London is a town of many patient wonders. The architecture of a thousand years gives the city a chaotic, hapharzard quality; as a visitor, you can never be sure what marvels you might find waiting around the next corner.

It was, therefore, considerable good fortune with which I learned how the serendipity of the City might lie in wait on the banks of the River Thames, a stone’s throw from the Tower Bridge. There may be found the Telectroscope, a wonder almost unparalleled, even among all the great cities of the Earth.

What is the Telectroscope? I will tell you now that it is not a simple gimmick or a fairground attraction of less-than-fair value. The Telectroscope is the genuine article: a portal, a medium, a revelation of another world. The Telectroscope brings the distant into close focus, and banishes the near-by into the distance. But to define it so might not permit you to understand it. Allow me instead to describe my discovery, with several companions, of this spectacle.

We came to the site by means of hired carriage, and then by foot across the Tower Bridge and down to the promenade that braces the south bank of the river. There rested a brass half-dome about the size of a haystack. It looked, from a certain vantage, like an enormous fallen beehive, but one could not mistake it for such. From the other side of the dome protruded a large box, fitted in brass and wood. From the exterior evidence offered by a few steam pipes, valves and gauges, one might presume that this box hid some fiendishly complex mechanism, though for what purpose it was not then clear. Out from the other side of the box extended a conical tube, perhaps 20 feet in lenth, reaching a diameter of perhaps 7 feet at its far end. This tube was periodically encircled with brass rings, lending it the appearance of a spy-glass. At the end of the tube there stood a small group of people, peering within and engaging in all manner of odd behaviours—gesturing and waving; laughing and pointing; holding up hand-written signs (To what possible end? one wonders), talking amongst themselves and alternately turning their attention back to the device to laugh and wave some more.

Intrigued, my travelling companions and I joined a queue of men, women and children waiting for their chance to peer inside the contraption. It was certainly popular—it took us about 40 minutes to clear the queue and reach a small, mechanical ticket booth. Inside the booth there was too little room for a person; rather, a pair of mannequin’s arms extended from behind a black curtain.

Into a little slot at the front of the ticket booth each of us inserted a coin to the value of one pound sterling. By some mechanism unknown, this caused the artificial arms to shuffle and jerk about, writing out a ticket. Needless to say, I kept my reserve, but some of the more delicate members of our party were inspired to gasp with delight at this little marvel. I recommend that you, too, save your awe, for this ticket-writing automaton merely echoed those marvels yet to come—the ticket granted the bearer the right to peer inside the Telectroscope, and to see what might be peering back.

Shortly after purchasing our tickets, it came our turn to stand at the end of the Telectroscope and look within to whatever it was that the device revealed. We stepped forward with some trepidation; after all, what could cause so many seemingly-civilised individuals to wave and gabble excitedly at the innards of a steam-driven folly such as this? But my companions and I had resolved to see what might be seen within, and so it was that we came, at last, to see the wonder that was the Telectroscope.

How is one to describe such a wonder as this? Those who have travelled as extensively as my companions and I will know the dislocation one feels, in far-flung lands, that derives from the loss of a physical connection with one’s home. Letters and, more recently, the telegraph are poor substitutes for the sight of one’s own door, one’s own chair, and one’s own family. Photographs may, in some measure, ameliorate this nostalgia, but they lack the cycle of action and reaction that so enlivens the human condition.

Well: there, my friends, you will find such life. There, on the south bank of the River Thames, a stone’s throw from the Tower Bridge, there is a portal to the other side of the World (if you will): to Brooklyn, New York, in the former colony (and now the United States) of America. And compounding this marvel, if you should find yourself divorced from Europe, and in said country, then you could stand upon the bank of the East River, a stone’s throw from the Brooklyn Bridge, look back to Old London, and thus assuage a part of your yearning for return to England.

So it was that yes, we laughed, and waved, and pointed and conversed with the strangers around us and, after a fashion, by means of an erasable writing board, with the strangers so far across the waves.

We left the Telectroscope with light hearts and clear minds. I venture that whatever your humour, you too would find such a visit uplifting. As any London street might open out to a new and unseen vista, so too does the Telectroscope open a new perspective in one’s mind. There will forever be a way, for me, that leads from London to New York, and from my heart to the heart of every stranger there.

(Addendum: How this miracle of modern engineering operates is beyond me. The inventor of the device claims that it is enabled by a tunnel, stretching between the continents and beneath the Atlantic, which is equipped with a series of carefully calibrated mirrors. This, I have reason to doubt. I do not question the tunnel’s existence, for I presume that it is simply an extension of the principles that permit tunnels to run beneath other, more modest water courses. But mirrors? I am confident that the attenuation of light over such distances would preclude so clear an image. Thus I suspect that the story of its workings is not the whole truth, even though I cannot conceive of any secret they could hope to hide. At any rate, it is a mystery with which I am content; it’s consequence leaves me more at peace than before.)