The Holmes-Ginsbook Device
by ISAAC ASIMOV 

In Science, the double feel licks the one-pinch effect every time!

I have never seen Myron Ginsbook in a modest mood.

But then, why should I have? Mike — we all call him Mike, although he is Dr. Ginsbook, Nobel Laureate, to a reverential world —is a typical product of the 21stCentury. He is self-confident, as so many of us are, and by right should be.

He knows the worth of mankind, of society, and most of all of himself.

He was born on January 1, 2001,so he is as old as the Century exactly. I am ten years younger, that much farther removed from the unmentionable Twentieth.

Oh, I mentioned it sometimes. All youngsters have their quirks and mine had been a kind of curiosity about mankind’s earlier history, concerning which so little is known and so little, I admit, ought to be known. But I was curious.

It was Mike who rescued me in those days. " Don’t," he would say, leering at the girls as they passed in their bikini business suits, and leaning over at intervals to feel the material judiciously, "don’t play with the past. Oh, ancient history isn’t bad, nor medieval times, but as soon as we reach the birth of technology, forget it. From then on it’s scatology; just filth and perversion. You’re a creature of the Twenty first. Be free. Breathe deeply of our century’s clean air! It will do wonders for you. Look at what it’s doing for that remarkable girl to your left."

And it was true. Her deep breathing was delightful. Ah, those were great days, when science was pulsing and we two were young, carefree and eager to grab the world by the tail.

Mike was sure he was going to advance science enormously and I felt the same. It was the great dream of all of us in this glorious Century, still youthful. It was as though some great voice were crying: Onward! Onward! Not a glance behind l

I picked up that attitude from Paul Derrick, the California wizard. He’s dead now, but a great man in his time, quite worthy of being mentioned in the same breath with myself.

I was one of his graduate students and it was hard at first. In college, I had carefully selected those courses which had had the least mathematics and the most girls* and had therefore learned how to hemstitch with surpassing skill but had, I admit, left myself weak in physics.

After considerable thought, I realized that hemstitching was not going to help me make further advances in our great Twenty-first Century technology. The demand for improvements in hemstitching was meager and I could see clearly that my expertise would not lead me to the coveted Nobel Prize. So I pinched the girls goodby and joined Derrick’s seminars.

I understood little at first but I did my best to ask questions designed to help Derrick demonstrate his brilliance and rapidly advanced to the head of the class in consequence. I was even the occasion for Derrick’s greatest discovery.

He was smoking at the time. He* was an inveterate smoker and proud of it, always taking his cigarette out and looking at it lovingly between puffs. They were girlie cigarettes, with fetching nudes on the clear white paper — *always a favorite with scientists.

"Imagine," he would say in the course of his famous lectures on Twenty-first Century Technological Concepts, "how we have advanced on the Dark Ages in the matter of cigarettes alone. Rumors reach us that in the the Famed Twentieth Century, cigarettes were a source of disease and air pollution. The details are not known,of course, and no one, I imagine, would care to find out, yet the rumors are convincing. Now, however, a cigarette liberates air purifying ingredients into the atmosphere, fills it with a pleasant aroma, and strengthens the health of the smoker. It has, in fact, only one drawback."

Of course, we all knew what it was. I had frequently seen Derrick with a blistered lip, and he had a fresh blister that day. It impeded his speech somewhat.

Like all thoughtful scientists, he was easily distracted by passing girls, and on those occasions he would frequently place his cigarette in his mouth wrong end in. He would inhale deeply and the cigarette would spontaneously ignite, with the lit end in his mouth.

I don’t know how many learned professors I had seen, in those days, interrupt their intimate conversations with secretaries to yell in agony as another blister was added to tongue or lip.

On this occasion, I said in jest,"Professor Derrick, why don’t you remove the ignition tip before putting the cigarette in your mouth?" It was a mild witticism and actually, if I remember correctly, I was the only one who laughed. Yet the picture brought up by the remark was a funny one. Imagine a cigarette without its ignitable tip! How could one smoke it?

But Derrick’s eyes narrowed."Why not?" he said. "Observe!"

In front of the class, Derrick whipped out a cigarette, observed it carefully — his particular brand presented its girlies in lifelike tints— then pinched off the ignotip.

He held it up between two fingers of his left hand and said again,"Observe!" He placed the unignitable residue of the cigarette in his mouth. A thrill went through us all as we observed from the position of the girlie that he had deliberately placed the cigarette in his mouth wrong end in. He inhaled sharply and nothing, of course, happened.

