Coincidence Train

In researching science fiction stories recently, I was scrolling through the pages of a magazine and came across this illustration that made me stop. There was something immediately familiar about it. I felt this strongly. Although I was certain I hadn’t seen this particular illustration before I found myself tracing over its lines until suddenly it hit me – there was something in it that I had seen before. 

In my childhood in the late 1970s early 1980s we had a lot of picture books. It seemed like a golden era of illustration at a time before televisions in bedrooms or mobile phone screens. It was a time when picture books could monopolise the attention of young eyeballs. Whenever I rediscover one of the books we had in my childhood, as I had done on a recent visit to my parents house, I’m struck by how each page evokes high-fidelity memories that had seemingly been lost to time. 

One of these picture books was by Peter Lippman. It is called ‘Busy Wheels’ (1973).¹ It is about wheels of all shapes and sizes, the vehicles they move and the people who use them. Colourful illustrations crammed every inch of every page with many details. There were road sweepers and garbage trucks, school buses and roller-skaters, fire engines and police cars, racing cars, steamrollers and bulldozers, and even a moon buggy. 

The vehicles were all rendered in exacting detail. Some had an odd perspective that seemed slightly wrong in places. The people were less refined than the machines; cartoonish with large heads, but always compelling. There were frowning people caught in traffic jams, smiling firemen rescuing people from a blazing building, racing car drivers with determined, staring eyes, and people merrily going about their day oblivious to the world around them – all relying on wheels to get around. 

The final two page spread shows a landscape of green rolling hills and distant snow-capped mountains. A roadway filled with tiny cars emerges from a tunnel and is crossed over by trainline. The train carries an endless chain of wagons stacked with three tiers of cars. 

This is where I had seen it – the thing I had looked at as a child and which had evidently left an impression on my memory. It was now suddenly brought back to consciousness by the science fiction illustration that I had just seen, which I felt (it definetly wasn’t a thought) resembled it. 

In the foreground of the illustration in Busy Wheels is a train carriage packed with cars but unlike the one snaking into the distance these cars are being loaded onto ramps and then lifted into a vertical position and packed inside the carriage by a bright orange loading machine.

The novelty of this design fascinated me as a child. Cars standing on end! It’s the one detail I remembered distinctly. It was this mechanism that I saw echoed in the science fiction illustration that I was now looking at. 

The science fiction illustration above depicts what looks like a massive vessel, like a ship or train carriage, with three large doorways opening outwards to form ramps made up of three sections forming a gentle curve. They are strikingly similar in shape to the car loading ramps in ‘Busy Wheels’. Except there are no cars. Instead, a mass of people carrying luggage is gathered to board the vessel, and their vast numbers trail off into the distance.

So, for me, this doorway to the carriage and its unusual ramps became the single point of connection between the science fiction illustration I’d recently discovered and an illustration in a picture book that I’d poured over as a child decades earlier. 

I wanted to verify this connection – perhaps I was irrationally making too much of it from cloudy memory –  so I found the copy of ‘Busy Wheels’ that we have and photographed the double page spread to compare it with this illustration that was new to me. That’s when I realised the similarity might not be accidental. 

A Surprising Discovery

What was surprising is that, upon inspection, there appear to be more than this single point of similarity between the two pictures than I was aware of or would have even looked for. One mundane coincidence of detail led me to what appears to be a set of coincidences.

Seen side-by-side we see the two illustrations share a similar perspective. They both show a landscape with a central vanishing point on the horizon and rolling hills.

The metal doorway / ramp [A] was similar in both images. It is just about right, not a perfect match², but I’d felt it similar enough, and unusual enough, to have led me to begin the process of comparing the images in the first place. 

In addition the areas B, C, D, E and F in the image above are also similar. I had no idea these other resemblances existed, and when considered in combination they give the impression of a pattern, indicating that the pictures are in fact related.

How the Images are Similar

	Science Fiction Illustration	‘Busy Wheels’ Illustration
A	A large metal doorway hinges downwards forming a curved ramp made of three panels.	A large metal doorway hinges downwards forming a curved ramp made of three panels.
B	The rolling hills converge in a Y shape.	The rolling hills converge in a Y shape.
C	The gathering of people recedes into the distance then curves left.	The loaded train carrying the cars recedes into the distance then curves left.
D	The machine on the left is formed of tiers with horizontal and vertical lines broken up by diagonal lines.	The train carriage carrying the cars on the left is formed of tiers with horizontal and vertical lines broken up by diagonal lines (cross braces).
E	The perspective of the machine on the left forms a steep angle toward the central vanishing point.	The train carriages and large mountains in the distance form a steep angle toward the central vanishing point.
F	The mass of people begins well defined in the foreground. As it recedes it becomes a mass of heads drawn as rough circles.	Beside the train track a mass of stones is rendered as a series of sketched circles.

