The major work missing from the bibliography is JimSteinmeyer,Charles Fort: The Man Who Invented theSupernatural (NY: Jeremy P. Tarcher/Penguin, 2008), which is nowthe definitive biography of Fort.
I gave a talk entitled"WhatSkeptics Can Learn from Forteans" in 2003.
Charles Fort byJim Lippard is licensed underCC BY-NC-ND 4.0
The great trouble isthat the majority of persons who are attracted are the ones that we donot want; Spiritualists, Fundamentalists, persons who are revoltingagainst Science, not in the least because they are affronted by themyth-stuff of the sciences, but because scientists either oppose or donot encourage them. (Knight 1974, p. 172)This did not stop Fort's ardent admirer, Tiffany Thayer, from foundingthe Fortean Society on January 26, 1931, at a public dinner to whichFort himself had to be lured by subterfuge. (Fort had written justtwo months before to his friend Theodore Dreiser that he wantednothing to do with Thayer's efforts to found such a society, and"wouldn't join it, any more than I'd be an Elk" (Knight 1974,p. 181).)
In school Charles did poorly and was something of a class clown.On his own, however, he was an avid reader and aspired to be anaturalist. As part of those aspirations, he collected eggs, birds'wings, shells, starfish, and animal skeletons, with the assistance ofhis brothers.In his teens he began keeping a diary and collecting stories. By theage of seventeen he had written features for both the AlbanyDemocrat and the BrooklynWorld. He then embarkedon two years and thirty thousand miles of travel, supporting himselfby writing newspaper travelogues. He toured the American South,Scotland, England, and South Africa. At the age of 21, he returned toNew York with an illness contracted during his journey, where he metup with Anna Filing, whom he had known in Albany since nearly a decadebefore. They married on October 26, 1896.
Charles and Anna Fort lived on the edge of poverty in New York Cityon income derived from renting out a house in Albany Charles inheritedfrom his grandfather and short-term jobs such as eight months workingin the kitchen of the Metropolitan Hotel. He continued to writenewspaper stories and began to write fiction. Theodore Dreiserpublished several of Fort's short stories inSmith's Magazineand encouraged him in his writing. Although Fort wrote severalnovels, only one (The Outcast Manufacturers, 1909) was everpublished and Fort destroyed the rest. Two of these destroyed novels,X andY, were about strange civilizationscontrolling human life, a theme echoed in his later books. Theycaught the attention of Dreiser, who offered to act as Fort's agentbut was unable to sell the works.
In 1916, Charles Fort's uncle died, leaving his share of Fort'sgrandfather's estate to Charles and his brothers. This inheritancemade Fort financially independent, and he pursued a career of researchwhich lasted the rest of his life. While he had already collectednumerous notes about oddities, he began his research in earnest bygoing through the indexes of all English and French scientificperiodicals in the New York Public Library beginning with the year1880. This research led to his four nonfiction (a term Fort rejected)books, the first of which was published at the urging of TheodoreDreiser. (Dreiser was quite influenced by Fort, as recounted by Dash(1988/89).)
Fort's second book,New Lands, was read by Tiffany Thayer,a writer who was so taken by Fort's work that he founded theaforementioned Fortean Society and edited its journal,The ForteanSociety Magazine (later renamedDoubt), which beganpublication in September 1937. Other early Forteans of note includedBen Hecht, who favorably reviewedThe Book of the Damned inthe ChicagoDaily News, Booth Tarkington, Theodore Dreiser,and science fiction writer Eric Frank Russell.
In 1932, Fort's health began to fail. He managed to completeWild Talents, but died on May 3, 1932, two days before itspublication (Chorvinsky 1990; contrary to the account given by Knight1974, p. 184). His wife survived him by five years, and left fundsfor grants in her husband's name to students at Harvard and New YorkUniversity.
Fort's notion of acceptance has a corresponding notion ofrejection, and Fort openly admitted that he excluded things from hiswork. In the fifth chapter ofWild Talents, he wrote of a story of atalking dog which vanished in a green puff of smoke, and explains thatsuch a story is not of the type he is presenting in his book(ironically, since the story and the reference to its source isincluded in the book). The reason he gives is that it is aone-of-a-kind event, while the oddities he collects are supposedlycommonplace (insofar as they are found in multiple instancesthroughout the scientific literature). (Fort goes on to note thatwhat is odd about the talking dog story is not the dog's speaking--herecounts other examples--but its vanishing in a puff of green smokeafterwards.)
