We are pleased hereby to convey to Your Lordships our observations on the recent activities of Professor Ballsnipe. We can report that as usual his behavior constitutes, at best, a general public nuisance, however we cannot discern anything that would lead us to concern about any long-term hazards to the public at large or to the national security.
Here is the essence of the current matter. Professor Ballsnipe has devoted virtually all of his free time for the last two years to the design and construction of a full-sized electro-hydraulic elephant, which he is now “testing,” to the great aggravation of the public. He originally referred to this monstrosity as an “electro-hydro-phant” but has recently (“for marketing purposes,” he fancies) changed it to simply an “electrophant.” This will be the subject of our review.
His invention is the size of a full-size elephant, bearing a box-shaped passenger howdah covered with a red canopy. It has an articulated metal skeleton moved by a vast number of motors and hydraulic cylinders, and is covered with a kind of rubberized canvas brown-grey “skin.” It has ivory-colored plastic tusks and a fully-moveable trunk. When it is in operation, the elephant effect is somewhat diminished by the sound of the three petrol engines in the thing’s innards. Two of these run hydraulic pumps, and the third generates electricity and provides compressed air to keep the skin inflated to an appropriate shape.
Like the old story of the man who constructed a boat in his basement, Professor Ballsnipe constructed this abomination in his garage, only to discover the door wasn’t high enough to permit its removal. He had to have the front of the garage ripped off and rebuilt higher. At that point, he was planning to control the thing riding like a perfect mahout, behind its head. However, initial trials demonstrated that there was not enough room for the number of pedals, levers, and valves he needed to have even a minimal amount of control over the thing, hence the howdah was added, which added a good 5 feet to the height, and necessitated another rip-off and re-make of his garage front.
When parked in his garage, the thing leans forward slightly with its trunk sticking straight out and plugged into a computer coupling, and an exceedingly dazed expression on its face. Since its skin is deflated, it looks bizarrely thin, is if it were being sucked right into the wall through its trunk.
If it looks strange when parked, it looks even worse when under way. All three engines are roaring, there are creaks and groans of the structure, and various hydraulic hisses and pops emanate from within. The professor is strapped into his control chair in the howdah, constantly working various levers and pedals. The thing lurches along in a most alarming manner, pitching and veering in the general direction of travel. Personally, we cannot imagine anything more harrowing than being 10 feet off the ground on that thing, swaying side to side over 30 degrees either side of the vertical, and seemingly constantly on the verge of upsetting. He manages to get it up to the rate of a leisurely stroll but only with the most vigorous efforts on his part at the controls.
One of the neighbors we interviewed pointed out to him that the government has not been able to master the robotic motions of even a low, small 10-legged centipede-like machine, much less a full-sized elephant. Ballsnipe retorted that “the civil service and their consulting lackeys” were nothing but “fools,” “morons,” “donkeys” and “insectivorous vermin” and couldn’t be expected to discover anything of any importance. He regards their failures as signs of “incompetence of the highest degree” and feels they should be jailed for squandering the public’s money on artificial centipedes. Apparently he believes that artificial elephants have some further redeeming purpose.
On the subject of the neighbors, they are on the verge of insurrection over this. Every time he runs a test, they call in their children with whistles and then call the police. The police are at a loss, however, as Ballsnipe has licensed it as a “motor vehicle” and thus is allowed to use the public roads for his tests. They have tried all sorts of maneuvers regarding this, including pointing out that it has no wheels. It turns out, oddly enough, that wheels are not required, as witnessed by a gent in Tyneside who ten years ago built a hovercraft and was allowed to run it on the streets under the same theory.
The thing has been equipped with a frightfully loud trumpet, the trunk even rises up into the air when he lets loose a blast on it. The trumpet was the result of vast effort on his part to use a variety of pipes, reeds, and horns to mimic exactly the sonic spectrum of actual elephants. At one point during development, something in the mechanism stuck and the thing kept blowing for upwards of half-an-hour while Ballsnipe, wearing sound-proof headphones, “attempted to debug the control circuitry”. In the meantime, the entire neighborhood for 300 meters around was treated to the most phenomenal racket imaginable, especially since it was jammed on one note. Finally a constable came round and just unplugged the air compressor. This infuriated Ballsnipe, who complained bitterly that he couldn’t fix something that way, with it off. The constable noted that he needed a “permit to sound a horn or warning appliance for the purposes of testing” and if he didn’t get one he would be arrested.
Miraculously, there have been few serious accidents to date with it. Last year one of the neighbors (a man named Shaftsworth) turned his dog on the beast while it was out on a test, and it managed to gnaw through the outer covering and chew up some of the wiring in one of the rear “legs.” For this, the dog was promptly electrocuted, and the hydraulics controlling the after parts of the machine failed, thus toppling it over backwards and thoroughly flattening (appropriately enough) Shaftsworth’s car.
Ballsnipe and Shaftsworth sued and countersued over this, Shaftsworth maintaining that Ballsnipe had “constructed and loosed an Infernal Machine,” and Ballsnipe in turn accusing Shaftsworth of “sabotage and interfering with an inventor’s activities.” Shaftsworth invoked common law regarding “engines of destruction” and Ballsnipe counter-invoked the “interests of National Defense.” The case then hinged around the question of whether the dog had intent “to cause damage” or not and whether or not Shaftsworth had the power to command it to do his bidding. Ballsnipe brought in witnesses from the Royal Canine Society who testified as to how this particular kind of dog was so loyal to its master, etc., and in turn Shaftsworth’s neighbors swore that he had never shown the slightest ability to control the dog, which they further stated was “exceedingly dense” and “beyond redemption as to intelligence.” Ballsnipe then stalled the whole proceedings by filing an additional complaint for Shaftsworth’s “keeping an uncontrollable and dangerous animal in a residential neighborhood.” To everyone’s extreme displeasure Ballsnipe prevailed on all counts. Feelings ran so high that the judge was placed under the protection of a constable for a fortnight thereafter, for his safety.
Although the monstrosity can hardly walk, Ballsnipe assumes it could be “scaled up with no difficulty whatsoever” to one that could run, spin on its axis, and so on. He is busy at the moment in preparing pamphlets extolling its virtues in a wide variety of exceedingly unlikely purposes, including parading, “forcing traffic jams to loosen,” patrolling parks, and riot control. We can see traffic jams forming around them quite easily, but how this thing would clear them is not at all clear, unless he envisions using it to shovel the offending cars off to the side of the road. As to riot control, in his heated imagination he forsees outfitting these things with machine guns in place of the tusks, with an operator concealed in the head. Disregarding the issue of using machine guns against a domestic disturbance, we cannot see how they could possibly be aimed effectively given how the thing rolls and pitches drunkenly. Perhaps he feels that once people saw the result of a phalanx of these beasts advancing and spraying machine-gun fire more or less indiscriminately in a wide arc in front of them, they would flee in terror, which would be an entirely rational response.
We have sent some undercover agents around to see him, posing as new neighbors. To them, and as usual, Ballsnipe complains about everyone around him who be believes is “hindering” his “experiments.” The town council are “swine of the highest order,” the newspaper reporters are all “illiterate panderers of the corporate cabals,” objecting neighbors are “short-sighted, dim-witted, uneducated, and lacking any shred of imagination.” The police are, of course, “thugs” and “hired torpedoes” bent on enforcing the “stupid writs of a corrupt and venal judiciary.” And so on.
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