Professor Challenger

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Professor Challenger (sitting) as illustrated by Harry Rountree in Arthur Conan Doyle's short story "The Poison Belt" in Strand Magazine.
Professor Challenger (sitting) as illustrated by Harry Rountree in Arthur Conan Doyle's short story "The Poison Belt" in Strand Magazine.

George Edward Challenger, better known as Professor Challenger, is a fictional character in a series of science fiction stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Unlike Conan Doyle's cool, analytic Sherlock Holmes, Professor Challenger is an aggressive, dominating figure. Ned Malone, the narrator of The Lost World, the 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.

He 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. 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 French wife was all encompassing.

Like Sherlock Holmes, Professor Challenger was based on a real person--in this case, a Professor Rutherford, who had lectured at Conan Doyle's medical school.

Contents

[edit] Fictional biography

Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.

[edit] Early years

According to The Lost World, the character was born in Largs, a village in Strathclyde, Scotland, in 1863. He studied at Edinburgh University, where he studied Medicine, Zoology and Anthropology.

In the The Land of Mists, it's stated that although he was qualified as a doctor, he only practised for a few months before deciding to concentrate on his scientific work. This decision seems to have been the result of some crisis of conscience or confidence.

The Lost World states that in 1892, following post-graduate work at the University, he became an assistant at the British Museum, and was promoted to assistant-keeper of the Museum's Comparative Anthropology Department the following year. This post should have been ideal for a man of his talents; unfortunately, Challenger was never one to suffer fools gladly, and resigned later the same year after some acrimonious correspondence.

The Land of Mists and The Lost World revealed that Challenger was a wealthy man whose independent income, later supplemented by patent fees from a series of inventions, was able to finance his continued work. Usually controversial and always brilliant, he received a series of awards and held several important posts while being cordially disliked by most of his colleagues.

During these years he somehow found time to go on several expeditions, to marry and father one daughter, and to publish a series of papers on various topics.

[edit] Adventures in the Lost World

Challenger's adventures in South America were described in The Lost World.

Following an expedition to Brazil, Challenger claimed to have proof that some prehistoric species still survived. Unfortunately, the backing for this story was limited: some fragments of bone, a piece of membranous wing, sketches, and damaged photographs.

Not surprisingly, few of his colleagues were inclined to believe him. Matters were not improved by intensive press interest, which resulted in Challenger assaulting several reporters. After two years of frustration, he finally persuaded the Zoological Institute to supply a group of unbiased witnesses, who would accompany a second expedition at Challenger's expense.

The story is narrated by Edward Malone of the Daily Gazette, who accompanied the expedition. It details the adventures of Challenger and Professor Summerlee, the hunter Lord John Roxton and Malone himself as they venture into the depths of the Amazon in search of a hidden plateau where Challenger claims dinosaurs still exist. Naturally, they reached this plateau, but became stranded there. After various encounters with dinosaurs, the group joined with a tribe of Indians, who live on one side of the plateau, to eradicate a society of homicidal ape-people who live on the other.

Once Challenger's team had returned safely back to London, it is revealed that the professor brought a pterodactyl back with them, which escaped, caused a stir and then flew out over the ocean. Whether it made it back to the plateau or died en route is unknown. As a result of their adventure, Challenger became life-long friends with Summerlee, Roxton and Malone, and the four were inseparable from that point on.

[edit] The Poison Belt event

In the novel The Poison Belt, Professor Challenger claimed that some peculiar physical and medical phenomena might be caused by the Earth passing through an unusual form of ether. Within hours, he was proven dramatically right, as most of the world's population lapsed into a cataleptic coma that lasted 28 hours. At the start of the story, Challenger had asked three companions from The Lost World - Edward Malone, Lord John Roxton, and Professor Summerlee - to join him at his home outside of London, where they remain secure in an airtight sealed tomb with cylinders of oxygen. They emerged to discover the worldwide destruction caused by this event.

[edit] The Lands of Mists

Challenger reacted extremely badly to the death of his wife in 1919. So when his daughter Enid and the journalist Edward Malone both became interested in spiritualism, and converts to the religious aspect of that belief, Challenger could readily understand their willingness to think that there might be life after death, but at the same time felt that this idea was a denial of the scientific logic he held dear. Always intolerant of scientific frauds (such as the so-called Piltdown Man), his natural response was to pour scorn on the idea, reveal the tricks of fake mediums, and otherwise make trouble for those he derided. This eventually led to a public debate on the matter, in which Challenger was allegedly badly prepared and supposedly came off a very poor second to the spiritualist James Smith.

Challenger's subsequent conversion to spiritualism has never been satisfactorily explained. Ruling out the possibility of genuine supernatural involvement, the most obvious theory is that he secretly wanted to believe, despite his rationalist sentiments, and eventually allowed himself to be persuaded that he had seen psychic phenomena. His love of his wife would certainly explain his willingness to accept that she still lived on another plane. There are suggestions in the only surviving account that his daughter—unconsciously or not—deceived him by imitating a tapping pattern used by his late wife,[1] and a medium assuaged his apparently guilty conscience over the deaths of two experimental subject early in his career, with the statistically implausible claim that they had died simultaneously of natural causes.[2]

Having thus become an overnight convert to spiritualism, Challenger proceeded to embrace it with the same enthusiasm he gave to any other cherished scientific theory, protesting against anyone who attacked it. A series of abrasive letters and papers were sent to various journals, which became increasingly wary of any envelope bearing his address. Several interesting articles on zoology, physics, and plant genetics were rejected without a fair hearing; one paper, submitted two months before the climax of the Hengist Down experiment, and outlining his "World Echidna" theory in great detail, was rejected by Nature and three other journals.

