Telescope Takes a Long View, to London
In the wee hours of Tuesday, a giant drill pokes up from the depths in Dumbo (or does it?).
Before sunrise on Tuesday morning, a strange sight began to appear on Fulton Ferry Landing in Brooklyn: a six-foot-tall metal drill bit seemed to emerge from the wooden pier, covered in genuine East River mud and revolving slowly beneath the glow of the Manhattan skyline. On Wednesday it will grow into a 12-foot-tall industrial-looking behemoth erupting just in front of the quaint Brooklyn Ice Cream Factory. And on Thursday? Imagine an enormous brass and wood telescope, 37 feet long by 11 feet tall, connected to a mirrored dome, like a child’s drawing of something that will see into the future. Voilà: the Telectroscope will have materialized.
Paul St George, a British artist whose Telectroscope will allow New Yorkers and Londoners to wave to one another.
A fanciful device born equally of history and imagination, it will visually connect New Yorkers to people in London, where an identical scope will sit on the banks of the Thames in the shadow of Tower Bridge. Spectators who step right up will have a real-time, life-size view across the pond 24 hours a day, until June 15, thanks to ... no spoilers, yet. (The queue will generally be first come first served, but to make an appointment to connect with a friend in London, visit telectroscope.net.)
The Victorian-looking contraption is the invention of Paul St George, a 53-year-old artist based in London — or, if you believe the gadget’s supposed history, of his great-grandfather Alexander Stanhope St George. According to his very own fake Wikipedia entry, Alexander (born July 8, 1848; died Oct. 12, 1917) was “a British inventor and researcher” who came up with a feasible design for a device to connect places on opposite sides of the world visually through a very long tunnel, and even began digging under the Atlantic to make his creation work. According to Paul St George — well, all of this is according to Paul St George.
And some of it is true, sort of. Mr. St George did have a relative named Alexander — his grandfather, a tailor. The extra generation was added, as was the Stanhope; it’s the name of a type of magnifying lens. And the Telectroscope is a real 19th-century creation — sort of. It was written about, Mr. St George said, by a reporter who misheard a story about an electroscope, a device used to measure electrical current.
The apocryphal 19th-century account of this futuristic, far-seeing invention that worked on telegraph wires drew the attention of Mark Twain, who wrote about the Telectroscope around the turn of the last century. Several other publications — including scientific journals and The New York Times — followed suit, and a century before the Internet, a meme was born.
Fast-forward to about five years ago. Mr. St George, a fan of public art and projects that play with scale — his other work includes “Minumentals,” well-known monumental sculptures recreated in centimeters — started thinking about the childhood notion of digging through the earth and reaching the opposite end of the globe.
He said he was quite taken “with the idea that if you just had a hole in the ground, and you’re looking down, you’d see up because the person you’d see is on the other side of the world,” he said in a telephone interview from his home in London. And since he studies 19th-century chronophotography — sometimes called precinema or pre-cinematography — for his day job as a professor of animation at London Metropolitan University, he knew where (and when) to begin looking for model machinery.
But Mr. St George realized the project was too big for him to undertake alone. Two years ago he was introduced to the British arts organization Artichoke, known for bringing the Sultan’s Elephant, a 42-ton mechanical animal, for a walkabout in London in May 2006.
“Many, many people were knocking our door down after the elephant,” said Nicky Webb, a co-founder of Artichoke. Though the organization didn’t know Mr. St George’s work, the theatricality and playfulness of the idea appealed to its members immediately, Ms. Webb said. “Hilariously,” she added, “we thought it would be quite easy to do.”
It wasn’t. The project, which was underwritten by British government grants and private sponsorship, cost £400,000 (about $787,000). As a memento and to help offset the costs, Mr. St George designed a $320 limited-edition “minumental” Telectroscope, complete with a Stanhope lens. (Using the real Telectroscope is free in New York, £1 in London.)
Mr. St George visited the United States for the first time last fall. The waterfront sites were chosen for their iconic vistas of the cities; that the project could be timed to coincide with the 125th anniversary of the Brooklyn Bridge this week was icing. (“We’re looking forward to seeing whether we can see the fireworks down the Telectroscope from London,” Ms. Webb said.)
Katie Dixon, the director of planning and development in arts and culture at the Downtown Brooklyn Partnership, which helped facilitate the installation, has already made an appointment to wave to London friends via the Telectroscope. “Projects like this give people the opportunity to experience their everyday paths in different ways,” she said. “It’s just the kind of public art we want to see more of in the area.”
On Monday night and Tuesday morning, Peter Kohlmann, an event producer whose credits include the Millennium celebration in Times Square, supervised a crew of 15 as they assembled the drill; by 4 a.m. on Tuesday they were “dressing it,” as Mr. Kohlmann said — piling rocks and dirt around the base to make it appear as if the drill had just burst forth from below. For the time being, the site is surrounded by metal gates and yellow caution tape; when the Telectroscope finally takes its place, by dawn on Thursday, it will be watched 24 hours a day by a security guard and a staff member to explain how it works and give the invented back story.
“The interesting thing about it is, it’s almost true,” Mr. St George said. “There are many tunnels underneath London. It’s totally imaginable — at least to me it is — that one could find a number of tunnels and connect them to Brooklyn.”
In this case (spoiler time!) technology supplanted imagination: the Telectroscope, whose frame of vision is about six feet in diameter, is linked into existing fiber-optic networks. Mr. St George hopes that people will use his device in surprising ways — to hold dance-offs, say, or propose marriage via placards. (The Telectroscope has no audio component “because I thought then people would just stand still and use it like a telephone,” he said.)
Mostly, though, Mr. St George is charmed by the circuitous nature of public imagination. Much the same way that comic book tales of space travel helped people accept Sputnik, he said, the Twain story and other accounts of the Telectroscope helped spur an appetite for technology that didn’t exist yet, like TV and the Internet.
Now, he said, “I’m hoping people will find other inventions that could’ve been, or were almost, and think about completing those.”
New York photographer and