So what’s going on here?

One possible answer is nothing. You might simply disagree that there is any similarity between these images at all, thinking that I’ve read too much into it a few similar lines and shapes found across two images, and that a snowballing of confirmation bias has occurred, beginning with one wrong comparison that has lead to others.

This may indeed be the case, but I would venture to say that these additional similarities—ones I did not set out to find—are objective enough for even the most skeptical observer to recognise some coincidental parallels. If not in A alone, then perhaps in combination with attributes B to F. This, arguably, goes beyond being a matter of my own interpretation.

Homage

Another possible answer as to why the pictures might be so similar may be found in the biographies of the illustrators who created them. 

The science fiction illustration is by Marco Marchioni (1901-1987). Marchioni grew up in Brooklyn, New York and his family owned an ice cream factory on the Lower East Side, downtown, Manhattan. He was a prolific illustrator, drawing for science fiction pulp magazines, Astonishing Stories, Amazing Stories and others. This particular drawing he made for Wonder Stories, May 1931.³

Peter Lippman (1936-2022), author of ‘Busy Wheels,’ was a trained architect and graphic artist. He shared an interest in complex machinery of all kinds and created a number of children’s books crammed with detailed illustrations of machines all referenced from real-world objects.

Lippman had also grown up in New York City, so, as a budding graphic artist, it seems likely he would have encountered the science fiction pulps that his fellow New Yorker Marchioni created illustrations for decades earlier. 

So, if you agree the pictures are similar, this seems to be a plausible explanation. Two graphic artists lived in the same city and had a shared interest in machinery, and one took inspiration from the other. Lippman’s illustration was simply a homage to this particular Marchioni illustration. Homage was the cause of the coincidence.  

But why?

Easter Egg

If there is a genuine connection between the illustrations, as I argue, and their similarities are not simply a psychological concoction of mine, then it seems to be an incredibly well hidden one. So well hidden that you’d have to wonder if it was ever meant to be found or if anyone else has made this connection along such a tenuous pathway.

But I guess people do these things. For example the creators of Easter Eggs in video games. These are secret messages buried deep within a graphical world that have no consequence on the game as a whole but are often placed there for inquisitive players to find. They are often used to pay homage to another influence or inspiration, or are included simply “just because”. Was Lippman’s illustration one such Easter Egg?

The coincidence (if you agree there actually is one) could have occurred spontaneously, but this seems unlikely. For so many elements to ‘match’ appears to be the product of design rather than that of chance. Illustrators begin with a blank canvas and every pen stroke is a choice. So one coincidental detail [A] might be one thing, but five or more in the same image seems to all but confirm a deliberate action. 

But again, the overall combination of matching attributes and the fact that I didn’t set out to find them is the real surprising thing here. 

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In support of the idea that Lippman was influenced by Marchioni, there appears to be evidence in favour of the practice of hiding meanings within images, as suggested by Lippman’s artist statement, which includes a discussion of his motifs:

While this is a general statement about his painting, it seems to resonate with the plausible narrative of my chain of thought about these illustrations. Lippman’s illustrations were frequently crowded with detail – the perfect place to hide things. 

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As an experiment to see how easy it was to find this similarity between the images I tried to emulate the process using the cold mechanical eye of Reverse Image Search (RIS). This is a recent browser-based Artificial Intelligence tool that can be used to visually search an image to find similar images. Its uses vary from identifying plant species by taking a photo of a leaf, to geolocating military equipment based on the most tenuous of clues seen in photos or videos. Relying on massive data sets, almost anything that has been photographed and indexed by search engines can be compared and identified, found, bought, or targeted. 

In this case, the images and the elements within them (you can choose which area of the image to search) are different enough that no useful search results came back. However, when I first saw the Marchioni illustration, it took only a few seconds for me to feel that the ramp/loading mechanism was something that existed elsewhere, and led to writing this story. It seems that such a task remains beyond the less intuitive skill-set of artificial intelligence, at least for now…

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Vert-a-Pac

As mentioned the machines Lippman drew were real objects, while Marchioni often created fantasy machines for science fiction stories.

The unusual car transportation vehicle seen in Lippman’s image was an innovative system named Vert-a-Pac, developed in the 1970s by Chevrolet to reduce the shipping costs of their subcompact car, the Vega. Storing the cars vertically meant they could carry more per wagon than the more traditional tri-level autoveyers seen in contrast on the left hand side of his illustration.