[edit] The Disintegration Machine

In 1927 Malone's editor asked him to investigate Theodore Nemor, a Latvian scientist who claimed to have invented a so-called disintegration machine [DM]. Nemor demonstrated the device, which apparently worked, and was able to make objects disintegrate and reappear unharmed.

Malone and Challenger left Nemor working on the machine, which had given Challenger a mild electric shock. They were the last to see him. The mystery surrounding his subsequent disappearance involved diplomats from Russia and Germany, accusations of murder, and a prolonged (but ultimately futile) police investigation.

[edit] When the World Screamed

Challenger's "World Echidna" theory is bizarre, apparently insane, but correct, a triumph of flawed logic that happened to reach the right conclusions. Challenger purchased land on the South Coast and announced that he intended to prove that there was oil under Britain. This explanation was obvious nonsense to any expert, since the huge shaft he had built was totally inappropriate for an oil well. The excavations on Hengist Down were to continue for the next five years, kill four workmen, and exhaust most of Betterton's estate, while Challenger's paranoid secrecy would try the patience of the press, the public, and his colleagues. Suffice it to say that it was possibly his most spectacular experiment, with the widest possible consequences.

Within hours every active volcano in Europe erupted, fortunately without fatalities. Further afield, there was volcanic activity in South America, Japan, Hawaii, and the United States. It has subsequently been learned that Mount Erebus, in Antarctica, also erupted at about this time. Days later shocks were still being felt in many areas, and an earthquake in China killed several hundred, while avalanches in Switzerland claimed nine lives. There is no proof, of course, that Challenger's experiment was responsible for these later incidents.

A few weeks later Challenger was asked to give evidence at an emergency session of the League of Nations. When questioned, he admitted that it might be possible to stimulate the World Echidna and deliberately trigger volcanoes or earthquakes. The second 1929 revision of the Geneva Convention banned all forms of "geological warfare", its language strongly implying that any repetition of the Hengist Down experiment might in itself be regarded as an act of war.

[edit] Books

[edit] By Arthur Conan Doyle

[edit] By other authors

  • Osamu Tezuka published in 1948 a manga version of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World. Tezuka's manga, however, is a Lost World unlike any other. Not an adaptation, this is a complete re-imagining of the story. There have been several other comic adaptations of Professor Challenger's exploits, but not too many and none that were particularly widespread and well known.
  • Return to the Lost World: Nicholas Nye. A sequel set a year later than The Lost World, which almost ignores the dinosaurs in favour of a plot involving parapsychology, an extremely odd version of evolutionary theory, and ancient technology in the style of Chariots of the Gods. While Conan Doyle's Challenger is a foe of scientific fraud, this novel begins with him preparing a scientific fake.
  • Dinosaur Summer: Greg Bear. Thirty years after Professor Challenger discovered Dinosaurs in Venezuela, Dinosaur Circuses have become popular and are slipping out of the spotlight. The one remaining dinosaur circus makes a bold move to return their dinosaurs to the Tepuye plateau. Challenger himself never appears, but the protagonist's son attended Challenger High School.
  • Professor Challenger in Space: S.W. Theaker (2000). In this sequel Professor Summerlee, Lord Roxton and the narrator Malone accompany Challenger on a journey to the moon, in a desperate bid to save the people of Ell Ka-Mar, who have crowned Challenger their king.
  • Challenger makes a guest appearance in the 2nd Plateau of Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari's post-structuralist philosophical text Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, in which he gives a lecture.
  • The Gorilla Comics series Section Zero, written by Karl Kesel, featured a scientific genius named Titania "Doc" Challenger, implied to be Professor Challenger's descendent.
  • Cult Holmes: The Lost World: In this BBC 7 Cult Holmes story, Holmes is investigating the damage done by Challenger in bringing dinosaurs over from the Plateau. Interestingly, Malone's version of events is referred to as if it had been the version of events in the BBC TV adaptation of The Lost World, rather than the novel.
Bob Hoskins as Professor Challenger from the 2001 BBC adaptation The Lost World.
Bob Hoskins as Professor Challenger from the 2001 BBC adaptation The Lost World.

[edit] Professor Challenger on screen and stage

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was the first person to portray Professor Challenger, dressing up as the professor for the photographs included in The Lost World's initial publication.

Wallace Beery played Challenger in the classic 1925 film version of The Lost World.

Claude Rains played him in the 1960 film version.

John Rhys-Davies was Challenger in the 1992 film version and its sequel (from the same year), Return to the Lost World.

Patrick Bergin played the angry professor in the 1998 film version.

Peter McCauley played G.E. Challenger in the 1999-2002 television series.

Bruce Boxleitner also played Challenger in the 2005 film King of the Lost World.

A 2001 TV movie adaptation with Bob Hoskins portraying Professor Challenger. Airing in the UK over Christmas Day and Boxing Day in 2001, it was the first British film adaptation. Directed by Christopher Hall and Tim Haines, producers of the BBC's dinosaur documentary Walking with Dinosaurs, the BBC/A&E version adds a female member of the expedition, the ward of an unsympathetic Christian missionary.

[edit] External links

[edit] References

  1. ^ The Land of Mists chapters 2 & 16.
  2. ^ The Land of Mists chapter 16.
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