"The unblistering cigarette," he said.

I said, "But you can’t light it."

"Can’t you?" he said and, with a flourish, brought the ignotip up against the cigarette. We all caught our breath. It was a sheer stroke of genius, for the ignotip would light the safe outside end of the cigarette, whichever end it was.

Derrick inhaled sharply and the ignotip flared into life, igniting the outer tip of the cigarette — and the tip of Derrick’s thumb and forefinger. With a howl, he dropped it and naturally, the entire class laughed with great cheerfulness this time.

It was a stroke of misfortune for me. Since I had suggested the miserable demonstration, he kicked me out of his class forever.

This was, of course, unfair, since I had made it possible for him to win the Nobel Prize, though neither of us realized it at the time. You see, the laughter had driven Derrick to frenzy. He was determined to solve the problem of the unblisterable cigarette. To do so, he bent his giant mind to the problem full time, cutting down his evenings with the girls to five a week — almost unheard of in a scientist, but he was a notorious ascetic.

In less than a year, he had solved the problem. Now that it is over, of course, it seems obvious to all of us, but at the time, I assure you, it dumbfounded the world of science.

The trick was to separate the ignotip from the cigarette and then devise some way of manipulating the ignotip safely. For months, Derrick experimented with different shapes and sizes of handles.

Finally, he decided on a thin shaft of wood as ideal for the purpose. Since it was difficult to balance a cigarette tip on the wood,he discarded the tobacco and paper and made use of the chemicals with which the cigarette tip had been impregnated. These chemicals he coated on the tip of the shaft.

At first, he lost considerable time trying to make the shaft hollow so that it could be sucked or blown through to ignite the chemicals. The resulting fire might then be applied to the cigarette. This, however, revived the original problem. What if one put the wrong end of the shaft in the hand?

Derrick then got his crowning idea. It would only be necessary to increase the temperature of the chemicals by friction, by rubbing the tip of the wood against a rough surface. This was absolutely safe for if, in the course of bestowing a fatherly kiss on the lips of a girl student intent on an A in her course at any hazard — a typical event in every scientist’s life — one should rub the wrong end of the wood on a rough surface, nothing at all would happen. It was a perfect fail safe mechanism.

The discovery swept the world. Who, today, is without his package of ignosplints, which can be lit at any time in perfect safety, so that the day of the blistered lip is gone forever? Surely this great invention is a match for any other this great Century has seen; as much a match, in fact, that some wags have suggested the ignosplints be called "matches". Actually, that name is catching on.

Derrick received his Nobel Prize in Physics almost at once and the world applauded.

I returned then and tried to re-enroll in his class, pointing out that but for me he would never have earned that Nobel Prize. He kicked me out with harsh expletives, threatening to apply an ignosplint to my nose.

After that my one ambition was to win a Nobel Prize of my own, one that would drown out Derrick’s achievement. I, John Holmes, would show him.

But how? How?

1 managed to get a grant that would take me to England in order to study Lancashire hemstitching, but I had no sooner got there than I pulled every string I could to get into Cambridge, with its famous covey of girl students and its almost equally famous Chumley Maudlin (pronounced Cholmondeley Magdalen) Technological Institute.

The girl students were warm and exotic and I spent many an evening stitching hems with them. Many of the Cantabrigian scientists were struck with the usefulness of the pursuit, not having discerned earlier this particular advantage of sewing. Some of them tried to get me to teach them to hemstitch but I followed that old First Law of Scientific Motivation: "What’s in it for me?" I didn’t teach them a thing.

Mike Ginsbook, however, having watched me from a distance, quickly picked up the intricate finger manipulations of hemstitching and joined me.

"It’s my talent," he said with charming immodesty. "I have a natural aptitude at manipulation."He was my man! I recognized at that moment that he would help me to the Nobel Prize. There remained only to choose the field of activity that would get it for us.

For a year our association produced nothing except for a sultry brunette or two; and then one day I said to him lazily, "I can’t help but notice, Mike, that your eyes are extraordinately limpid. You’re the only one on campus who doesn’t have bloodshot sclera."

He said, "But the answer is simple. I never view microfilms. They are a curse."

"Oh?"

