by Christopher T Schuman

Invented in 1947 by Dr Guy Lamberson, the Erie Name Generator is a machine designed to generate three names, a first, middle and last, at random, from a bank of millions, at the request of its user. The generator is named after the town it resides in, Erie, Pennsylvania, and has become a Mecca for writers across the world. While a hip spot today, few remember the obscure work that first sparked the Name Generator Generation of writers: The Squid of Tomorrow, first published in 1962. The author, an English writer named Barrett Argent, learned of the name generator, as a child, from his uncle, Canada's famous inventor, Dr Arnold Argent, a great friend of Dr Lamberson. Young Argent became obsessed with the idea of millions of named no-ones floating about inside the machine, waiting to be printed out onto a slip of paper. The Generator dominated the young writer's thoughts for years to come. Finally, in 1958, having finished university, a twenty-five year old Argent traveled to Erie Pennsylvania, and visited the Erie Name Generator. The writer described sitting before the Generator as his first and only true religious experience. He looked at it for an hour before asking the machine to produce one name that he could build his first great novel around. The machine beeped and whirred, and breaking its programming for the first time, printed out a single name: SCHUMAN. Argent took the name and returned to England. He looked up its origin, and came upon a strange German folktale. The folktale, which, in most versions, is set in Frankfurt, is about an extremely short cobbler suffering from mistaken identity. In Frankfurt, according to the tale, the entire shoe creation and repair industry was run by elves. Though resembling an elf in size, the cobbler was a human. Too often being mistaken for a shoe-elf, the old cobbler eventually broke down, crying I'm a shoe-man, a shoe-man! He eventually took his cry as his surname (in the original German: Schumann) and the name Schuman was born. Argent wrote his novel, with the tale in mind. The Squid of Tomorrow is about a Floridian diving couple who one day find a human-like squid-baby on the beach. Mistaking it for a boy, the couple adopts the squid-baby, and raises it as if it were human. The name given to the baby, an act of irony never addressed within the text, is Schuman. Schuman grows up as if he were a boy, until adolescence, when, on a dive, the young squid meets his original parents and learns the truth of his ancestry. Refusing to be ashamed of who he is, whenever people would refer to him as a boy, Schuman would always correct them, saying, I'm a squid, a squid! The novel never sold well, being too off-beat for the average reader, however the method soon caught on, and the Erie Name Generator became a national landmark.