Lateral Science - The Ernest Glitch Chronicles

Anarchic Experimental Science in Victorian Weardale
THE ERNEST GLITCH CHRONICLES
- Illustrations & Supplementary Information -
This page is under development, and more drawings & information
will be added as soon as they are completed & collated. Victorian Cyclotron A Coal Bomb

The Ernest Glitch Chronicles is a novel about anarchic science. It combines dark humour, a steampunk theme set in Victorian England, and a cyberpunk story in the near future. This web page is intended for people who have purchased the eBook. The eclectic content will be rather confusing if you haven't purchased the novel !

Click here to go to the main Ernest Glitch Chronicles page.

Illustrations and further information are presented under the individual chapters, below.

Red hot Ammonites & Nitric Acid.
Glitch enables the formation of a pseudo-volcano near Whitby. Also, a fossil Ichthyosaur & an innovation which clearly preempts the invention of the Birkeland & Eyde nitrogen fixation process of 1905.

Whitby pseudo-volcano, from "An introduction to geology" by Robert Bakewell. 1838

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Birkeland–Eyde process

Drawing of the apparatus refered to by Glitch is in progress, should be finished before the end of April 2011.

The Glitch Steam Engine. Requiring neither water nor coal.
A powerful hydrogen peroxide engine-part interacts with a South American camelid.

Hydrogen Peroxide

Glitch Steamer - The Locomotive.
Aycliffe man disemboweled by an African vulture.

The Northern Echo Full circle, an article about Locomotion No.1 by Chris Lloyd

Archie, a White-backed Vulture, Gyps africanus.

Photo by John Haslam from Dornoch, Scotland

Great Fire & Explosion at Gateshead & Newcastle.
56 dead, rivers of molten sulphur, massive destruction, Faraday implicated.

Pictures of Gateshead The story of the disaster.

Great fire of Newcastle and Gateshead

The 1855 Grand National Steeplechase at Aintree.
The front page from the April 1855 issue of "The Turf" refers to equestrian enhancement of a scientific nature.

The Grand National

Victorian Nitrogen Laser.
A letter from Glitch to Faraday, dated June 1856, would appear to indicate the observation of laser action in air, more than a century before Maiman's ruby laser or Javan's helium-neon laser. Or indeed, H.D.Heard's 1963 nitrogen laser.

Leyden Battery

Litchenburg Figures

Nitrogen Laser

Artificial Volcano

Fictional Influence Machine.
Predating Wimshurst`s electrostatic generator, using hemispherically terminated charge carriers.

Influence Machine

Fullerenes Discovered in Victorian England
A letter from Ernest Glitch (son of Mad Judge Glitch) to Michael Faraday appears to note the crystallisation of C60 some 150 years before Kroto detects the allotrope.

Electrostatic C60 precipitation apparatus

C60 crystals

Victorian Liquid-Fuel Rocket Engine
An account of the use of hypergolic propellants and deLaval nozzles in 1856.

Victorian Tesla Coil, with reference to a possible medieval Coil.
A letter from Glitch to Michael Faraday appears to note the discovery of Germanium some 30 years before Winkler. The main body of the correspondence concerns a lightning machine.

Alchemists with Tesla Coil

Lightning Machine

Transcranial magnetic stimulation.
Glitch performs an experiment upon his own brain.

Transcranial magnetic stimulation

19th Century Jet-Powered Flying Machine in Weardale.
Powered Manned Flight achieved long before the Wright Bros., using Multiple Valve-less Pulse Jets.

The First Flight.
part two of 19th Century Jet-Powered Flying Machine in Weardale, plus
The Steam-Powered Rope-Engine - Mad Judge Glitch`s Power-Gallows - An account of the first test of this capital punishment machine.

Victorian Cyclotron
E. Glitch bombards diamonds with high energy particles to produce coloured 'fancy' stones. His equipment, mentioned in a letter to M. Faraday, pre-dates that of Lawrence by some 73 years

Cyclotron

Hodges

Sprites observed 1850s

Faraday's lecture debacle.
"Chemical History of the Candle" disrupted by conflagration of Falco peregrinus.

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Glitch Constructs Hypersonic Gun.
Upper Weardale was impacted by several projectiles in late 1857, in Glitch`s words, "Velocities approached 70,000 furlongs to the hour, Bishop."

Coal Bomb

Bladders

Glitch High Swiftness Gun

Trout fishing using electrolytically generated gas explosions.
A butler's lungs detonate & the effect of acceleration on a closed system of buoyancy.

The Ernest Glitch Expedition To America 1858.
Glitch decides his War Poisons could have excellent commercial potential in the USA.

Sporting activity aboard a transatlantic steamer.
A rather unfortunate incident with explosive rifle ammunition.

Twenty three days later. Virginia City, Nevada.
Hodges is mistaken for a wanted gunfighter, One Handed Thompson.

Ernest Glitch, Power Mountaineer.
The Ascent of El Capitan in Yosemite Valley by a Steam-Limpet.

An Autonomous Rendering & Mummification Phosphorus Harvester. circa.1860 drawn E.G. for pat.app.
A version of this decimated the Ahwahneechee Yosemite Indians.

The Deal.
Mescaline Cacti for Volcanic Repeating Rifles; Geronimo meets Glitch.

The Glitch Ranunculaceous Death-Spray.
An anti-personnel weapon of self defense, for use against robbers and other undesirable blackguards. Some 150 years before US law enforcement officers were issued with Mace and CS gas sprays, Ernest Glitch demonstrated a lethal precursor using an alkaloid extracted from Aconitum napellus.

