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Fitz James O'Brien (also spelled Fitz-James; December 31, 1828 -
April 6, 1862) was an Irish-born American writer, some of whose
work is often considered one of the forerunners of today's science
fiction. CONTENTS What Was It? My Wife's Tempter The Child Who
Loved a Grave The Diamond Lens The Golden Ingot The Wondersmith
O'Brien's earliest writings in the United States were contributed
to the Lantern, which was then edited by John Brougham.
Subsequently he wrote for the Home Journal, the New York Times, and
the American Whig Review. His first important literary connection
was with Harper's Magazine, and beginning in February, 1853, with
The Two Skulls, he contributed more than sixty articles in prose
and verse to that periodical. He likewise wrote for the New York
Saturday Press, Putnam's Magazine, Vanity Fair, and the Atlantic
Monthly. To the latter he sent The Diamond Lens(1858) and The
Wonder Smith (1859), which are unsurpassed as creations of the
imagination, and are unique among short magazine stories. The
Diamond Lens is probably his most famous short story, and tells the
story of a scientist who invents a powerful microscope discovers a
beautiful female in a microscopic world inside a drop of water. The
Wonder Smith is an early predecessor of robot rebellion, where toys
possessed by evil spirits are transformed into living automatons
who turns against their creators. His 1858 short story From Hand to
Mouth has been referred to as"the single most striking example of
surrealistic fiction to pre-date Alice in Wonderland (Sam
Moskowitz, 1971). What Was It? A Mystery (1859) is one of the
earliest known examples of invisibility in fiction.
FROM a very early period of my life the entire bent of my
inclinations had been toward microscopic investigations. When I was
not more than ten years old, a distant relative of our family,
hoping to astonish my inexperience, constructed a simple microscope
for me by drilling in a disk of copper a small hole in which a drop
of pure water was sustained by capillary attraction. This very
primitive apparatus, magnifying some fifty diameters, presented, it
is true, only indistinct and imperfect forms, but still
sufficiently wonderful to work up my imagination to a preternatural
state of excitement. Seeing me so interested in this rude
instrument, my cousin explained to me all that he knew about the
principles of the microscope, related to me a few of the wonders
which had been accomplished through its agency, and ended by
promising to send me one regularly constructed, immediately on his
return to the city. I counted the days, the hours, the minutes that
intervened between that promise and his departure.
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