A book Nicole might be familiar with...

Alfred P. Morgan's textbook on telegraphy and telephony, from 1916.

Enjoy.

Bit too old-school for Nick. Plus, think that's more an Adept thing; before computers, they were into radio, telephone and telegraphs. Perhaps also TV / film too. Though as Nick was reared in the pre-Internet age, she'd have spent many an hour reading old 'how-to' guides.

It's an idea she has, though; to produce a kind of 'Field Scientist Guide' - a kind of Etherite variant of 'Steal this Book' and 'Science of Revolutionary Warfare'.

Definitely an Etherite book, and not a Virtual Adept book. Check out chapter 1!

So, a crossover between "Dummy's Guide to Automotive Repairs" and "The Anarchist's Cookbook"?

Nah, Adept. Don't take the presence of hardware-making as proof of otherwise. Though the Adept-Etherite divide was much weaker in the late 19th; in fact it appears the Adepts were an Etherite offshoot [though perhaps can be traced back to the Craftmasons in the 16th].

You can bet one of the first Union uses of the telegraph system was teleportation - for if 'everything is data' and those copper wires transmit data; a good telegraph line, with full use of automated telegraphs could reach baud speeds seen in '50s modems [and with Correspondence will be even quicker].


With Nick's idea, along those lines, yeah - though more modular [like the book which started this conversation]. Somewhere between a Pelican and an Observer book. Unless Great One rules otherwise, there's a real gap in the market' for such texts 'by Adventurers, for Adventurers'. [Which is why I'm going on and on about the points on the Update thread; if it's not considered a 'legitimate field', chances are Nick will have to write them herself, but if it is, such texts may already exist].

No, definitely the Etherites. Adepts were part of the faction that abandoned Ether theory, after all.

How pivotal Ether was to the Etherites quitting is debatable, similar to how pivotal was Turing's death was the Adepts.

Canon is split on the topic. One side holds on the variant of the 'Great Man Theory'; that 'the Ether belief' caused a quasi-religious 'schism' within the technomancers. However, other sources hold a much more 'Hegelian/Marxist' analysis to the event; citing the increasing disquiet within the Union in the final decades of the 19th regarding many issues, including Ether/Void exploration efforts, the Time-Table, policies regarding Sleepers and so on. In this view, 'Ether' was 'the last straw' from a faction which had gotten fed up to their back teeth for a myriad of reasons - after all, most 'Etheries' would have been in fields in which the existence of 'Aether' would have been utterly irrelevent.

More of a "last straw" situation than anything else, I expect - but as far as I can tell, you wouldn't find Ether theorists outside of the Sons of Ether at the time, or later...

Thing was, by c1900 Ether theory was already ~85% dead in RL; it's why Einstein 'won the argument' so easily/quickly regarding Special Relativity. Ether, like phlogiston and now dark matter/energy was a kind of science 'pollyfilla'; a general-purpose thing used to fill in the holes in scientific theories which ran ahead of the provable science. [A kind of a scientific 'God of the Gaps' argument].

Though we also need to remember the Union has never developed a watertight 'Theory of Quintessence'; this gap would have allowed Ether to survive as a non-cranky theory under 'Tass is Ether'. It's possible if the Union were going hard against *this* theory without actual proof to cause the rupture, held as an example as their increasing authoritarian nature and scientific conservatism.

Anyway, still waiting for a reply for the Update Thread.. If we're able to make a firm general 'Secondaries Rule' between us we can then present it to Great One together...