The Encyclopedia of Fantastic Victoriana

by Jess Nevins

The Electric Bob Adventures (1893)  

copyright © Jess Nevins 2022

The five Electric Bob Adventures were written by Robert T. Toombs, beginning with “Electric Bob and His White Alligator; or, Hunting for Confederate Treasure in the Mississippi River” (New York Five Cent Library no. 50, July 22, 1893). Nothing is known about Robert T. Toombs, although Everett F. Bleiler states that he is “said to have been a real person.”¹ 

Robert “Electric Bob” Morse is a ten-year-old boy who lives near New York City. He is a brilliant inventor, and capable of creating the most advanced technology possible, but unlike other boy inventors he does not build his own equipment and weaponry. He draws up detailed blueprints and then sends them to the most efficient and skillful shops to construct for him. Like the earlier Edisonade heroes he creates a variety of electric weaponry and equipment, but Electric Bob’s specialty is vehicles in the form of animals, including the sea-going White Alligator, the land-roving Desert Camel and Big Black Ostrich, the flying Revenue Hawk, and the submarine Sea-Cat. The only exception is the Big Bicycle, a canopied, electrically-powered bicycle with steel-covered tires and storage space for food and equipment. Most of Bob’s vehicles are armed, he wears a coat of bullet-proof armor under his clothes, and he carries an “electric pistol” which shoots bullets at high speeds. Additionally, Bob has the usual Edisonade diving suits with oxygen packs and one man flying suits, propelled by flapping wings powered by electric batteries.

Electric Bob’s adventures include riding across country on his Big Bicycle in only thirty days, helping an aging Spanish-American landholder fight off Yankee swindlers, attempting to dredge up sunken treasure in the Caribbean, and finding gold in the desert of the American southwest. The Electric Bob stories are linked together, a relative rarity in the Edisonades. Similarly, the idea of a vehicle shaped like an animal is in all likelihood taken from Jules Verne’s The Steam House, but unlike Luis Senarens, Toombs did not steal outright from Verne. Instead he used Verne’s idea as a springboard.

Electric Bob was in the second rank of Edisonade heroes. His stories were never as popular as The Frank Reade Adventures or the Jack Wright Adventures, but Electric Bob was popular enough to appear five times. The stories are more upbeat and good-humored than other Edisonades and are written with a certain lightheartedness and a whimsical tone which is missing from other Edisonade stories. The stories are likewise lacking the venomous racism so common to other Edisonades. Although Bob’s servant Dandy, a former slave, is called a “nigger” by the story’s author, Dandy is treated in a far less racist manner than Luis Senarens, in the Frank Reade, Jr., stories, treated Reade’s servant Pomp. Non-whites are not, by and large, the victim of most of Electric Bob's weaponry; white men, including West Virginia moonshiners, Mississippi swamp rats, and Yankee swindlers, generally are. The light tone and comedic content of the Electric Bob stories have plausibly led some critics to see the stories as satires of the Edisonade genre, an entirely plausible charge considering the time (1893, the height of the dime novel Edisonade craze) and place (New York Five Cent Library, from Street & Smith, the dime novel competitors to Frank Tousey, the publisher of the Frank Reade and Jack Wright stories).

The Electric Bob stories are a pleasant change from the usual dime novel Edisonades.

Recommended Edition

Online: http://jessnevins.com/edisonade/edisonade.pdf