Professor Challenger

George Edward Challenger, FRS, MD, DSc, was appointed to an assistant position at the British Museum in 1892 and was promoted within a year to assistant keeper in the Comparative Anthropology Department. He held a professorship in Zoology and was elected President of the Zoological Institute in London. Several of his inventions were successfully applied in industry and brought him additional income. Edward Malone, the narrator of The Lost World, the 1912 novel in which Challenger first appeared, described his first meeting with the character: “His appearance made me gasp. I was prepared for something strange, but not for so overpowering a personality as this. It was his size, which took one’s breath away – his size and his imposing presence. His head was enormous, the largest I have ever seen upon a human being. I am sure that his top hat, had I ventured to don it, would have slipped over me entirely and rested on my shoulders. He had the face and beard, which I associate with an Assyrian bull; the former florid, the latter so black as almost to have a suspicion of blue, spade-shaped and rippling down over his chest. The hair was peculiar, plastered down in front in a long, curving wisp over his massive forehead. The eyes were blue-grey under great black tufts, very clear, very critical, and very masterful. A huge spread of shoulders and a chest like a barrel were the other parts of him which appeared above the table, save for two enormous hands covered with long black hair. This and a bellowing, roaring, rumbling voice made up my first impression of the notorious Professor Challenger.” Challenger was also a pretentious and self-righteous scientific jack-of-all-trades. Although considered by Malone’s editor, Mr McArdle, to be “just a homicidal megalomaniac with a turn for science”, his ingenuity could be counted upon to solve any problem or get out of any unsavoury situation, and be sure to offend and insult several other people in the process. He was also seen as extremely vain by his colleagues: Edward Malone says that “he is convinced, of course, that he is destined for Westminster Abbey”, and later speculates that “in his fancy, may he see himself sometimes, gracing the vacant pedestal in Trafalgar Square”. Challenger was, in many ways, rude, crude, and without social conscience or inhibition. Yet he was a man capable of great loyalty and his love of his wife was all-encompassing. In July 1908 Malone joined Challenger, the 66 year-old Mr Summerlee, Professor of Comparative Anatomy, and the explorer and mountaineer Lord John Roxton, third son of the Duke of Pomfret and then in his mid-forties, on an expedition to the Amazon Basin, where Challenger claimed to have observed creatures from the Jurassic Age two years previously. The explorers journeyed to the great table-top mountain (tepui) that was The Lost World. The isolated plateau was home to numerous prehistoric animals, previously known only from the fossil record, including pterodactyls, allosaurids, iguanodon and an early species of hominid. A group of indigenous people also occupied the plateau and the explorers aided them to subjugate the predatory “ape-men”. The expedition returned to London, bringing with them diamonds worth £200,000. Professors Challenger and Summerlee presented their findings to the Zoological Institute on 7 November 1908 at the Queen’s Hall, Regent Street, London. They claimed to have discovered over 150 new species, some dating from the Early Jurassic. Three years later the friends re-assembled in Challenger’s Sussex home to witness The Poison Belt incident of 27 to 28 August 1911. Challenger interpreted a shift in Fraunhofer’s light diffraction lines to predict that the Earth was passing through a deadly interstellar cloud of ether. By breathing oxygen from cylinders brought to the house earlier Challenger, his wife and friends avoided falling into catalepsy over the several hours the event lasted. It appeared as though all animal life on the planet had expired but within 28 hours all had recovered. Next, he purchased an estate on Hengist Down near to his Sussex home, and engaged construction of a vertical shaft to a depth of eight miles, and then with the help of Mr Peerless Jones drilled a further hundred feet into the apparently-living protoplasmic substance that had been revealed at the bottom of the shaft. Challenger hoped through this experiment to prove that the Earth was a living organism that sustained its vitality from the ether of outer space. The drill finally breached the tissue, producing a loud scream and unleashing a geyser of a protective tar-like secretion, accompanied by global volcanic activity. It was the day When the World Screamed. Some months later, Challenger and Malone were the last people to meet the Latvian inventor Theodore Nemor, who had claimed to have discovered the physics of disintegrating and then reassembling matter. Nemor was apparently seeking competing bids from the British and Soviet governments to buy The Disintegration Machine at the time of his unexplained disappearance from London. The death of Jessica Challenger affected her husband profoundly. Professor Challenger undertook an investigation into psychic phenomena after Ted Malone and Enid Challenger’s reports on spiritualism appeared in the Daily Gazette. Lord John Roxton, Malone, and the Reverend Charles Mason, a former Church of England exorcist who had taken up Spiritualism, visited a haunted house at Dryfont in Derbyshire. An apparition at the house convinced the two friends of the reality of the spirit world and they set out to explore The Land of Mist further. Challenger joined the investigation ostensibly to demonstrate the fallacies of psychic research but became convinced of the reality of intercourse with the spirits of the dead and announced his conversion in a polemic carried by The Spectator magazine.