[HPforGrownups] Flamel on the Net / Fiftypence shape

[Jenett]

No: HPFGUIDX 36210

On Fri, 8 Mar 2002, Ronald Rae Yu wrote:

> Finally, I have the time to re-re-re-re...reread Harry
> Potter. Well, of course I again came across the trio's
> search for Flamel. My question is: if there is a
> wizarding equivalent of internet, how could the search
> for Nicolas Flamel be that difficult? Hmm... well,
> let's say it doesn't exist yet in book 1 (don't think
> so, though), Hermione, who got home for the holidays,
> could try searching 'Nicolas Flamel' on the muggle
> internet and will at least get the information that he
> is the maker of the Philosopher's Stone (dunno about
> info on his work with Dumbledore). Well...?

It's easy to forget how rapid change has been in regard to the Internet. 

Depends, I think, on exactly when you consider book 1 to be set. If you go
with the Lexicon's arguments which set book one in 1991-1992 (which I find
quite persuasive), then it is *extremely* unliklely that Hermione would
have had access to the Internet, or that, in fact, much information would
be easy to find.

There's a couple of reasons for this. The first major one is that until 
relatively recently, Britain was well behind the US when it came to Net 
access. When I first got on the Net in 1994, I did know a few people in 
Britain who had net access - but most of them were in University, where 
they were making use of a limited number of computers. (And note: that's 3 
years after the time we're talking about)

Net access through dial-up modem at that time involved per-hour charges,
generally, so the only people who were on for hours at a time were people
who had access through school.  This stopped being quite such an issue a
year or two later - but it's still only pretty recent (last 2 years, if
I remember correctly) that the flat-rate "Pay $20 a month for unlimited
Net access" agreements have been readily available in England to your
average user.

I just did a little hunting: in 2000, only 1 in 3 households in the UK
were apparently connected to the 'Net according to a poll I came across.  
Just consider how much lower that would have been in 1991. Another study I 
came across says that in 1998, only 34% of UK households had a computer. 
Again, that's obviously going to limit how many people have home net 
access. 

The second major issue is that while the basic underpinnings of the Web
were in existence in 91, it was really quite primitive indeed. I got on
the Web while it was still a big deal that webpages had backgrounds rather
than light gray (again, that was fall 94'). 

There were *many* fewer pages out there, Yahoo! was only barely beginning
to get going (they were founded in January 1994), and a lot of the other
services (gopher, ftp)  were a lot more complex to use, and not centrally
indexed very well.  A lot of this, again, was because there weren't free
hosting services, and most ISP accounts didn't start including web space
until a bit later - so what you had, again, were academicly hosted
websites and some commercial ones.

So, you have Hermione, who probably *does* know how to use a computer, if 
she went to a school that had one or two (my elementary schools did and we 
learned basic word processing and some educational games and some basic 
programming). 

But for her to be on the 'Net, she'd have had to convince 
her parents to invest in a suitable computer (*not* cheap at that time.)  
and that this was a worthwhile thing to do (something I think would be 
hard to convince parents of at that time since the situation regarding 
amount of data available/benefits for learning didn't really exist) and 
then figure out how to access the information without any of the highly 
sophisticated tools we have access to now, and while being quite aware 
that every minute she took to figure this out was costing her parents a 
fair bit of money. 

I do know some people in the US who were online not much after early 1992 
- but even then, they were pretty few and far between, and I mostly know 
them because I've tended to run in computer geek circles. Even among my 
friends, the people who were online that early in the US are pretty rare. 

I think it's highly unlikely Hermione was on the Net (if her parents had 
been engineers or computer science folks or something, I'd consider it at 
least potentially more likely. But they're not.) 

And, along with "Well, couldn't she have looked it up in the library?" - 
computerised library catalogs were only barely beginning to be in use 
around this time, and were still pretty primitive in a lot of ways. And of 
course, if the book is called something like "Famous Alchemists" but the 
computer catalog record doesn't mention Flamel by name, that's not going 
to help.

Now, she might have checked an encyclopedia or something - but we don't 
know how much access she might have had to a local library while home on 
vacation. (As a note: I just checked the copy of the Encyclopedia 
Britannica at work - I work in a US high school library - and Flamel isn't 
listed) While Hermione's quite bright and good at research, I wouldn't be 
surprised if she didn't know at the time about other potential resources 
(biographical dictionaries and such) or whether a local small library in 
England would have them. (A lot of those sets of things are *expensive*)

As a note: I just checked all our likely resources: Flamel isn't mentioned 
in any of our suitable biography resources, *or* in the articles on 
alchemy in the things like "Encyclopedia of the Renaissance", nor is the 
philosopher's stone included in either of the two specialised resources I 
checked. 

We've got excellent resources for a high school library, and I'd 
guess that our resources are slightly more likely to focus on Renaissance 
science/thought than your average library (the students here have a major 
project involving bits of that subject area) so I wouldn't be at all 
suprised if a public library serving a general population that wasn't a 
major library (like in a large city or even a large town) didn't have them 
either. 

Now, as a comparison, I just typed 'Flamel' into the online Britannica 
version (which we have access to as a school), and he turns up with a 
couple of lines mention in the section on "Latin Alchemy" The 
philosopher's stone is mentioned in the sections on "Alchemy" and 
"Christian Myth and Legend." 

-Jenett, idly contemplating just how fast access to information and ease 
of research has gotten.