"I’ve never told you?" A somber look crossed his face and a clear Stab of pain furrowed his brow. I had clearly activated a memory almost too sharp to bear. He said,"I was once viewing a microfilm with my head completely enclosed in the viewer, naturally. While I was doing that, a gorgeous girl passed by — a girl who won the title of Miss Teacher’s Pet the next two years running, I might say —and I never noticed her. I was told about it afterward by Tancred Hull, the gynecologist. He spent three nights with her, the cad, explaining that he was giving her a physical checkup. Had pictures taken to prove it that were the talk of Cambridge."

Mike’s lips were quivering."From that time on," he said in a low, suffering voice, "I have vowed never to view a film again."

I was almost faint with the sudden inspiration that struck me. "Mike/’ I said. "Might there not be some way in which microfilms can be viewed more simply? Look, films are covered with microscopic print. That print has to be enlarged for us to see it That means bending over an immobile screen or encasing the head in a viewer.

"But — " and I could hardly breathe with the excitement of it — "what if the material on the film were enlarged until it could be seen with the naked eye and then a photograph of the enlarged print were taken? You could carry the photograph with you, looking at it at your leisure whenever you chose. Why, Mike, if you were looking at such a photo and a girl passed by,it would be the work of a moment to lift your head. The photo would not take up your attention as viewer would."

"Hmm," said Mike, thoughtfully. I could see his giant mind spinning over every ramification of the subject "It really might not interfere with girl watching; less important,it might prevent bloodshot eyes. Oh,but wait, all you would have would be about five or six hundred words and you would be bound to read that through before the day was over. Then what?"

It was amazing to watch him pick unerringly the flaw in the project

For a moment, I was daunted. I hadn’t thought of that Then I said, "Perhaps you could make a large series of small photographs and paste them together in order. Of course, that might be more difficult to carry."

"Let’s see — " Mike’s mind continued to work. He leaned back in his chair, closed his eyes, straightened suddenly and looked piercingly about in every direction to make sure there were no girls in the vicinity, then closed them again.

He said, "There’s no question but that magnification is possible; photography is possible. If all of a typical microfilm is expanded and photographed, however, so that it could be read with the unaided eye, the resultant series of photographs would cover an area of — "Here he whipped out his famous girlie slide-rule, designed by himself, with the hairline neatly and stimulatingly bisecting a buxom blonde. He manipulated it caressingly. " — an area of ISO square feet in area at least We would have to use a sheet of paper ten feet by fifteen feet and crawl around on it."

"That would be possible," I muttered.

"Too undignified for a scientist unless, of course, he were pointing out something to a girl student And even then she might get interested in reading whatever it was he was pointing out and that would kill everything."

We were both down in the dumps at that We recognized that we had Nobel material here. Films had the virtue of being compact, but that was their only virtue.

Oh, if only you could fold a ten foot by fifteen foot piece of paper in your hand. You would require no electronic or photonic equipment to read it. You could read any part of it at will. You could go backward or forward without having to manipulate any controls. You would merely shift your eyes.

The whole thought was incredibly exciting. The technological advance involved in using eye muscles in place of expensive equipment was enormous. Mike pointed out at once that glancing back and forth over a large sheet of paper would exercise the eye muscles and equip a scientist better for the important task of not failing to observe the feminine parade.

It remained only to determine how best to make a large sheet of paper portable and manipulable.

I took a course in topology in order to learn folding techniques and many was the evening my girlfriend of the day and I would design some order of folding. Beginning at opposite ends of the sheet of paper, we would come closer and closer as we folded according to some intricate formula, until we were face to face, panting and flushed with the mental and physical exertion. The results were enormously exciting but the folding procedures were never any good.

How I wished I had studied more mathematics. I even approached Prunella Plug, our harsh voiced laundress, who folded bedsheets with aplomb and dignity. She was not about to let me into the secret, however.

I might have explained what I wanted the folding for, but I wasn’t going to let her in on it. I meant to share the Nobel Prize with as few people as possible. The famous phrase of the great scientist Lord Clinchmore — "I’m not in science for my health, you know"— rang through my mind.

One morning I thought I had it. Oh, the excitement of it! I had to find Mike, for only his keen analytical mind would tell me if there were flaws in the notion. I tracked him down to a hotel room atlas but found him deeply involved with a young lady — or popsie, to use the scientific term.

I banged away at the locked door until he came out, rather in a bad humor for some reason. He said, "Darn it, Jack, you can’t interrupt research like that." Mike was a dedicated scientist.

