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| From Technology Review, May/June 1996 Let Them Eat Toast . . . . . . . . . . . . . By David Brittan THE BAD-NEWS phone call of the week began with the metallic echo I associate with trouble brewing across the Atlantic. Was it a British writer demanding payment? An Italian scientist badgering me to reconsider her unpublishable manuscript? To my surprise, a pleasant voice, a radio voice, announced, "This is the BBC, in London." One cannot receive a phone call from the BBC—deliverer of coded messages to the French resistance, chronicler of wars and crises in the world's most unpronounceable places—without imagining that one is about to be tapped for a role in history. But on that particularly day, the BBC had something more ephemeral on its mind. A young woman I will call Cecily inquired, "Is there really a printer that makes toast?" I had to think for a minute, for there was no simple answer. Certainly I had written about a printer that made toast. A recent Phenomena column (February/March 1996) stated: "Say It With Toast, a 300-dpi color bubble-jet machine, uses edible dyes to transform an ordinary slice of bread into an eye-popping panorama or a distinctive business card. What better way to say 'I love you' than with a plateful of piping-hot Flemish masters." That claim was supported by an illustration showing two slices of toast popping out of a "toaster/printer"—one decorated with the Mona Lisa, the other with a Picassoesque portrait. So in the sense that a technical description and a schematic drawing had appeared in the scientific literature, then, yes, there was a printer that made toast. Conceptually speaking, of course. I was forced to consider that the BBC may be too busy saying "Srebrenica" and "Tadzhikistan" to concern itself with philosophical subtleties. Perhaps Cecily wanted to know if the printer existed in the physical sense, as an actual machine that printed actual pictures on actual toast. Now I was wrestling with the limits of knowledge: a credible magazine had reported that it was so, I saw no obvious reason why it should not be so, yet I had not technically seen such a device or met anyone who had. So was there a printer that made toast? I weighed my words carefully. "No," I replied. The silence on the other end was longer than the usual satellite delay could account for. I went on sheepishly, "The toaster/printer is fictitious. There's no such thing." Evidently that was not the answer Cecily had hoped for. "Oh, no!" she said in a parabola of dismay, as if I had announced that God was fictitious. Then it dawned on me that if the BBC believed the one about the toaster/printer, it probably believed the one about the wallet-sized "personal ATM," and the one about the "interactive sneakers" with the list of programmable destinations, and the one about the loudspeakers that pound people's ears with boxing gloves. Full disclosure seemed like the only way out. I explained to Cecily that all the marvelous inventions I had mentioned in that particular column were complete fabrications. "I just made them up," I told her. "They were meant as a..."—gosh, the word sounds so feeble when the other person isn't laughing—"they were meant as a joke." This time the silence was even longer. "Oh, no-o-o-o!" moaned Cecily, her voice now arcing through several octaves of disappointment. "Oh, no-o-o-o-o-o!" I began to realize that something quite expensive was hanging in the balance. A wager, perhaps. "I say, Basil, do you know the Americans have invented a printer that makes toast?" "Oh, Cecily, you're so gullible sometimes." "No, honestly." "A fiver says they haven't." "A tenner." "A hundred." And so on. Or was career advancement at stake? "Jolly good scoop on that toaster story, Cecily. If it's on the level, you could be up for a transfer to Silicon Valley." "And if it isn't?" "Can you say 'Tadzhikistan'?" Whatever the explanation, it was apparent that my little attempt at satire had brought the BBC to its knees. I find that, when humor backfires, the best policy is usually to go for more humor. So after another of Cecily's oh-no's, I ventured brightly, "Don't tell me you've planned a half-hour news program about all those new American technologies." The connection was bad, and our voices sometimes blotted each other out; I couldn't be sure Cecily had heard me correctly. But there was no mistaking her reply: "Um . . . yes." After signing off, I went through a minor existential crisis. All I had tried to do was bring laughter to the overworked masses of scientists and engineers. I just wanted to make people happy. Now I had gone and made fools of the world's largest news-gathering organization, causing no end of disruption and embarrassment, and possibly motivating their reporters to think twice before they accept ridiculous-sounding technologies as fact. Was it really worth it? You bet. db |