See You Later, Astrogator!

[beamjockey]

I wrote a comment on wcg's blog I thought might be worth sharing here.

He was talking about software called Astrogator, whose manufacturer made the following claim:

In 1953, Robert A. Heinlein published a book named Starman Jones. Aside from being one of Heinlein's better juvenile novels, it coined the word astrogator, meaning a person who navigates a spaceship.

This did not ring true for me; I had the impression it was a pretty standard word in Golden Age stories. A bit of googling and n-gram plotting turns up the 1938 story "The Degenerates" by John Russell Fearn:

We took off right on time two days later, and it was certainly a joy to be the chief astrogator of the Stardust.

Willy Ley mentions "astrogator" in the first version of Rockets, 1944, connecting it to the astronomer R. S. Richardson. Now Richardson wrote lots of science articles for Astounding Science Fiction in those days, so I wouldn't be surprised if we found him using the word now and then.

I can push "astrogation" even further back. David Lasser, an editor working for Hugo Gernsback on Science Wonder Stories and other SF magazines, joined with other writers and enthusiasts to found the American Interplanetary Society, from which the AIAA is descended. And in 1931 he published one of the first American nonfiction books about the new science of spaceflight, Conquest of Space.

Just as two-dimensional navigation on the earth's surface gave way to avigation* when men attempted to travel through the air, so in interplanetary travel we must develop an exact science of three-dimensional astrogation through the heavens.

Okay, having demonstrated that I can find multiple citations predating Starman Jones, now I will peek at the answer in the back of the book: the OED SF jargon site.** Yup, their earliest citations for both "astrogation" and "astrogator" point to Lasser's book. Guess I missed the latter; Google Books failed to detect its presence.

Heinlein's Starman Jones does have the virtue of being about an astrogator, and its control-room scenes are most memorable. But "astrogator" was a venerable word, by SF standards, by the time this novel appeared.




* No, Mr. Lasser, actually it didn't; most aviators wound up still calling it "navigation." So did most astronauts.

** Basis for the book Brave New Words: The Oxford Dictionary of Science Fiction, edited by Jeff Prucher.

Comments

[beamjockey.livejournal.com]

By "real" I think you mean "people who navigate spacecraft don't use it." Quite true.

It's a "real" word in the Velveteen Rabbit sense: nobody needed it before spaceflight could be contemplated, and somebody needed to coin it. It did get a lot of use in SF for a few decades.

The similar word "Astronaut" didn't exist until, I believe, Percy Gregg (about whom I have written before) gave that name to his interplanetary spaceship in Across the Zodiac. I found a contemporary review of that book which uses "astronaut" in the "person who travels through space" sense. But it was scarcely used after that until the Americans decided that their spacemen would be called astronauts.

"Astronaut" was a big success. "Astrogator" didn't get picked up when the real Space Age came along. Other words coined in the era of delicious anticipation of the spaceflight era, such as "planetology," also failed to make it big. "Zero G" has been superseded by "microgravity," though "weightless" is still hanging on.

SF, and pop-science writing, peers at the horizon, and makes up words to describe what's coming. Sometimes these words catch on; more often, they remain within the confines of SF discourse, or fade away.

In other news, "waldo" does not seem to be a generally accepted term by the people who design and use "remote manipulators." "Robotics" is doing just fine, however.

[maiac.livejournal.com]

I am impressed by your research. (Being cynical, I don't expect the manufacturer of the Astrogator software to change their citation. There's more value in being associated with Robert Heinlein than with whatshisname who really was first to use the term.)

[wcg.livejournal.com]

Good bet. After I told the instructor, he showed me the revised splash page, which now says the term is from Starman Jones by Robert A. Heinlein and other science fiction.

[mike johns (from livejournal.com)]

I saw "waldo" used on TV, in the context of real manipulators, long bef atore I read the story. The term had made it at one time