Charles Hoy Fort
"In the topography of intellection I should say that what we call knowledge
is ignorance surrounded by laughter."
Charles Hoy Fort was born in Albany, New York, on the 6th of August 1874, the eldest of three brothers.
His two younger brothers were named Clarence and Raymond. His parents, who where originally Dutch immigrants, owned a grocery store, and the young Fort often helped his parents minding the store.
Fortīs mother had died when Fort was young, a few years after the birth of Raymond, and his father had remarried. One incident of his early life reveals his love of the fantastic and unusual even then; when he was fifteen he wrote to Jules Verne asking for his autograph. When he was 26 he wrote an autobiography called "Many Parts", which is the source of much of our knowledge of Fortīs early years. It reveals among other things that Fort often quarreled with his father after his mothers death. This may be the reason for his leaving his father at eighteen to become an editor of the magazine The Independent, a New York based magazine, which he was for a year, after which he realised he was dissatisfied with the tedium of doing the same things every day, and so travelled around the world seeking adventure. His grandfather, John Hoy, provided him with 25 $ a month to finince his travels. When, at 22, he contracted malaria in South Africa he returned to New York and met an English nurse named Anna Filian. They were married on the 26 of October 1896. He took up a number of professions, embalmer of butterflies, watchman, dishwasher, novelist and others, but never really managed to do more than barely earn a living. Occasionally the Forts had to burn their furniture to keep warm, since they couldnīt afford firewood. He wasnīt a great litterary success either, only one of the ten novels Fort wrote were published, "The Outcast Manufacturers". It didnīt sell.
Mr. Fort had an unusal hobby, though, that earned him a place in this dictionary.
Every day he would go to the local liberary and read voraciously through the different magazines, newspapers and journals, in search of articles about strange happenings and inexplicable phenomena. When he was 23 he had collected over twenty five thousand notes on odd phenomena, collected from every newspaper and scientific journal at the Municipal Liberary for the last fifty years, and kept in shoe-boxes which he affectionatly referred to as his "sanatorium of overworked coincidences".
His first attempt to systematise all this was made when he wrote two books called X and Y. The first suggested that Martians had colonised the Earth, the second that a strange civilization existed at the North Pole. Neither book was written completly seriously, and he was unable to get them published. As a result he burned both books and the 25.000 notes and decided to begin again.
He started with giving himself an eight year crash-course in subjects ranging from physics to mathematics to philosophy and natural science. When he was done he had built up a new "sanatorium of overworked coincidences", plus become aquainted with contemporary scientific models, and began to write a book based on the newspaperclippings and articles found therein.
His first book, "The Book of the Damned", so called because it contained data "damned" by science, was published in 1919 in New York. It was described alternating as "the crackpots' Golden Bought" or ".....like taking a ride on a comet."
In may 1916, when he was 42 years old an uncle died and he inherited the store and a small fortune. He sold the store which, coupled with the small fortune, enabled him to live comfortably for the rest of his life, and to continue with his hobby. In 1921 he and Anna moved to London, Marchmont Street 39A, close to the British Museum. He wrote three more book in which he expounded his ideas; New Lands, which he wrote in London in 1923, Lo! which he wrote in 1931 after having moved back to New York in 1929, and his final book, Wild Talents was published after his death.
He died on the 3rd of may 1932, at the age of 58, of an "unspecified weakness", probably leukemia. His wife Anna died five years later. He kept writing notes to the very end, the last one simply said; ""Difficulty shaving. Gaunt places in face."
Fortīs enormously entertaining literary style is, perhaps, his greatest asset, making the books seem more like a philosophical treatise by a wise clown than a mere collection of dry facts. It is actually both. He writes; "As with all clowns, an underlying buffoonery is the desire to be taken seriously."
Charles Fort is remembered not only for his books, but also for his inventions; he invented a game of "super-checkers" consisting of an ordinary board with 1600 squares. He was also the first to coin the word "teleportation", used to describe the movement of matter between two points without crossing the intervening space. Even his name has become a term, "forteana", used to describe unexplained events such as rains of fishes, mysterious things seen in the sky, (now called UFOlogy), and psychic powers.