Our History
It would seem ironic to speak of the history of an institution whose research has been pivotal in the understanding of multi-linear timestreams. This then is a history.
The story of the Institute stretches back nearly eighty years, and is intimately tied to the career of its founder, professor Nöys Harlan and her pioneering work in chronocartography. Following a series of lectures given by Harlan at MIT in the summer of 1941 the US military took an interest in the possible strategic applications of her work and a loose collection of researchers were brought together to collaborate on furthering the field. Calling themselves the Lernaean Group they focused primarily on the manipulation of temporal streams.
During the early years of the Cold War the group received heavy funding from the US military as part of the Montauk Project, but their work began to fall out of favour as relations between the US and USSR stagnated and the group failed to produce any results with strategic application. Letters sent between Harlan and her fellow researchers suggest that despite the group’s reliance on defence department funding she was actively working to suppress information which she deemed might have a military use.
Whatever the reason for the group’s lack of success, by 1961 the US military had cut its ties entirely and most members of the original research team had relocated to other posts. Only Harlan remained, working from a succession of obscure offices, first at MIT, and then independently. She would continue her work in near isolation for twenty years until her 1984 paper ‘Transkleionics’, reinvigorating the chronocartographic field overnight. The renewed interest in Harlan’s work brought with it a flurry of new papers in research areas which did not sit directly within the field of chronocartography, and it became clear that there was a need for an institution capable of coordinating research efforts across a wide range of subjects.
Thanks primarily to the hard work of Professor Echidna Stillwell at Miskatonic University the Lambent Institute was formally founded in 1986 as an independent body within the Miskatonic Virtual University family, with Professor Harlan at its head. Under the patronage of Miskatonic University and the Vysparov Foundation the Institute was granted full staff and research funding, and relocated their offices to the United Kingdom west London premersie where they now reside. Professor Nöys Harlan would remain director of the Institute until her death in 2005, at which time the directorship passed to her daughter, Professor Silvia Harlan.
Extracts reproduced with permission from The Lambent Institute: A Secret History of Secret Histories by Prof. Silvia Harlan, available through Oxford University Press.