12: The Special Setting of The Sussex Beekeeper at the Dawn of Time

The Lighthouse

of Alexandria (GIPHY)

As I said in Post 7, as far back as I can remember, I’ve always been enchanted by lost cities, giant secret projects and the like. In other words, little secrets don’t interest me. Neither do fuzzy secrets like conspiracies.

Book 3 of the "Holmes Behind the Veil" trilogy series, The Sussex Beekeeper at the Dawn of Time, features an especially large secret project. And it's entirely likely that it was Richard Halliburton's Complete Book of Marvels (1941) that seeded my interest in huge engineering projects.

 
Note: All of the below text summarizes the sort of "giant secret project" that I long wanted to create. Of course, that project may serve its vital function in the book—but it was also created so that I could visit it!  However, ironically, the large facility at which Quatermain and Hans are detained for weeks on the west coast of Africa, while it is the control center of the project, it is only the merest tip of something so astoundingly immense that it can only be inferred in the course of the story. This blog post, then, actually gives me the opportunity, finally, to in fact and in toto describe the original real projects that inspired my story and which I emulate in my story, at least in terms of pure immensity of infrastructure. In the story itself, there is no practical way to describe any of this other than, as I say, infer its enormous existence through footnotes and the like. Also, readers of this blog will take away some awareness of the astonishing nature of the hubris involved in building the telescope and of the almost unfathomable degree of irony with which the novel concludes.

Giant projects, of course, have been around since the advent of humans, everything from Stonehenge through the Apollo Project to send humans to the moon.  In between was the construction of the Panama Canal, America’s Transcontinental Railroad, the Suez Canal, the Great Eastern, Hoover Dam, and countless other projects, both exotic and prosaic, old and new, on virtually every continent that pop up at the simplest query of any Internet search engine. There is something inherently romantic about the ability of humans to organize and pursue such enormous projects to completion. But, to the best of my knowledge, none of these was secret, and most took a considerable amount of time.

              ..........Click on these images to enlarge.

Two views of the plutonium plant in Hanford, 
Washington, with a workforce of 45,000.

Some housing for Hanford's workforce.

The altered priorities of war, however, change everything, including the necessity of many activities being prosecuted with rapidity and in secret. That said, it may or may not be common knowledge that the Manhattan Project, the U.S.’s Second World War bid to crash-build an atomic weapon, probably holds the record for the most vast, most secret, most vital, fastest engineering project in all human history. On September 17, 1942, U.S. Army General Leslie Groves was ordered to build an atomic bomb before the Nazis did. At that moment in time, all that existed was a growing palpable excitement as physicists learned of the potential of the atom, lots of equations (most derived from Einstein's E=mc²), much concerned extrapolation about how far along their German colleagues were, and a few experiments done in university labs. Since our best intelligence at the time showed that Hitler was well ahead of us, Groves was given a blank check with the entire unquestioned power, wealth, and resources of the USA at his disposal and, for all practical purposes, at his informed whim. It turns out that physicists in those days were an undisciplined lot, so one of the first things Groves did was install Robert Oppenhiemer to keep the scientists focused—easier said than done, as a good many of them were Nobel Prize winners!

The Uranium 235 plant at Oak Ridge, Tennessee,
 with a workforce of 24,000.

Housing for some of Oakridge's workforce.

Two years and ten months later, on July 16, 1945, the Trinity bomb detonated in New Mexico. In between, there had sprung into being—literally from nothing, from an arid wilderness, a woodland valley, and a desert plateau, respectively—the plutonium plant in Hanford, Washington, with a workforce of 45,000; the Uranium 235 plant at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, with a workforce of 24,000; and the bomb development facility at Los Alamos, New Mexico, with tens of thousands more. To me this is living proof that humans can do anything once they set their minds to it.

The road to Los Alamos.

At the end of the road.

Thus, when I began what would become Book 3, The Sussex Beekeeper at the Dawn of Time, I needed Quatermain to stumble onto a super secret project something like the Manhattan Project in Africa. When I got through appending some of my other interests to this core concept, what resulted was the building on two continents in less than two years time of a giant way-before-its-time telescope for reasons transcending mere astronomy. 
 .
The telescope that Quatermain and Hans, his Hottentot (now termed “Khoisan”) companion since childhood, discover in 1873 is a vast world-girdling interferometer radio telescope that was built under the auspices of Pope Pius IX by James Maxwell, considered the greatest scientist then alive, and Impey Barbicane, the genius engineer who built the mammoth cannon that sent a projectile to the moon a decade earlier as described in Jules Verne’s From the Earth to the Moon. 

Click image to enlarge and enhance.

Drawing by Elizabeth Davies

(Foreground) One of the four gargantuan bowls that comprise the telescope.  Note the four full factories along the circumference and the two locomotives on the far left. (Background) The distant second bowl of exactly the same character and proportions. These two were built on the west coat of Africa on the border of Liberia and Sierra Leone. Two more identical bowls were simultaneously being built on the west coast of South America along the coast of Ecuador. The concept of these bowls for use in radio astronomy was later rediscovered and used to construct the far smaller Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico (below right).

Arecibo Observatory, Puerto Rico

These three conceived of, designed, and built the telescope to “listen in” on the still-dying nova that was presumed to be the Star of Bethlehem and that has long faded from sight in the constellation of Aquila. They coordinated the efforts of more than 100,000 scientists, technicians, and laborers on the west coasts of both Africa and South America, which efforts included the mining and smelting of unthinkable quantities of silver ore. 

Of course, this whole gargantuan enterprise required prodigious amounts of power, and again these passionate masterminds conceived and contrived the damming of rivers in mountain valleys on both continents, as well as inventing and building two unprecedented 300-mile-long gravity-powered aqueducts and undreamt-of hydroelectric plants that, again, would not see the light of another day until October 1934 when the City of San Francisco's mammoth Hetch Hetchy Aqueduct System became operational. 

 Click on image to enlarge.

(Top left) Hetch Hetchy Valley before the Tuolumne River was dammed (landscape painting in the style of Alfred Bierstadt, artist unknown). (Bottom left) Hetch Hetchy Reservoir today. (Top right) O'Shaughnessy Dam, which blocked the river and created the reservoir. (Middle right) The water’s long journey from the reservoir to San Francisco is almost entirely downhill, providing the energy to run the generators (top inset) that create electricity that is transmitted to the city through these power lines that cross much of the state (bottom inset). (Bottom right) The journey across the state as shown here was preceded in 1873 by equivalent mega engineering projects on the west coasts of Africa and South America. Special photo juxtapositions by Thomas Kent Miller; copyright © 2016-2017 by Thomas Kent Miller.

Before then it was necessary for San Francisco (as our telescope team had already equivalently accomplished twice over in 1873!) to dam the Tuolumne River in the Hetch Hetchy Valley in the Sierra Nevada Mountains, thereby diverting and transporting the river's fresh clean drinking water (which I happily drank for the first 40 years of my life from the local catch reservoir named Crystal Springs!), as well as transmitting the resultant electricity to power the city, clear across the breadth of the state of California. The difference here is that the telescope builders constructed their electricity generating plants, along with the concomitant construction of an unending array of towers to transport the electricity hundreds of miles, for the sole purpose of collecting electricity to power its super-telescope. The water being of little use to them, they simply let it pour into the sea.  

Drawing by Elizabeth Davies

Oh ... BTW, there were also a couple of high-speed submarines built for the project so that the two facilities on two continents could rapidly communicate, before the first Africa-to-South America telegraph cable was finally laid on the Atlantic Ocean just in time to turn on the telescope. But the subs are a whole 'nother story.

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