This week’s entry: Turboencabulator
What it’s about: Just your typical collection of hydrocoptic marzlevanes fitted to an ambifacient lunar waneshaft. In 1944, British grad student John Hellins Quick wrote of a nonexistent machine in the pages of the Institution of Engineering and Technology’s Students’ Quarterly Journal, using a ridiculous abundance of nonsense technobabble not seen outside late-season Star Trek: The Next Generation. Engineers the world over embraced the device—whose main winding “was of the normal lotus-o-deltoid type placed in panendermic semi-boloid slots in the stator”—and the turboencabulator’s legend lives on more than 75 years later.
Biggest controversy: Time magazine, not renowned for their sense of humor, got in on the joke in 1946, printing a straight-faced description of the turboencabulator that had readers baffled. Many people wrote in to complain that the magazine was using too much technical jargon for the layperson; others guessed the device was everything from a high-powered motor to a “wonderful machine for changing baby’s diapers.” One reader suggested, “it sounds like a dictionary that has been struck by lightning.”
Thing we were happiest to learn: People have taken the joke very, very far over the years. General Electric slipped a page on the turboencabulator into its 1962 handbook, the rest of which contains specs for actual GE products. In 1977, a crew working with General Motos put in some unpaid overtime to make a fake training film about the turboenabulator, basing their script on Quick’s original article from 1944. 11 year later, Chrysler made its own spoof showing how the turboencabulator is serviced (the Wiki page links to both videos, along with an introduction to Rockwell Automation’s Retro Encabulator). In 2016, nonprofit PATH posted an April Fools’ video describing the Micro Encabulator as a, “game-changing global health technology featuring hydrocoptic miniaturization and advanced panametric fam alignment.”
Thing we were unhappiest to learn: Describing a made-up device with made-up words is more or less the pinnacle of engineer humor, and there isn’t a lot of competition, at least according to Wikipedia’s Tech Humour category, which only lists three pages—this one, FFF system (a joke about how impractical Imperial measurements can be, namely the furlong, firkin, and fortnight), and List of Humorous Units of Measurement (which includes FFF), and sounds like a real knee-slapper.
Best link to elsewhere on Wikipedia: Isaac Asimov did for one scientific discipline what J.H. Quick did for mechanical engineering. Besides being a renowned author of science fiction and nonfiction, Asimov had a doctorate in chemistry. While doing doctoral research, he observed catechol dissolving the instant it contacted water. Asimov mused that, if the substance were any more soluble, it would dissolve before it touched the water. So he wrote a scientific paper about thiotimoline, an imaginary molecule whose chemical bonds reached into the future and the past, causing the material to dissolve in advance of contact with water. He published the article in Astounding Science Fiction, on the condition that it run under a pseudonym, worried that Columbia might think him less than serious in his pursuit of his doctorate. The magazine didn’t comply, and the Columbia University faculty slipped a question about thiotimoline into Asimov’s dissertation defense, acknowledging that they were in on the joke. He got his degree, and thiotimoline made it into several of his innumerable short stories.
Further Down the Wormhole: G.E.’s Instrument Department, which was responsible for the turboencabulator page in the 1962 handbook, was located in Lynn, Massachusetts. For a town of less than 100,000 people, Lynn has numerous claims to fame: Frederick Douglass lived there when he wrote his first, groundbreaking memoir, Narrative Of The Life Of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave; General Electric was formed there when Lynn’s Thomson-Houston Electric Company merged with Schenectady’s Edison Electric; and it was home to the first iron works, the first fire engine, the first baseball game played under artificial light, and the first roast beef sandwich. Besides Douglass, past residents include 60 Minutes journalist Lesley Stahl, Social Distortion singer Mike Ness, and actress Verna Bloom, who appeared in films as varied as Animal House, High Plains Drifter, and The Last Temptation of Christ. Among other distinctions, Last Temptation is notable for being the Martin Scorsese film with the least amount of cursing. In sharp contrast to that is The Wolf Of Wall Street, a film that ranks third on the all-time List of Films That Most Frequently Use the Word “Fuck”. We’ll take a monkey-fighting look at that Monday-to-Friday list of frozen films next week, you fairy godmother.
48 Comments
Needs more patch hamplers.
Patch Adams 2: Patch Hamplers
This is what happens when engineers try and tell a joke. It’s not a pretty sight.
And of course the punchline at the end is “the government is stupid!”, which has pretty much been the attitude of every engineer I’ve ever met.