Preparing to return to Blighty from San Francisco.
Glitch & Hodges have to flee the USA, because of unpleasantness regarding a demonstration of mass-poisoning.

CUBIC EGGS part two.
Military interest causes concern.

1858: First X-Ray?
Rupert Glitch photographs his own bones

Double Van Marum

First X-Ray

The Glitch Sporting Bathyscaphe
Accounts of the use of this extreme depth marine hunting vessel.

HMS Warrior

Dodecahedron

The Glitch Machine Gun.
A fully automatic weapon 24 years before Hiram Maxim.

Glitch's Big Game Room

Reed Canary Grass

Observation of Light Emission from Electrically Stressed Silicon Carbide Crystals
Early LED? Letters to Faraday, with an account of country life between them, also mentioned is C60 in coal fulgurites.

First LED

Hodges & the Golden Fly
Gold-nucleation experiments produce a jewel and the promise of unlimited wealth. Work is suspended because of a successful test of Glitch`s Cacodyl Offensive Weapon

Hodges' Golden Fly
Photo by Peter Halasz

The Great Geysir & One Cubic Foot of Metallic Sodium.
The Iceland geochemical expedition. Mission, to impart a scientific understanding of hydro-geothermal processes to the indigenous population.

Volcanic Bomb.
From Stromboli, Glitch pours scorn on a contemporary academic. "... but Darwin‘s grasp of the fluid dynamics regarding a globule of solidifying effervescent viscous lava in free-fall is feeble!"

Stromboli Volcanic Bomb

Geological observations on the Volcanic Islands, visited during the voyage of HMS Beagle. By Charles Darwin. 1844

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The Glitch Equatorial Africa Expedition.
Radium! A highly active deposit of radio-baryte crystals is discovered. Autumn 1861. A Journal of Events by Ernest Glitch.

Weapon of Mass Destruction in Victorian Times: The Coal-Dust Flame-Thrower.
Horror weapon invented in Weardale by Glitch. Also in 1862, his assistant noted the depletion of U235 in pitchblende from Oklo, and suggested that a natural reactor could be the cause of the isotopic anomaly.

The Coal-Dust Flame-Thrower

Mist Chamber

1. outer glass cylinder
2. inner glass cylinder
3. insulating air space
4. upper blackened silver disc
5. black felt soaked with pinene
6. nickel chromium heating wire
7. asbestos wool insulation
8 & 9. wires to battery of cells for heating
10 & 11. wires to battery of cells for condensation nuclei clearance
12. lower blackened silver disc
13. copper pipe soldered to disc for cooling water
14 & 15. inlet & outlet pipes for cold spring water
16. turned cuban mahogany support
17. intimate mixture of powdered emerald crystal and powdered glowing baryte crystal, wrapped in platinum foil
18. hog fat
19. block of uranium metal refined from Joachimstahl pitchblende
20. top of a glass torrecellian vacuum tube
21. vacuum
22. carbonised sumatran tiger`s whisker
23. platinum wires
24. quicksilver
25. wires to battery of cells for illumination

Potassium Bromide; Illuminator & Castrator.
"An astonishing cold orange glow simultaneously appears, and is most beautiful to observe in a darkened room." Wolfhound Training a la Glitch.

The Glitch Electro-Magnetic Cannon.
A badger-flea is accelerated to well over the speed of sound, and survives.

Paleometeorite Unearthed in Victorian Coal-Mine.
A magnificent fossil meteorite found in the Durham Coal Measures is classified as a paleopallasite.

Ecinoderm parasite disturbs porpoise repast.
Horse doctor has his severely shattered arms splinted with sperm whale metatarsals.

Physeter Macrocephalus Farmed Inland for Spermaceti & Ambergris.
A force-fed sperm whale, raised from a calf, grew to fill a brine filled pit dug into a Weardale carboniferous limestone quarry.

Beagle 2 - A 19th Century Hybrid Coal / Liquid Nitrous Oxide Powered Rocket.
Busty seam coal & laughing gas propels scientific probe into space, successfully launched 24th July 1863 from Teesdale, returning 30th June 1908 over Siberia.

Beagle Two, about to take off from upper Teesdale

Great Balls of Brown Gas!
The preparation of a green solid from Liquid Air & experiments with the oxides of nitrogen. Also, Thai Boxing in Victorian London; combat between Hodges and a Muay Thai fighter.

CUBIC EGGS part three.
Global Holocaust.

Jacko Macauco, Fighting Monkey
Hodges' CO₂ powered artificial hand is brutally shot in a London drinking emporium.

Jacko Macauco

Slowsilver discovery north west of Kyzyl.
Natural, crystalline Hg collected for the first time. Plumbum rod siphon for quicksilver. Self priming.

Lead Siphon

An Ingenious Method for the Preparation of Large Mercuric Iodide Crystals.
A single crystal is used to detect radioactivity, the output being amplified by a Victorian transistor.

Cosmic Ray Muons Detected and Tracked 1864.
The spark chamber was then utilised to predate Marconi`s wireless transmission apparatus by 45 years.

Epidermal Quicksilver.
Hodges becomes ill due to terminal mercury poisoning.

Z-pinch X-rays and Levitation.
Photography of the internal structure of a flea, the levitation of an aluminium sphere using an oscillating electromagnetic field, and coronal levitation.

Michael Faraday in Possession of Glitch`s Thallium & Oil of Vitriol Balm.
A hand delivered note, accompanying the pharmacological preparation, is dated Sunday the 25th of August 1867.

Advanced Metallurgy in Neolithic Weardale.
The ancestors of Glitch & Hodges are the first technocratic shamen. Pre-bronze age compass needles produced using the Earth's magnetic field.