The Man Who Refused to Lose a Thought

Charles Dodgson lectured on Euclid at Christ Church for twenty-six years, wrote Alice in his spare time, and climbed to a glasshouse on the roof of Tom Quad to photograph Tennyson, Faraday, Rossetti, and Ellen Terry. A first-class mathematician at the top of Victorian intellectual life.

He was also, quietly, at war with forgetting.

For thirty-seven years he kept a register of every letter he sent and received, cross-indexed, numbered, tallied. At his death the final entry read 98,721. He published a pamphlet explaining the system, in case anyone else wished to run one.

Sleep offered no reprieve. An insomniac, he lay in the dark and composed and solved seventy-two mathematical problems in his head, then wrote them up in the morning. He said it kept his mind from wandering into "skeptical thoughts, which seem for the moment to uproot the firmest faith." Mathematics, apparently, was cheaper than a night-light.

That left one loophole. Ideas that arrived after the candle was out.

In 1891 he closed it. He designed a gridded card with sixteen quarter-inch square holes and an alphabet of dots and strokes, so he could write in bed, in total darkness, without lifting his hands from under the bedclothes.

He called it the nyctograph. Greek for writing in the dark.