultan's
Elephant -- a 42-ton mechanical creature -- for a stroll through
central London in 2006. The company was immediately taken by St.
George's idea.
"The whole thing is about seeing what is real and
what isn't real and how the world is," said Nicki Webb, a co-founder of
Artichoke. "Is it nighttime when we are in daytime, and does it look
familiar to us or not?"
When the sun illuminated the lens of the
Telectroscope next to the Thames, it was, of course, still nighttime in
New York. So the screen inside the scope broadcast back only an empty
sidewalk silently framed by the Brooklyn Bridge and the Manhattan
skyline.
But then something miraculous occurred.
A police officer and a street cleaner walked into the frame. Stopped. And waved.
via cnn
Giant telescope links London, New York,england, london, new york, NewYork, ny, science, Telectroscope, telescope
