I was late onto the Web -- I think I'd only just got a graphical browser going around the time I wrote this piece in January of 1996. I was writing a "32-bit Computing" column for PCW at the time, and a couple of years earlier readers had been pestering me to take a look at this new thing called Linux. I started writing about Linux in 1994 -- I seem to remember it took something like 10 floppy disks to load it and the accompanying GNU software onto my laptop -- and for the first year I didn't even install X on top of it, and so was running in character-based mode.
But I didn't care. I was just besotted with the fun of getting to grips again with what was essentially a free and democratic UNIX -- an operating system I had for a long time gone round telling anybody who would listen was "the greatest intellectual adventure of the 20th Century".
Bottom line: when colleagues started urging me in the direction of this new graphical World Wide Web browser called Mosaic, I was still on Planet Charbase. That changed with the arrival on my desk of an Intel ObjectStation running NeXTStep (the operating system Tim Berners-Lee had used to develop the first World Wide Web software), by which time I had also managed to get X running on Linux.
I didn't like anything about Uri Geller. In 1980 my job as script editor on Doctor Who had been to chase the magic out of the show and put the science back in (well, that's shorthand for a rather more complicated task I was charged with, but it'll do in this current context). So I wasn't thrilled to come across Geller's magical nonsense on the Web. Perhaps too I still hadn't got to grips with the idea that this newly discovered Web of mine was "out there". In those early days I may still have been under the illusion that everything on my screen was somehow inside my computer. And I didn't welcome hosting Geller in any shape or form.
James Randi, however, is a great guy. Check him out on the Wikipedia.
MSC002: Spoonwatch on the Web][mscop][22 Jan 96][chb]
I see Uri Geller has discovered the World Wide Web. On a page called Uri Geller's Psychic City he offers visitors a chance to "participate in an online experiment in psychokinesis" and win a million dollars. He is going to lock a spoon up in a safe where it will be under constant scrutiny from a video camera. What you do is go on line, watch the video, and concentrate on the spoon until you get it to bend. Then you send in your invoice.
Well, not quite. Mr Geller wants to be perfectly fair about this: if the cutlery curves while you're watching it who's to say it isn't someone else's mental muscle at work. So everybody electronically present at the moment the silverware succumbs will be invited to "take part in a series of psychic tests with Uri Geller to determine the winner". Oh, and the experiment hasn't quite started yet, because Mr Geller is still looking for a sponsor.
Uri Geller arrived in this country in the early '70's, and the moment he stepped off the plane he thrilled the respected science correspondent of the Observer -- Brian Inglis, if I remember correctly -- by causing a dagger-shaped paper knife to bend mysteriously in front of his eyes. But there were a few details in the series of photos accompanying Brian Inglis' uncritical story that had apparantly escaped his attention. I used a piece of string to measure the knife in the photo-sequence and noticed that it wasn't only bending, it was also getting longer. It crossed my uncharitable mind that this is what you'd see if the blade were already bent and initially presented with its concave face direct to the camera. Geller would then just need to gently rotate the knife... The shifting position of the hilt and Geller's fingers in the sequence of shots seemed to prove the point.
But steady on. As Mr Geller is strenuously litiginous in defence of his psychic powers, I'm advised by my solicitor to offer a more rational explanation. The clues I thought I saw were probably telepathically imprinted on my mind by some malign anti-Geller magician. Indeed there was and is such a person, "The Amazing Randi". All through the '70's and '80's, while Mr Geller graced the world with a series of phenomenal feats, James Randi, a brash, bearded American, lowered the tone by replicating every one of the Geller miracles using only his skills as a professional prestidigitator.
The wonder of the Internet is that it brings all sorts of old junk floating to the surface. But its biggest strength is that it puts you in touch with people. People like the redoubtable James Randi himself. He got to the Internet long before Uri Geller -- he's been there since 1992, and in his mail list archive you can read about the debilitating financial effect on Randi of being pursued through the courts by Mr Geller. Last year Randi emerged legally victorious, and now Mr Geller is stuck with a bill for tens of thousands of dollars. I used a telepathic extension of my personality known as email to ask Randi whether the series of courtroom sagas had made him cautious about any future debunking of the spoonbender. Randi's reply came back swift as thought itself.
"Chris: Don't ever let your mind wander to the possibility that my "sting has been drawn"! Never! [But] my activities hardly involve him any more. He's old news.
"Re the Geller WWW page, it's laughable... How silly can people get? Mind you, I think I can see Geller's plan here. If he's as cunning as I think he is, he'll suddenly announce that the spoon-in-a-safe became bent, and now he's calling in all those who were trying at that moment, to give them the Acid Test. And, quel dommage!, they will all fail and will not be paid the million! Drat!
"Now that his star has faded, Geller's looking for ANYTHING that will bring in money, and this is a pretty feeble effort! It's fascinating to watch U.G. going down the drain slowly. I warned him, years ago, that this would inevitably happen, but it appears that he has undiminished faith in the gullibility of the human race. Hmmmm. In that, he may be right."
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