827-1: Feedback, Notes and Comments

Vulcan “An interesting piece,” Benjamin Lukoff wrote, “and you may be right — but given that there was a planet Romulus (and a minor one in the same system named Remus) — could Roddenberry not have been thinking about ancient Rome after all?” It seems very probable. How could I have forgotten the Romulans?

Charles Norman suggested yet a third possibility: “The Outer Limits, a short-lived SF series on American television, featured an episode Cold Hands, Warm Heart, which starred William Shatner as an American astronaut participating in a Project Vulcan. Gene Roddenberry was often on the set, and hired several staffers from the earlier series when he began the Star Trek project.”

Terry Walsh felt my description of the Roman god as irresponsible was off the mark: “Vulcan, as the blacksmith god, was particularly careful and diligent. As you say, his famous limp (which marks him off, of course, as a ‘below-stairs’ god) was not of his own making, but most (human) blacksmiths in the ancient world would have picked up injuries from the nature of their work, so that Vulcan is a fair representation of the type. A blacksmith, in other words, cannot afford to be careless or irresponsible.”

Several readers queried a connection with vulcanise, the process of treating rubber with sulphur and heat to harden it. I doubt that Gene Roddenberry had this in mind. The term was introduced by Thomas Hancock in his patent for the process in 1846. It was suggested to him by his friend William Brockedon, a painter and inventor, who clearly had in mind the great heat associated with Vulcan’s forge.

Babies and bathwater Debby Swayne pointed out that there is a more recent US version of the saying: Don’t throw the baby out with the dishes. She found this in a little red book of blunders attributed to President Johnson; a writer in the Chicago Sun-Times in 1986 gave the credit instead to Ronald Reagan. Enough instances appear online to show that this version, though nonsensical, is believed by many to be acceptable. I can’t trace examples before LBJ’s time, but I suspect it was around in the spoken language earlier.