And of course the punchline at the end is “the government is stupid!”, which has pretty much been the attitude of every engineer I’ve ever met. Well that, and these are basically a sub-genre of the very loathsome corporate humor sketch. My dad wasn’t an engineer, but his company would periodically send him home with some sales or marketing training video, and they usually had to throw in some kind of cutesy little skit to try and lighten up the dry material. If you ever saw the Enron documentary The Smartest Guys in The Room, they have a few examples of these. One that sticks to my mind is of Jeff Skilling and the folks from Arthur Anderson yucking it up about their smoke and mirrors accounting practices.The Wikipedia page also talks a bit about the actor, a veteran of many industry training films. It states that he “convinced” the director and the film crew to stay after the filming of a GMC project training film to do it. What do you want to bet he tried to parlay it into a nice little sideline, making appearances at industry seminars and conventions and the like?
Thank you for elaborating with all of that and adding nuance and context; with a lot of those folks there is this duality of having dependence on institutions to get as much funding as possible while at the same time laughing at those same institutions for falling for the grift. I haven’t gotten around to watching The Smartest Guys in The Room but I’m adding to my list to make sure I don’t forget to.
It also seems like an example of a joke taken too far. It’s plausible that it was funny the first time, but then a bunch of unfunny people latched onto it and beat it to death.That kind of gibberish humor was all the rage in the 40s. There’s a movie called All Through The Night where Bogart engages in it. It hasn’t aged well.
I think it’s worth considering that we’re in a pretty good era for comedy and the bar was set pretty low in the mid ‘40s. I’d imagine in the final year of WWII people were pretty eager to laugh at anything.
Hang on, hang on, “fortnight” is a very useful word (one which, as a Brit in an American company, I am trying to get used more widely). “Biweekly” is ambiguous; “two-weekly” is ugly; “every two weeks” is a mouthful. “Fortnight” is much more fun to say.
“Biweekly” is only ambiguous if one is a cretinous heathen who conflates “semi-” and “bi-” as prefixes. THIS IS MY HILL AND I WILL DIE ON IT.
For example, semisexuals are attracted to 18-wheeled trucks.
My only regret is that I have but one star to give.
“Bi-weekly” is every two weeks. What is ambiguous about that? It says what it is.OTOH, “fortnight” is a fun word to say.
…and The Onion was born
Describing a made-up device with made-up words is more or less the
pinnacle of engineer humor, and there isn’t a lot of competition, at
least according to Wikipedia’s Tech Humour categoryPish posh. The intensity of humor scales inversely with how specific and narrow it is, which is why the absolute funniest jokes are the ones that you share with exactly one other person. The more people have to be entertained by a joke, the broader and more general it has to be, which means that its individual power dwindles: it has to make everyone laugh, so it can only trade on things everyone has in common. Engineer humor doesn’t seem very funny to non-engineers, because it relies on specific knowledge and tropes that engineers are familiar with but non-engineers aren’t. It’s never going to be stuff that’s widely considered humorous, but it’s fucking hilarious when you’re in on it.
As an outsider I think that this is kind of humour works when it highlights the process or how easy is to actually make a mistake, say some bullshit or have like a common treaty between writer and reader to accept the barely defined jargon as the closest to what in benevolence that would mean. Like, how often one kind of reasoning is used when it doesn’t really mean much, or how often new jargon is introduced that is not defined or asked to defined because of some kind of etiquette. Or what I hate the most of the corporate world: take a metonimia and turn it to mean something slightly different so the real meaning is only shared by the chosen ones (spike, signposting)
This is a good theory, but it doesn’t explain why slipping on a banana peel is both the most universal joke in the world and the funniest possible thing that can happen to a person.Mayhe the rules are different for physical comedy, especially when it trades in someone humiliating or injuring themselves?
I’m pretty sure that’s explained by the old Mel Brooks line “Tragedy is me cutting my finger; comedy is you falling through an open manhole.”
DJ MC’s got it, Hamologist. Physical comedy is universal because it’s so basic — you fall through an open manhole? Hilarity!I cut my finger? Tragic — so, so tragic.Wordplay humor is more exclusive because it requires a shared knowledge of what’s being made fun of. For instance, in early Marx Brothers movies, which were taken from their Broadway shows, Groucho would suddenly launch into a mock-Eugene O’Neill monologue which he delivered with great drama the more absurd it got. It’s funny if you know Groucho’s looking serious while saying ridiculous things, but it’s even funnier if you know both the acting style and the writing he’s making fun of.A lot of Sixties and Seventies comedy I consider great like The Firesign Theater completely bounces off my niece because she never listened to dramatic radio or has any real familiarity with analog records with two sides, and while she’s aware of drug humor my generation’s terms and concerns aren’t at all hers: for instance, this exchange from “Nick Danger, Third Eye”:
CATHERWOOD: Tea, Madam?NANCY: (screams)NICK: (undertone) I’ll handle this… (heartily) Far Out, Catherwood! Why don’ t you roll a few bombers and put them on the side table?has me in stitches because I know “tea” was an archaic nickname for marijuana that got re-used in the late Sixties/early Seventies, and “bombers” were what we called really fat marijuana cigarettes. But given T had to tell her what a “joint” was, that bit goes right over her head.