The most common anomaly described inThe Book of theDamned is the inexplicable falling object: rains of unusual color(red, black, yellow), fish falls, falls of flesh and gelatinousmasses, coins, fossils, strange hailstones, frogs, and blocks of ice.Fort observes that the most common explanation offered for these oddfalls is that the objects in question were either "already there" anddidn't fall at all, or were carried by whirlwinds. He proceeds toenumerate example after example in refutation of these explanations,chiding scientists for their acceptance of material as meteoritic evenwithout witnesses to the fall and rejecting the extraterrestrialorigin of strange objects which are observed falling (pp. 126ff). Heoffers in their stead the speculation that there is a "Super-SargassoSea" above the earth where "gravitation is inoperative" (p. 90) whereobjects from the earth (or other planets) sometimes are carried andend up in a collection of refuse drifting about, to fall again to theearth at a later time and another place. In the Super-Sargasso Sea,says Fort (making him an early advocate of the theory of panspermia),is a place (or planet) he calls Genesistrine where living thingsoriginate and are periodically dumped to the earth. He furtherelaborates this thesis with the proposal that some intelligent beingsare in control of these falls and in communication with secretsocieties on earth (p. 136).The Book of the Damned contains an earlyappearance of the tautology objection against Darwinian naturalselection--that "survival of the fittest" is devoid of content becausefitness is determined only by survival (pp. 23-24)--an argument nowcommon in creationist publications.
InNew Lands, Fort delights in poking fun at astronomers'errors of prediction of the movement of objects in the heavens(especially planets and comets). The book also features furtherexamples of strange things falling from the sky, but is primarilyconcerned with anomalous visual and audible phenomena in the skiesrather than objects recovered from the ground. Earthquakes, flashinglights, strange airships, explosive sounds, and mirages of strangecities are the main topics of the book. Fort theorizes that the solarsystem is "an egg-like organism ... [with] this central andstationary earth as its nucleus" around which is "a revolving shell,in which the stars are pores ... through some of which sprayirradiating fountains said to be 'meteoric,' but perhapselectric" (p. 386). Fort rejects the theory of evolution in favor of"Super-embryonic development," which maintains that there is "dynamicdesign"--a predetermined pattern of development of complex functions,according to which early stages of things have certain features inorder to fulfill functions they will need to have in the future.Darwinism, according to Fort, fails to account for "the influence ofthe future upon the present" (p. 529). Super-embryonic development isnot just a Fortean theory of biology, but of all change over time.Fort would perhaps have approved of the anthropic principle.
The theme ofLo! is the mysterious appearances of objectsand, in particular, their teleportation (a word coined by Fort) fromone place to another. In this book is Fort's description of the"conventional explanation" of a mysterious appearance of crabs andperiwinkles near Worcester, England in 1881:
a fishmonger, with a procession of carts, and with a dozenenergetic assistants, appeared at a time when nobody on a busy roadwas looking. The fishmonger and his assistants grabbed sacks ofperiwinkles, and ran in a frenzy, slinging the things into fields onboth sides of the road. They raced to gardens, and some assistants,standing on the shoulders of other assistants, had sacks lifted tothem, and dumped sacks over the high walls. Meanwhile otherassistants, in a dozen carts, were furiously shoveling outperiwinkles, about a mile along the road. Also, meanwhile, severalboys were busily mixing in crabs. They were not advertising anything.Above all there was secrecy. The cost must have been hundreds ofdollars. They appeared without having been seen on the way, and theymelted away equally mysteriously. There were houses all around, butnobody saw them. (pp. 548-549)Other oddities described in the book include blood flowing from holyimages; appearances of mice, small crocodiles, fish, eels, snakes, andother creatures; poltergeist phenomena associated with adolescentchildren; lake and sea monsters; "mysterious burns" (which Fortconsiders distinct from spontaneous human combustion); and theappearance of Kaspar Hauser and the disappearance of BenjaminBathurst.InWild Talents, Fort describes the disappearance of AmbroseSmall and Ambrose Bierce and asks, "Was somebody collecting Ambroses?"(p. 847). In addition to mysterious kidnappings, he enumerates casesof mysterious thefts, arsons, and murders in the first part of thebook. Later, other "wild talents" are recounted, including dowsing,witchcraft, stigmata, and male lactation.
Fort tends not to evaluate any particular event or datum hedescribes in any detail, but rather to assemble numerous examples ofkinds of events and speculate on the basis of apparent patterns. Thisinvites the typical response of conventional scientists, which is tofind specific data which are bogus or unfounded, and reject thecollection on that basis. Martin Gardner (1957) argues that Fort'sbasic error is his assumption that a basic continuity in nature meansthat all theories are on equal footing (nothing is deserving ofbelief). The unattainability of absolute certainty does not mean thatno conclusions can be drawn, for there are still relative weights ofevidence sufficient to count some theories as well confirmed and someas unsupported.