Edwardian Daleks

As part of the ongoing Mechanicals project, I have been looking through old electrical and electronics magazines. In particular I have been struck by the speculative thinking found in the "Electrical Experimenter" magazine. The cover here was published in 1918, towards the end of the Great War and when new technology was changing the way wars were fought.

I find the resemblance between the automatic soldiers in the trenches and Daleks uncanny. I only wish I could actually get hold of a copy (Yes, I know I can pay large sums of money to some US citizen.) and see the detail in the drawing. The jpeg below that I found in several places on the web simply isn't detailed enough. The body shape, in particular the head and the cable/piping around the head particularly resonate Terry Nation's creation. I was reminded of the appearance of the Dalek in the last season with Winston Churchill.

Interestingly in this picture the armaments appear to be machine guns. I realise that this was hot technology at the time, but in other articles in the magazine a death ray either produced electrically or from radium is proposed. In fact there's another cover with walking tanks using radium dearth rays published a few months before hand.

Electrical Experimenter has been a fruitful source of both practical early circuits and edwardian speculative articles. If you look at the early editions they are grounded pretty much in fact, but as the magazine progresses it slips more and more towards speculation. Nevertheless, it's an eye-opening window into what the future was supposed to look like nearly a hundred years ago, and unlike many similar publications, the predictions are closer to what actually happened in some cases.