Born midway between the practical triumphs of a Franklin and of an Edison, his aim was to be the comprehensive theorist, and seer, of the electromagnetic age. An amateur mathematician, like his contemporary Morse, ‘even his most unbounded imagination’ (in Dostoyevsky’s phrase) 3 ‘betrays the true American’. Alone he would play the conjuror, constructing a post-Newtonian hypothesis to decipher God Himself, the Father Almighty, in terms of an almighty electric code.

American newspapers of the 1830s and 1840s were agog with strange reports: of ballooning, exotic voyages, premature burials, automata, trances, plagues. In February 1838, while Poe was working in Greenwich Village, the new electric telegraph was demonstrated at the White House. On 23 April the Sirius, the first steamship to cross the Atlantic, chugged into New York harbour, followed that same afternoon by Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s Great Western, a 1,300-ton ironclad, which had left England three days later. ‘The Thousand-and-Second Tale of Scheherazade’ was gaily to expound these marvels – with those of the electrotype, daguerreotype, and electrotelegraphic printer. But exploitation of mechanical inventions launched a parallel boom in psychology. Into the vacuum left by Descartes and Newton flooded every form of transcendentalism. The doctrines of Swedenborg, Lavater and Saint-Martin now grew intellectually fashionable. Had not natural forces been harnessed? So too would supernatural. Progress, Democracy, Manifest Destiny, were the cry of the day. All things, physical and metaphysical, would be annexed – like Texas, Cuba, Mexico – to the American Dream. Father Miller and Prophet Joseph Smith, Mormons and Second Adventists, vied with each other for disciples. Mysticism, spiritualism, hypnotism, mesmeric trances, galvanic resuscitation, phrenology, flourished. In 1849, with a greedy rush, Eldorado itself was besieged.

It was an age for amateurs. De Quincey and Coleridge, Emerson and Poe, could still speak as ‘philosophers’, as literary gentlemen. They linger on the very edge between the old Newtonian order and the new, between Sir William Herschel and Clerk Maxwell, between Munchausen and H. G. Wells. Professionalism and the gathering complexity of research had not yet overwhelmed all but committed ‘scientists’. After mid-century such confidence became less and less attainable. Between science and literature no neutral ground now remained. So no room for ‘natural philosophy’ remained – except in that new, eccentric and bastard form, their communal offspring, ‘science fiction’.

The main line of descent is usually reckoned from Verne and H. G. Wells. But Jules Verne himself acknowledged his debt to Poe; so it was the French who first saluted the American as master: ‘le créateur du roman merveilleux-scientifique’.4 Hubert Matthey presented ‘The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar’, ‘A Tale of the Ragged Mountains’, and ‘A Descent into the Maelström’ as ‘les types d’un genre qui devait se développer après lui’; the genre itself he defined as ‘ce mélange de la logique et de la narration’. And the emphasis ever since (following Poe’s lead) has been on logic, on reason, on coherent forecast and calculation. As the master himself observed in praise of Eureka: ‘these conditions themselves have been imposed upon me, as necessities, in a train of ratiocination as rigorously logical as that which establishes any demonstration in Euclid’.5

Facts and figures, as scholars have demonstrated, were commonly adapted – plagiarized verbatim even – from published sources. That was inevitable, no doubt.