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 "Small confrontation with the Töpler Influence Machine, nothing to worry about."

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"Töpler Influence Machine"

An electrostatic generator which means a machine to generate static electricity! It was probably used for hilarious practical jokes and Jackass-style stunts. It's almost certain that August Töpler was the first guy in history to know what it felt like to shock your scrotum. Or, more probably, his lab assistant was the first and Töpler was the first person in history to piss himself laughing at seeing a guy get his balls electrocuted.

I am, of course, joking. Static generators were invented well over a century earlier and, as such, many, many balls had been shocked before Töpler was even born.

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 He discussed it one day with his friend at Yale, Professor Vanderjuice, who, having just emerged from another of the laboratory mishaps for which he was widely known, carried as always a smell of sal ammoniac and singed hair.

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Pynchon never fears going full trope at times. He uses the entirety of language at his disposal and a good portion of the language we share are pop culture tropes and characters. The literate dog aboard the Inconvenience is based on Scrappy Doo, for Christ's sake! And here we see Professor Vanderjuice as that bumbling, absent-minded professorial-type whose massive intelligence and passion for new discoveries can get him into dangerous situations, like always blowing up the lab he's in and coming out smoking with wild hair and big black holes burned into his lab coat. He's a cartoon (to me, he's Professor Pat Pending from The Wacky Races)! But being a cartoon, he's capable of more than real people and, as such, he's actually built a perpetual motion machine for the Chums of Chance (an invention his peers scoffed at, not because they didn't believe he built it but because the thing he built was impossible and thus deserved academic scorn).

One of the themes I feel Pynchon crafting in this book is that what we believe as human beings shapes the world in which we live. Like a cartoon coyote running on air off a cliff, we craft reality and reality only shifts or changes, causing us to plummet, when we finally observe some truth which causes us to give up our old beliefs. So the Frontier was more about what we believed it to be, and declaring its death once again changed the landscape of the West. Believing that light needed Æther to travel through meant the world was full of Æther and its strange lighting effects were seen by balloonists up until scientists could prove Æther didn't exist (which they haven't proven yet by 1893! But they have experiments which have failed to prove its existence where they should have, and thus it is on its way out). Later, we'll see the Chums of Chance travel through a hollow Earth, something we know isn't possible but lived on in theory and belief during their century.

Vanderjuice might be a ridiculous human being but that only means he's capable of accomplishing ridiculous scientific feats.