I said, "Listen. We’ve been thinking in terms of two dimensions. What about one dimension?"

"How do you mean, one dimension?"

"Take the photos," I said, "and make them follow one after the other in a single line I"

"It would be yards and yards long." He worked out the figures with his finger on his colleague’s abdomen, while I watch closely to make sure that he made no mistakes. He said, "It could easily be 200 feet long. That’s ungainly."

"But you don’t have to fold," I said. "You roll. You place one end on one plastic rod, and the other end on another. You roll them together!"

"Great Scott," said Mike, shocked into profanity by the thought."Maybe you have it"

It was that very day, however, that the blow struck. A visiting professor from California had news. Paul Derrick, he said, was rumored to be working on the problem of a non-electronic film. He didn’t seem to know what that meant, but we did and our hearts sank again.

I said, "He must have heard of what we’re doing here. We’ve got to beat him."

And how we tried! We took the photographs ourselves, pasted them side by side, rolled them on rods. It was a job of unimaginable complexity and delicacy that might well have used skilled artisans, but we were intent on allowing no outsider to see what we were doing.

It worked, but Mike was uncertain. He said, "I don’t think it’s really practical. If you want to find a particular place in the film, you have to roll and roll and roll, one way or another. It is very hard on the wrists."

But it was all we had. I wanted to publish, but Mike held back. "Let’s see what Derrick has worked out," he said.

"But if he has this, he will have anticipated us."

Mike shook his head, "If this is all he’s got, it doesn’t matter. This isn’t going to win the Nobel Prize. It isn’t good enough — I just felt it, here."

He placed his hand on the girlie stitched on his shirt pocket so sincerely that I did not argue. Mike was a great scientist and a great scientist just knows what will get a Nobel Prize and what will not. That’s what makes a scientist great.

Derrick did announce his discovery — and it had a flaw in it that an average high school student would have spotted at once.

His non-electronic film was simply our old two dimensional sheets, but without even our efforts to fold them. It just hung down the side of a large walk A movable ladder was supplied that was attached to a runner near the ceiling. One of Derrick’s students climbed the ladder and read aloud into the microphones.

Everyone oohed and awed at the sight of someone reading with the unaided eye, but Mike, watching on television, slapped his thigh in amusement. "The idiot," he said. "What about people with acrophobia?"Of course! It leaped to the eye when Mike pointed it out. Any one afraid of heights couldn’t read under the Derrick system.

But I seized Mike’s wrist and said, "Now wait a while, Mike. They’re going to laugh at Derrick and that’s dangerous. As soon as this point about acrophobia comes out, Derrick will feel humiliated and he will turn with every fiber of his magnificent brain to the project. He will then solve it in weeks. We’ve got to get there first."Mike sobered up at once. "You’re right, Jack," he said simply."Let’s go out on the town. A girl or two apiece will help us think."It did, too, and then the next morning we thought about other things and got back to work.

I remember I was walking back and forth, muttering, "We’ve tried two dimensions; we’ve tried one dimension; what’s left?" And then my eye fell upon Mike’s girlie shirt with the nude on the breast pocket so cleverly hemstitched that strategic areas were distinctly raised.

"Heavens," I said, "we haven’t tried three dimensions."

I went screaming for Mike. This time I was sure I had it and I could hardly breathe waiting for his judgment. He looked at me,eyes luminous. "We have it," he said.

It’s so simple, looking back on it. We simply piled the photographs in a heap.

The heaps could be kept in place in any number of ways. They could be stapled, for instance. Then Mike got the idea of placing them between stiff cardboard covers to protect individual photographs from damage.

Within a month, we had published. The world rang with the discovery and everyone knew that the next Nobel Prize in physics would be ours.

Derrick, to do him justice, congratulated us and said, "Now the world can read without electronics and by the use of the unaided eyes, thanks to the Holmes-Ginsbook device. I congratulate those two dirty rats on their discovery."

That handsome acknowledgment was Science at its best.

'The Holmes-Ginsbook device is now a household item. The popularity of the device is such that its name has been shortened to the final syllable and increasing numbers of people are calling them simply "books."

This eliminates my name, but I have my Nobel Prize and a contract to write a book on the intimate details surrounding the discovery for a quarter million dollar advance. Surely that is enough. Scientists are simple souls and once they have fame, wealth and girls, that’s all they ask.
END