It’s remarkable!
Many years ago I remember seeing a clip from some old, weird horror film, probably from the 1960s, in which a mad inventor is demonstrating to what I recall was some sort of deformed servant a kind of torture chair that he'd invented.
He's explaining the chair while sitting down in it, calmly describing how the victim will sit in it unsuspectingly, and then, the moment he puts his arms on the chair's armrests, the "Igor" lunges at some sort of lever, trapping the mad inventor in his own invention, then gurgles, triumphantly, something along the lines of, "I have you now, I finally have you where I've always wanted you!"
I don't remember if the movie was in black-and-white or color, and it seems like it would've been a Roger Corman type of film or a Hammer film.
I'm hoping some die-hard fan of mid-20th-Century horror cinema will remember the scene and what film it's from!
So there's no patent office before. So inventors probably kept their own inventions secret. So the question is, did this secrecy and lack of spread of information lead to inventors refusing to teach others their knowledge, leading to knowledge loss and the stagnation of science?
I'm hazy on a lot of details, was just reminded of it when listening to a rebroadcast from an anthology podcast (drabblecast) for a similar story.
Seems like the story centered on an inventor who discovered the secret to cheap time travel, but doesn't dare tell anyone. Seems like it was in the form of opening a window to the area so you could see what happened, but couldn't go there physically or transmit information to that time. When he first tried it he went back in time to the night of the house fire that killed their child, and discovered that the fire had been started by his negligence. He decides not to tell anyone because he "knows" that his wife would do the same thing he did, and would leave him. He also believes that once she finds out she can see that day, that she'll become obsessed with it and spend all her time watching that day (or their kid, don't recall).
I think I read it about 25 years ago, and at the time I was reading a lot of classic scifi from the Asimov, Bradbury, Clark era. It could have been a story from Encyclopedia Mathematica (an anthology of scifi stories), but I'm not sure. At any rate it was set in that kind of general "Present" that a some of those stories were, where it could have (presumably) happened anywhere from the 1950's to the 1990's as it didn't reference anything that stood out as being from one time period.
This ringing any bells for anyone else?
Maybe
