About 15 years ago, I read the epic Herman Melville book Moby-Dick; or, The Whale. There’s one part I remember clearly, and it’s a quote from chapter 124:
The magnetic energy, as developed in the mariner’s needle, is, as all know, essentially one with the electricity beheld in heaven [...]
As the volume was published in 1851, it seems strange we’re seeing using the word electricity because it sounds too modern.
A few chapters earlier, however, the author explained how the ship was equipped with a lightning rod which was connected to a chain touching the sea bed. Again, that sounds too up-to-date, but it was a century after Benjamin Franklin’s kite experiment, so the movement of lightning was well understood by that time.
The author Nicola Cornick is attributed with naming this phenomenon The Tiffany Problem. The use of the name Tiffany as a first name dates back to medieval times, yet it feels like a 20th-century derivation. However, the term can be applied to any similar anachronism, not just names.
Conversely, the name of this observation isn’t actually that old, only dating back to 2018.
Another book where I spotted this was Dracula, where Bram Stoker mentions that Jonathan Harker has a Kodak camera. The Eastman Kodak Company was set up five years before the novel was published in 1897, but a 21st-century author might be cautious of including such a detail.
Staying in this universe, it’s possible to extrapolate in other ways. For example, some of the action is set in Whitby and this had long been connected to Leeds by rail, where Marks & Spencer was founded in 1884. As such, it’s canonically possible that Dracula could have enjoyed a cup of M&S tea.
Of course, as the problem originally highlighted becomes more widely known, that becomes the key to solving it. Now when readers encounter a girl called Tiffany living in the 1400s, they’ll recognise it’s historically consistent, and I think we’ll see authors starting to feel more relaxed about using it.
Gavin Cameron 