I’ve had the same issue with my kids. They just have so little context for the things Firesign references that none of it makes any sense to them.
You’re wrong. The most universal, and oldest, jokes in the world are fart jokes.
I’m sorry, you stopped too soon. Humor for one is funnier than humor for a million, but something so narrow that nobody thinks it’s funny is even funnier, and something so annoying that not only does nobody like it but it is a negative amount of humor and every graduate of the Ringling Brothers Clown College and everyone who has ever appeared at the open mic night at the Comedy Castle in Des Moines gangs up to beat you with frozen custard pies and plates of airline food — now we’re talking funny.
I’ll allow it.
“In sharp contrast to that is The Wolf Of Wall Street, a film that ranks third on the all-time List of Films That Most Frequently Use the Word “Fuck”.”I have not looked this up or looked at the link, but my money is on Boondock Saints as the winner for most fucks given.*SPOILER ALERT*I give no fucks.
I’m reminded of the Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and its mention of a prize given to “The most gratuitous use of the word ‘Belgium’ in a serious screenplay” (“Belgium” by an odd coincidence was a profanity in galactic culture)
Lebowski has got to be WAY up there.
You would think so, but—spoiler alert for next week’s entry—it’s only twenty-third.
It would have been number 5 when it was released.
Work the turboencabulator into Phase IV of the MCU or bust.
It’s going to be the driving force between all the Phase 4 projects. Avengers 6 is going to have a dramatic close up where Elizabeth Olsen looks sternly at Crule (played by Jai Courtney) and says, “Mole Man already has the turboencabulator…” Robert Downey Jr will be sitting in the theater thinking, “I got out just in time…”
If Shang Chi manages to make The Mandarin work, then they can probably sell Mole Man.
The FFF system relies on British/Imperial measurements. Nikolas Lloyd wrote a defense of that system against metric (whose base of 10 only has two factors) here:http://lloydianaspects.co.uk/opinions/imperialHuzzaMetricPah.html#mainSection
Of course, one would normally use a different size of unit when measuring speed, like miles per hour (and as Lloyd notes, even the proponents of metric don’t use a base of 10 to measure time).
Tangentially related: Which was owned via Modern Props; only just now looking for it did I find that Modern Props closed its doors in Jan 2020. I wonder where this prop went. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BmJRqZEG4rs
Nothing personal, but god, how I hated that fucking prop. It takes up a huge amount of space and does nothing but make a couple of fluorescent bulbs flicker. It was dumb in the original “Alien Nation” and dumber in every other episode of “Star Trek: The Next Generation.” Give me the B205 anyday:
Though Airplane II is mostly a pale imitation of the original (with many of the jokes just repeated verbatim), the Shatner portion is my favorite.“I want a complete file on anyone who’s seen The Sound of Music more than four times.”
Got to give it to Shatner — nobody else could sell that so convincingly.
Well, it’s a Dual-Optical Light-Emitting Power Transducer, of course!
The guy in the photo kind of looks like Bill Maher.
I had a couple of engineering students for college roommates. We actually got along fine and they seemed to genuinely enjoy the company of an art student. I turned them on to Holt’s “The Planets” along with some Bernard Herrmann. Both had the oddest sense of humor, like machines trying to replicate something they didn’t understand the basics of.
Yeah it’s basically like in Star Trek when Data attempts to understand humor, so he turns to Joe Piscopo of all people. No clue where to even begin.
The two best units of measurement I learned about from going down my own wormhole:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helen_(unit)https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muggeseggele
Verna Bloom is terrific and at least Scorsese kept giving her work though typically as with all the female characters in his movies none of the roles were actually very good
Next week’s Wiki Wormhole will be written by special guest Mr. Falcon.
As for next week’s list, I assume this will be included -https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0486585/?ref_=fn_al_tt_2And if not, what the fuck?!
Joke’s on them. They could have gotten it working if they’d only reversed the polarity of the dylithium crystals.
I only just realized that I forgot to work in any references to the Blackadder episode where he rewrites the dictionary. I feel absolutely anaspeptic, and offer my most sincere contrafibularities to my readers.
“A giant rollercoaster of a novel in four hundred sizzling chapters. A searing indictment of domestic servitude in the eighteenth century, with some hot gypsies thrown in”Watching Blackadder the Third for the first time was one of the true bright spots of my youth.