The Oxometer

I

IT must now be verging on six or seven years since my old friend Bill M. told me he was working on a device that he said would be the greatest invention of all time. As he described it, I could see that he was right. There was no shadow of doubt in my mind that if he could make the thing work, it would be the most powerful agent for promoting civilization that the world has ever seen. By comparison, the wheel, the lever, and all the other fundamental aids to civilization put together, would be nothing to it. I was immensely enthusiastic over the idea, and whenever I saw Bill I would ask him how it was coming on, but presently Bill moved, and I was away a good deal, so we more or less lost sight of each other, and I rather thought, since I had seen no word of his invention in the public prints, that probably he had been unable to get it going and had given it up.

Last week, however, Bill telephoned me to come around to his workshop and see a demonstration. It seems that shortly after he first spoke of it to me he had gone so far as to get the machine working perfectly under controlled conditions, and only a few slight simplifications and adjustments were needed to make it foolproof, but these were so troublesome that it had taken him five years to get them fined down exactly right, shipshape and according to Gunter. I remembered that Edison had hit the same snag with talking pictures and lay aground on it a long time. I saw talking pictures perfectly synchronized in his laboratory years before they came out commercially; he had got them to the point where they would work all right when he worked them, but not to the point where anybody could work them. That was the way with Bill’s machine. He worked it for me almost all the afternoon, and I never saw anything so indescribably marvelous in my life.

Bill named his machine the ‘oxometer,’ accent on the second syllable. How he came to give it that name is rather a long story, but it must be gone through with in order to show what the machine is for, so the reader will not find it uninteresting.

The term bull has been long current in the glossary of journalism, and has seeped out to some extent into common slang. Newspaper men have told me that it means slight stuff which its authors know is unsound and do not take seriously, and which is printed only to fill space in a way that is appealing and agreeable to a low order of intelligence and taste. It is not synonymous with hooey, for that implies self-deception on the part of the utterer; he believes in what he says, notwithstanding it may actually be most dreadful nonsense. Thus, as I understand it, the formulas worked out by circle-squarers, flat-earth people and perpetual-motion savants are hooey, not bull. Tripe, again, seems to be not quite the same thing as bull, because it carries a distinct implication of something commonplace and hackneyed. A person who in good faith rehashes some old story, or propounds as a novelty or a discovery some simple fact that everyone knows, is emitting tripe. Perhaps the thing most nearly analogous to bull is buncombe or bunk, though not exactly so, I think, but quite nearly.

I do not know how this use of the term bull came about. I once published an inquiry and got a good many replies, none of them satisfactory. One correspondent said he had found a suggestion of it in Homer, but I looked the passage up and thought it very doubtful. I have flirted with the notion that it may have come into the language by way of the Spanish bulla, for I suppose that with a little stretching you might render the verb bullir in a tropical sense which would give some color to this suggestion.

I have a vague and imperfect recollection of a poem called ‘ Maddalena, or the Spanish Duel,’ which I read in my boyhood, one stanza of which runs somewhat like this: —

But problems like this are much more in my old friend Mr. Mencken’s province than in mine, so I gladly make him a present of this one. I first ran across the term some twenty years ago, in the phrase shooting the bull or its variant throwing the bull, which I believe is now more common. I remember that during the war, when the wife of a prominent European statesman came over here to help bamboozle us in behalf of the Allies, I heard an editor tell one of his firststring sob-sisters to ‘go out and get her to shoot a little bull for us.’ I remember also as long ago as when Don Marquis ran a column called the ‘Sundial’ in the New York Sun, he wrote a poem in firstclass Kiplingese, asking what had become of the great horde of Kipling’s imitators who had so suddenly sprung up in our literary circles, and as suddenly disappeared. His first stanza ended with the line; —

The only other special use of the term that I recall hearing was from some college students at an informal gathering which in my day we would have called a gabfest. They called it a bull-session.

II

Coming back now to Bill’s oxometer, I am unable to give a technical description of it, because I am utterly ignorant of all matters appertaining to mechanics. Bill undertook to explain it to me, but the more he explained the less I understood and the more my wits were tangled up, until by the time he got through explaining I did not know anything about anything. All I can say is that the machine is a small affair, easily portable, weighing, I should say, some fifteen pounds or so. You work it by plugging in on an ordinary electric circuit and throwing a switch like a lamp-switch, which anyone can do. At the other end of the machine there is a second switch which Bill said he would tell me about later, after dinner, when something was going to happen that would give him a chance to show me something which would really astonish me.

The principle of the oxometer seems in a general way like that of a separator, or perhaps I could better compare it to the principle of an air-conditioning apparatus. I am not sure about this, but at any rate what the machine actually does is to cause bull to disappear instantly from a printed or written page by some process that appears to be like volatilization, leaving all residual sound matter quite unaffected. Bill said he called it an oxometer because it sterilizes the bull, and of course it does sterilize it in the most effective way by getting rid of it completely. Still, there is obviously a certain amount of poetic license in applying that name, but Bill is an artist, and therefore poetic terminology comes naturallike to him and he gets it in whenever he can.