When looking for information about that system I located what appear to be the reference images Lippman used in creating his illustration. We see the wagons in several different perspectives and the same Pettibone Cary-Lift (the orange vehicle lifting the ramps into their closed position). Even the colours of the cars and the general background landscape are a good match.

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Runaway Train

But here’s where this train of thought about coincidences can easily run away. 

The apparent coincidence between the illustrations is given an additional dimension because there also appears to be a connection between the images that goes beyond the machinery depicted; a thematic connection rooted in the science fiction story itself.  

The illustration by Marchioni is for the first published story by science fiction writer John Wyndham, author of ‘The Day of the Triffids’ and ‘The Midwich Cuckoos’ (he is referred to in Wonder Stories by a pen name John B. Harris). 

Time Travelling Ultraterrestrials

Wyndham’s short story is titled Worlds to Barter, and it is a story about time travel. 

In the story a man from 200 years in the future returns to warn an inventor (his ancestor) about an invention that he would soon create that will have a significant impact on the world. 

The invention would be a battery that would be used by all machines [and wheels!] of the future. The time traveller tells of an invasion to his future time period, the year 2135 AD, of highly evolved humans from “half-a-million years” in the future, who are threatened by the death of the sun and the end of Earth. 

The man had managed to escape by jumping into one of their time travelling devices to make the leap to deliver this warning.

In a future half-a-million years from now, Earth is inhabited by telepathic dwarves with large heads who have mastered advanced technology, including the manipulation of time. These evolved beings demand that their ancestors from the year 2135 AD be transported into their future world to assume their places. In this distant era, the advanced humans would enjoy an abundance of technology and have thousands of years remaining (a period much longer than any individual’s life) before the sun’s inevitable death. The exchange involves the super-advanced humans transporting their population to a younger Earth, ensuring they benefit from hundreds of thousands more years on the planet while avoiding its ultimate demise, perhaps perpetually, [interplanetary expansion is not even considered for some unstated reason].

In order to convince the skeptical population of their power and intent, they disconnect all the world’s batteries. When they do so Wyndham writes: 

“Not a wheel could turn. It was chaos.”

The means of transport they offer to facilitate the exchange is the focus of the Marchioni illustration. Wyndham describes the machine as a “silver cage” and a “birdcage”. It is an enormous metal vessel which when loaded up with human cargo – the people seen trudging up the ramps – disappears into the distant future and returns empty to be filled once more. It is: 

The people shown entering it do so because they have become submissive to the telepathic “force of mind” of the highly evolved guards from the far end of human evolution.

In what appears to be a connection between the transportation vessel of Wyndham’s story and the Vert-a-Pac is, (coincidentally) how the doorways of the vessel are described:

A Cascade of Coincidences

So, does this provide more evidence that Lippman used Marchioni’s illustration as a reference, perhaps because he had read and liked Wyndham’s story so much, including its depiction of an essential human activity composed of “busy wheels” that, if stopped, would cause catastrophe? 

This seems plausible, if difficult to verify.

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On the face of it, there appears to be some plausible coherence – some kind of organisation – to this runaway chain of thought that began with an incredibly specific memory of a tiny detail in a particular children’s book.

However, this coherence may only be of a psychological nature and hold no real meaning. 

But there is one reason to draw attention to this. Chains of thought like this proliferate in ufology amongst believers in synchronicity and parapsychology. They are frequently invoked as evidence of unseen patterns of influence in the world that resist scientific measurment, yet are considered significant and meaningful.

So, finally, and for no other reason than to demonstrate how seductive the feeling of discovery is that a hidden pattern has been found, I’ll add one more curiosity to the mix. The reference photographs for Lippman’s 1973 illustration could also have been used by Marchioni, because they match to about the same degree, with the illustration of the time machine from 1931. However, the obvious problem with that is those real-life machines were not invented until the 1960s.

The only way this could be possible is if some form of time travel was involved…

As the visitor from 2135 AD in the story remarks: Time is “folded or circular so that it is all co-existent, or non-existent”.

Footnotes

1. https://archive.org/details/busywheels00lipp/page/n31/mode/2up ↩︎
2. Perhaps about as close as a rose-chafer is to a golden scarab? (see Synchonicity by C.G. Jung). ↩︎
3. https://archive.org/details/Wonder_Stories_v02n12_1931-05_Gorgon776/page/n79/mode/1up ↩︎
4. https://peterlippmanart.com/artist-s-statement ↩︎