The Origins of Mooge
It is an ingrained part of Western culture that we honour and remember those individuals who have shaped history by their intellect and positive impact. From Pythagoras, to Guttenberg, Galileo, Newton, Stephenson, Darwin, Curie, Einstein and Berners-Lee. All receiving credit and recognition, becoming the poster-boy/girl for an invention or discovery. Many have hogged the glory (not always by their own design), basking in the spotlight, while others go forgotten for an equally vital contribution. Alexander Fleming, the father of antibiotics, made the breakthrough with discovering Penicillin, receiving lasting fame, but Ernst Chain, Howard Florey, Norman Heatley, Edward Abraham and Dorothy Hodgkin are no less important in its story and making it useable by society, and few have heard of them. Obscurity in the public eye appears to be as much a reward of genius as recognition.
What all geniuses have in common is their debt to those who went before. As Newton once wrote, "If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants." He was likely referring to the classical Greeks and the Arab astronomers and mathematicians, such as Al-Khwarizmi from the medieval period, as much as to Copernicus or Galileo. Giants across the ages. Even during what we in the West refer to as the Dark Ages, the lights of creativity still glowed brightly elsewhere, most notably in the Arab Empire and China. But the further you go back in time, the dimmer those lights become. Kings, considered gods, take all the credit for great buildings, the engineers and labourers unrecognised. Facts merge with legends, tales pass down of heroic deeds upon the battlefield, of mythical giants fighting mortals, while the ‘giants’ of advancement and learning are ignored.
It was these two factors, the forgotten and the lost geniuses, that provided the seed for Mooge. The original ‘shoulders’ of humanity deserve no less credit as those who stood upon them in later generations and I wished to celebrate them. It is quite a remarkable thing to think that someone, somewhere, in some distance time was the first to use one stone to knap another into a tool or to notice that circular shapes roll smoothly. Were they eureka moments or purely an accident? My own guestimation is nature provided the examples i.e. flakes of flint, and the intelligence of growing human brains saw the opportunity. There was probably no celebrating or back-slapping. It helped them survive and that was all that was necessary. But the concept of understanding that using one tool (a stone) to make another (an axe) is so significant. It is strategic thought. You may see animals use tactics, such as lions corralling their prey for another to make the kill or chimpanzees using a stick to collect termites, but that is where it stops. With the strategic thinking and planning of humans, we opened up the concept of controlling nature to our own needs, exposing a world beyond just survival, eating and mating. It is a unique advantage and at the core of all the advances during the prehistoric era. It may also eventually be the cause of our downfall, but that is another matter.
Now, the problem with creating a character to represent all of these prehistoric ‘giants’ is the period runs over millions of years. Telling the full chronological story wasn’t really practical, largely because you have such long periods where nothing significant happened with respect to inventions and discoveries, or, if they did, they were soon lost or forgotten. Fiction allows leeway on such matters and comedy can stretch the realms of reality still further. The other factor lending itself to comedy, was the involvement of mistakes or luck in invention and discoveries. Penicillin was discovered when a petri dish was accidentally contaminated due to an open window and who can forget humanity’s greatest achievement of the 20th century, Post-it Notes, created as a consequence of a failed solvent. In Mooge I was able to build a character to epitomise the slapdash and the slapstick, while with Flair I could introduce the rational, scientific counterpoint. Mooge is the person who leaves the window open, Flair the one who works out the antimicrobial properties of the contaminate: both essential to the discovery. But why isn’t it ‘Flair: The Prehistoric Genius’, I hear you ask? Well, because it lacks the irony needed for a comic story and, after all, obscurity is often the reward for genius.
Nate Wrey