There was, in these views, a small but crucial difference of parallax or perspective between the two pictures, and it was this which created the sense of depth. One had no sense of what each eye saw separately, for the two views coalesced, magically, to form a single coherent view.
The fact that depth was a construction, a ‘fiction’ of the brain, meant that one could have deceptions, illusions, tricks of various sorts. I never had a stereo camera myself, but would take two pictures in succession, moving the camera a couple of inches between exposures. If one moved the camera more than this, the parallactic differences were exaggerated, and the two pictures, when fused, gave an exaggerated sense of depth. I made a hyper-stereoscope, using a cardboard tube with mirrors set obliquely inside it, increasing the interocular distance, in effect, to two feet or more. This was marvelous for bringing out the different depths of distant buildings or hills, but yielded bizarre effects at close distances – a Pinocchio effect, for example, when one looked at people’s faces, for their noses seemed to be sticking out inches in front of them.
It was also intriguing to reverse the pictures. One could easily do this with stereo photographs, but one could also do it by making a pseudoscope, with a short cardboard tube and mirrors, so that the apparent position of the eyes was reversed. This caused distant objects to look closer than nearby ones – a face, for instance, might look like a concave mask. But it produced an interesting rivalry or contradiction, for one’s knowledge, and every other visual cue, might be saying one thing, and the pseudoscopic images saying another, and one would see first one thing then another, as the brain alternated between different perceptual hypotheses.[29]
The other side to all of this, I came to realize – a sort of deconstruction or decomposition – could occur when I had migraines, in which there were often strange visual alterations. My sense of color might be briefly lost or altered; objects might look flat, like cutouts; or instead of seeing movement normally, I might see a series of flickering stills, as when Walter ran his film projector too slow. I might lose half of my visual field, with objects missing to one side, or faces bisected. I was terrified when I first got attacks like this – they started when I was four or five, before the war – but when I told my mother about them, she said she had similar attacks, and that they did no harm and lasted only a few minutes. With this, I started to look forward to my occasional attacks, wondering what might happen in the next one (no two were quite the same), what the brain, in its ingenuity, might be up to. Migraines and photography, between them, may have helped to tilt me in the direction in which, years later, I would go.
My brother Michael was fond of H.G. Wells, and lent me his copy of The First Men in the Moon at Braefield. It was a small book, bound in blue morocco leather, and its illustrations impressed me as much as the text – the attenuated Selenites, walking in single file, and the Grand Lunar, with his distended brain case, in his luminous, fungus-lit cavern on the moon. I loved the optimism and excitement of the journey to space, and the idea of a material (‘cavorite’) impermeable to gravity. One of the chapters was called ‘Mr. Bedford in Infinite Space’, and I loved the notion of Mr. Bedford and Mr. Cavor in their little sphere (it resembled Beebe’s bathysphere, which I had seen pictures of), snapping the cavorite shutters open and closed, shutting off the earth’s gravity. The Selenites, the moon people, were the first aliens I had ever read about, and after this I sometimes met them in my dreams. But there was sadness, too, because Cavor in the end is marooned on the moon, with only the inhuman, insectile Selenites for company, in unutterable loneliness and solitude.
After Braefield, The War of the Worlds became a favorite too, not least because the Martian fighting machines generated an exceedingly dense, inky vapor (‘it sank down through the air and poured over the ground in a manner rather liquid than gaseous’) that contained an unknown element, combined with the gas argon – and I knew that argon, an inert gas, could not be compounded by any earthly means.[30]
I was very fond of bicycling, especially on country roads through the little towns and villages around London, and reading The War of the Worlds, I decided to trace the advance of the Martians, starting on Horsell Common, where the first Martian cylinder landed.
Wells’s descriptions seemed so real to me that by the time I reached Woking, I found it surprisingly intact, considering how it had been devastated by the Martian heat ray in ‘98. And I was startled, in the little village of Shepperton, at finding the church steeple still standing, for I had accepted, almost as historical fact, that it had been knocked down by a reeling Martian tripod. And I could not go to the Natural History Museum without thinking of ‘the magnificent, and almost complete specimen [of a Martian] in spirits’ which Wells assured us was there. (I would find myself looking for this in the cephalopod gallery, as all the Martians seemed to be somewhat octopoid in nature.)
It was similar with the Natural History Museum itself – its ruined, cobwebbed galleries open to the air – which Wells’s Time Traveller wanders through in A.D. 800,000. I could never go to the museum thereafter without seeing its desolate future form superimposed on the present, like the memory of a dream. Indeed, the pedestrian reality of London itself became transformed for me by the charged and mythical London of Wells’s short stories, with places that could only be seen in certain moods or states – the door in the wall, the magic shop.
I found the later, ‘social’ Wells novels of little interest as a boy, preferring the earlier tales, which combined remarkable science-fiction extrapolations with an intense, poetic sense of human frailty and mortality, as with the Invisible Man, so arrogant at first, who dies so pitifully, or the Faustian Dr. Moreau, who is finally killed by his own creations.
But his stories were also full of ordinary people who have extraordinary visual experiences of every sort: the little shopkeeper who is granted ecstatic visions of Mars through gazing into a mysterious crystal egg; or the young man whose eyes are given a sudden twist as he stands between the poles of an electromagnet in a storm, transporting him visually to an uninhabited rock near the South Pole. I was addicted to Wells’s stories, his fables, as a boy (and many are still resonant for me fifty years later). The fact that he was still alive in 1946, still with us, after the war, made me long urgently, improperly, to see him. And having heard that he lived in a little terrace of houses, Hanover Terrace, off Regent’s Park, I would sometimes go there after school, or on weekends, hoping to catch a glimpse of the old man.
13. Mr. Dalton’s Round Bits of Wood
Experimenting in my lab brought home to me that chemical mixtures were completely unlike chemical compounds. One could mix salt and sugar, say, in any proportion. One could mix salt and water – the salt would dissolve, but then one could evaporate it and recover the salt unchanged. Or one could take a brass alloy and recover its copper and zinc unchanged. When one of my dental fillings came out, I was able to distill off its mercury, unchanged. All of these – solutions, alloys, amalgams – were mixtures. Mixtures, basically, had the properties of their ingredients (plus one or two ‘special’ qualities perhaps – the relative hardness of brass, for example, or the lowered freezing point of salt water). But compounds had utterly new properties of their own.
29
I was intrigued, too (though I never practiced it), by cine-photography. Here again it was Walter who made me realize that there was no actual movement in the film, only a succession of still images which the brain synthesized to give an impression of movement. He demonstrated this to me with his film projector, slowing it down to show me only the still images, and then speeding it up until the illusion of motion suddenly occurred. He had a zoetrope, with images painted on the inside of a wheel, and a thaumatrope, with drawings on a stack of cards, which when rotated, or rapidly flicked, would give the same illusion. So I had the sense that movement, too, was constructed by the brain, in a manner analogous to that of color and depth.
30
Wells’s reference to the Martians’ unknown element also intrigued me later when I learned about spectra, for he described it, early in the book, as ‘giving a group of four lines in the blue of the spectrum,’ though subsequently – did he reread what he had written? – as giving ‘a brilliant group of three lines in the green.’