Bill sat me down with a novel by an old acquaintance of ours who for years has made a lordly living by writing fiction for popular magazines. He writes them all on one formula which has never varied; that is, he tells the same story again and again in exactly the same way, merely dressing it up a little differently in each case. Bill told me to read two or three pages just to get the run of the stuff, and then he turned on the oxometer, with the amazing and incredible result that the pages I was reading instantly became blank. I leafed over the rest of the book and found that almost all the printing had disappeared. Here and there some detached sentences were left standing, sometimes most of a paragraph, but these all were bits of straight factual reporting, mostly descriptive. They were an odd sight, standing by themselves, often several blank pages apart, and unrelated to one another or to anything. ‘That settles it, you see,’ said Bill. ‘You and I have often wondered whether he took that muck seriously and really thought he was doing something, or whether it was simon-pure bull, and now we know. The oxometer can’t make a mistake — it’s bull, and all that talk he hands out about the silliness of preciosity, and how a writer ought to aim at meeting the wholesome democratic taste of the masses, is humbug.’

As I said, we kept the oxometer going most of the afternoon, turning it loose on all sorts of literature; travel-books, magazines, newspapers, essays, poems, whatever Bill happened to have around. We got some astonishing results with newspapers. I was especially keen to try out the editorial page of one paper, because for years I had not seen an editorial in it that read like anything but solid bull. The truth is, I suppose, that I could not imagine literate human beings so stupid as to write such stuff in good faith. Yet to my amazement, although we sampled the page in a number of issues, — Bill went down cellar and salvaged a dozen old ones that had been thrown away, — there was comparatively little bull in any of them. This was a puzzle to me, and still is. Other newspapers, however, made up for this deficiency. Their editorial pages never assayed more than two per cent of sound stuff, and rarely as much as that; the rest was bull.

Bill kept me to dinner with him, and afterwards we talked at length of the wonders we had seen; then presently he said he was ready to give me the real surprise of my life, for having showed me what the oxometer could do with the printed word, he would now show me what it could do with the spoken word, since one of our principal politicians was scheduled for a fireside talk over the radio on some aspects of our national affairs. Bill turned on the radio, the voice came in, we listened to several sentences; then he threw the second switch of the oxometer, the voice went dead, and we heard nothing for eight minutes, when suddenly one stanza of a poem came through — it was quoted — and then silence again. This verse of very good poetry, a quotation from Thomas Jefferson and another that I could not place, but I think it was from Edmund Burke — these were all that came through to us; the rest of the address was intercepted by the oxometer entire, lock, stock and barrel, and we heard nothing.

III

There is no point in dwelling on the glorious promise of a civilized life that Bill’s invention offers. The reader may be left to exercise his own imagination upon the enormous and truly revolutionary transformations of human existence that will now take place in consequence of the individual’s ability to make himself wholly inaccessible to the insidious advances of the bull-shooter. What will happen to the social institutions, now so many and so afflictive, which depend almost exclusively on bull for their predominance? Think of what will be left of a session of Congress, for instance, when an oxometer is installed in the Capitol! In a hundred-per-cent bull-free society (for with bull become inert, its use will no longer pay and will at once be discontinued) what will politics be like, what will the public forum, the newspaper, the school, the college, be like? What will the exercise of the learned professions be like — the law, literature, theology, medicine? What profound and salutary modifications of family life are inevitable! Can we possibly conceive of commerce, especially retail commerce, being carried on without bull? Imagination almost recoils on itself in contemplating the immensity of the field which the oxometer has opened before it. ‘I have always believed,’ said Bill, meditatively (Bill has the artistic temperament, which often gives his talk a pessimistic turn), ‘I have always believed that God must have some good reason for allowing such a country as this to exist, but I could never make out what it might be until I invented the oxometer. I think perhaps His intention from the beginning was to show what can be done with the most hopeless case, like the old-time temperance lecturers who kept a horrible example on the stage to encourage the audience. For certainly, if the most bull-sodden, bull-besotted society in the world can transform itself practically overnight into a self-respecting, truth-loving, clearminded, straight-thinking, square-dealing civilization, there is the surest ground of hope for every branch of the human race, from Greenland’s icy mountains to India’s coral strand, and back again.’

Bill has applied for a patent on the oxometer, but he says he did it only to put the Patent Office in a hole. He thinks they would like to refuse him a patent on the grounds of public policy, but will hardly dare go so far as to do that. If they do, he can stir up a tremendous popular commotion against the government and have a lot of fun, because he really cares nothing about the patent; if he gets it he will use it only to control the quality of the product put out by other manufacturers, if any. Bill is well-to-do in a small way, and has no desire to get money out of his invention, but on the contrary, he wishes to make the oxometer as nearly as possible a free property of the human race. Bill says his idea is merely to add the one essential item to Mr. Hoover’s glowing forecast of true national grandeur and prosperity. He is all for the chicken in every pot, two cars in every garage, a radio in every parlor, but he wants to round out Mr. Hoover’s generous programme and make it perfect by the installation of an oxometer in every home, and also in every schoolhouse, church, college, university, and every other place of public and semi-public resort throughout the country.