Arnold Alexander Axle Armstrong-Atlas. . . The A to Z of Slightly Strange Unknown Victorian Inventors and Explorers

Arnold Alexander Axle Armstrong-Atlas

Founder of the Preposterous Club of Great Britain, the right Honourable Arnold Alexander Axle Armstrong-Atlas was an inventor of note and was said to have been the mind behind the Automatic silver service laying device favoured by the Queen in her private chambers. Until the device malfunctioned and ate a lady in waiting. As the Queen cheerily joked later If she had not waited she would still be alive and well. But this is not the invention which he is generally associated with, that is called the Armstrong-Atlas Amplifying Alignment Armature 

Although we are all now aware of the principles of Chaos Theory where a small chicken in Holland eating a Ginger Nut will lead to a huge hurricane in China. Back in 1875 everything was ordered and structured in nature, and chickens did not cause Hurricanes without there being a damn good reason for it, because it was Gods work and entirely a predictable sequence of events.  Mr Armstrong Atlas concluded that it was the small vibrations in the air caused by the chicken that would cause a vibration in the surrounding plants which in turn would cause smaller and larger vibrations in the things around them. In other words all this was interlinked by a predictable vibration sequence (Gods work). So by amplifying and measuring the vibration and assessing its alignment it would be possible to map the sequences of events and therefore eventually predict exactly where a storm would happen before the chicken crossed the road (so to speak).

With the Queens patronage a huge matrix of Armstrong-Atlas Amplifying Alignment Armatures were laid out across London and the South of England, the measurements from each relayed to Armstrong-Atlas by young street urchins for a farthing a day.

However to Mr Armstrong-Atlas the results appeared to show that rather than structured the world was Chaotic.  A theory based on Chaos in Victorian Britain was totally out of the question or he would have been condemned by the Archbishop (The Very Rev Oscar Overlap Oppenheimer) and brought the Queen into disrepute. It was also a time when philanthropist do gooders were telling the world of the plight of young street urchins and many frowned at the use of them in his experiment particularly after one was run down after he tried to chase a chicken as it was crossing the road. 

Later in life still pondering the thousands of readings back in the family castle he inherited from his cousin Stanley Stumbledore, he said to Charles Darwin.  If Man was meant to be a scientist then why does he make so many things that go bang. . . . .

Darwin apparently replied. . . Pengiuns never prosper

And the rest of course is History