In my lifetime, myoelectric hands have evolved from clawlike constructs to multigrip, programmable, anatomically accurate facsimiles of the human hand, most costing tens of thousands of dollars. Since then, I have donned a variety of prosthetic hands, each of them striving toward perfect fidelity of the human hand-sometimes at a cost of aesthetics, sometimes a cost of functionality, but always designed to mimic and replace what was missing.
After being born missing my left forearm, I was one of the first cohorts of infants in the United States to be fitted with a myoelectric prosthetic hand, an electronic device controlled by the wearer’s muscles tensing against sensors inside the prosthetic socket. I know this because throughout my life I have been fitted with some of the mostĬutting-edge prosthetic devices on the market. The fleshy stumps of the world act as repositories for these designers’ dreams of a high-tech, superhuman future. Today, the people who design prostheses tend to be well-intentioned engineers rather than amputees themselves. A much smaller subset-between 1,500 to 4,500 children each year-are born with limb differences or absences, myself included. In the United States alone, more than 2 million people live with limb loss, with 185,000 people receiving amputations every year. Limb loss in the general population dwarfs those figures. soldiers and 300 British soldiers lost limbs in Iraq and Afghanistan. This recent investment is not, however, a result of a disproportionately large number of amputations in military conflict: Around 1,500 U.S. The two World Wars solidified the for-profit prosthetics industry in both the United States and Western Europe, and the ongoing War on Terror helped catapult it into a US $6 billion dollar industry across the globe. Civil War (during whichĦ0,000 amputations were performed) inaugurated the modern prosthetics era in the United States, thanks to federal funding and a wave of design patents filed by entrepreneurial prosthetists. And yet who better to design the next great leap in technology than men remade by technology themselves?Īs Verne understood, the U.S.
These piecemeal men are unlikely crusaders of invention with an even more unlikely mission. Their “crutches, wooden legs, artificial arms, steel hooks, caoutchouc jaws, silver craniums platinum noses” don’t play leading roles in their personalities-they are merely tools on their bodies. The story of the Baltimore Gun Club propelling themselves to the moon is about the extraordinary masculine power of the veteran, who doesn’t simply “overcome” his disability he derives power and ambition from it. By the war’s end, with “not quite one arm between four persons, and exactly two legs between six,” these self-taught amputee-weaponsmiths decide to repurpose their skills toward a new projectile: a rocket ship. They had spent the war innovating new, deadlier weaponry. In Jules Verne’s 1865 novel From the Earth to the Moon, members of the fictitious Baltimore Gun Club, all disabled Civil War veterans, restlessly search for a new enemy to conquer.
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