The Floo Revolution

[sunnyskywalker]

Occasionally, something on Pottermore actually makes sense and supplements what's in the books rather than breaking all of time and space. Here's one that I think works: Ignatia Wildsmith (1227-1320) invented Floo Powder some time in the 13th century.

What other things happened around this time?

• The Golden Snidget was used in Quidditch for the first time in 1269 and quickly became an integral part of the game;
  
• The first Triwizard Tournament was played around 1294;
  
• The Black family allegedly started marrying only other magical people.

Let's say Ignatia invented Floo Powder around 1260 and started marketing it pretty quickly. Within a few years, Quidditch development goes from introducing and refining new elements over the course of a couple of centuries to the latest addition becoming so popular so quickly that the Snidget is an endangered species within decades. After about 35 years, they organize a major international sports tournament with wizards on the Continent and probably Scandinavia.

This is about what you'd expect if travel suddenly became easier and faster. Anyone--not just those who can Apparate, but sick people, children, magically weak people, groups of people too large to side-along all at once, etc.--can suddenly instantly transport themselves at least anywhere in Britain. (We don't know the limits of Floo travel, but the kids Floo from either London or Ottery-St.-Catchpole, I can't remember which, to Hogwarts at one point. So it's at least that far.) And suddenly, they can chat with each other in real time instead of having to wait for an owl to arrive with a letter. We know how much cars, airplanes, and telephones have changed our own societies; imagine if we had (smoky, awkward versions of) FaceTime and Star Trek transporters seven hundred years ago.

This also makes a plausible turning point toward wizards separating from Muggle society. They went to magic school before, and had a national (or possibly international, depending on how much of the British Isles the Wizards' Council covered) magical advisory council. But they still lived in Muggle communities for the most part, and were limited in how much they could visit and communicate with other magical people once they'd graduated. So they had lots of reasons to integrate into Muggle society, marry Muggles, etc., even if they did also have their far-flung alumni/hobby community with a few traditions of its own. But once it became easy even for (temporary or permanent) non-Apparaters to visit their children even if they'd married people hundreds of miles away, well, that opens up some possibilities. Now marrying your school sweetheart doesn't mean losing your family support system--Mum can still help watch the baby even if she lives in Devon and you live in Yorkshire. A family of wizarding apothecaries can make a marriage alliance with another such family instead of whoever is available locally. And if you didn't meet someone at school, now you have more opportunities to meet someone at one of those increasingly well-attended sports games instead.

I doubt that the Blacks really have no Muggle or Muggle-born marriage partners going that far back, but I can believe that they started strongly preferring magical spouses and seeing themselves as set apart from their Muggle neighbors around that time.

And after a couple of centuries of the magical community growing increasingly defined and separate, you get witch hunts...

It probably isn't perfect, but this bit of backstory works well enough that I wonder if it happened by accident, or if someone other than Rowling made up the date.

Comments

[chantaldormand]

I agree that instant travel would speed up technological development, but I wonder just how spread out the Floo technology was. Aside from sports, there doesn’t seem to be much of technological advancement during that time. I would expect at least new potion brewing methodology or new manufacturing methods.
I seem to recall there being department at MOM responsible for, among other means of travel, Floo travel. So does that department simply regulate Floo technology or actively supports the whole system like DNS? In the second case we would see the same situation we saw during early internet days: most of the webs were local and if you wanted to send something further away you had to be on good terms with someone who worked at your closest Uni or send data in physical form. And then ISPs were created, but that is another story :P
Another thing I wonder about is what was first: instant travel via Floo or using it like a phone? Perhaps talking via it is a newer feature like with Patronus spell?
What bothers me about timeline of Floo usage and witch hunts is this: in Jo’s mind wizards lived among muggles without putting too much effort into hiding from them, used fire to travel and talk and yet when muggles decided that killing them is the right thing to do, they still used fire in executions.
No matter how stupid muggles are supposed to be, even they would stop and think “Wait, is that really a good idea?”

BTW it's nice to see you are back.

[sunnyskywalker]

I wonder if population size would work as a limitation? Traveling faster helps with a lot of things, but if you still only have a few thousand people, there are limits to how much they can invent in a short timespan. Hm, I'll have to think about this more. I don't expect all the details of her imagined medieval history to work, in any case; it's just surprising that any of them do.

It probably was chaotic at first, too. Since they seem to do fire-chatting by just not passing all the way through the fire, maybe they got walking through first and then quickly figured out that wait, you can just poke your head through. I imagine a lot of people bumping heads until they figured out some kind of system, which may have taken a while.

I think real-life Puritans made some accusation about witches passing children through the fire? I don't remember the reference, though... Anyway, witches in England were generally hanged, not burned. Maybe this is why :-)

I can't guarantee being around too much--due to a very computer-intensive job, I frequently end up with wrist/arm pain and have to cut back on non-work computer usage for a while to recover. But we'll see!

[chantaldormand]

Population size and amount of networks could limit development.
Imagine that Kate wants to visit Tom, but she is connected to different network than he is. First she must floo to Jane who is hooked to the same network she is hooked. Then she has to walk through the village Jane lives and visit Mrs. Brown. There she has to first politely drink tea with Madam and then politely ask to use her floo network. Then finally she get to visit Tom.
That would be tedious if you wanted to visit someone frequently.

I wouldn't be surprised if in the beginning there were a lot of splinching accidents.

Wouldn't that mean that Floo network was exclusive to England?

I know what you mean, lately first half of month exhausts me so much that after work I don't have much of energy to work on chapter analysis or responding to comments :(

[sunnyskywalker]

Incompatible networks would be a nightmare, definitely!

The inventor was supposedly British (she went to Hogwarts, anyway), so presumably they were the first adopters and dealt with the most early-adopter problems. But it must have spread to the Continent within a couple of decades, I would think, and they still burned witches. So... hmm. Maybe there was a national pride thing going on, the British magicals just made a bigger deal of it, and so their non-magical neighbors were more aware of a witches/fire connection than their Continental counterparts? Flimsy, but I'm too tired to think of anything else right now.