Before sunrise on Tuesday morning, a strange sight began to appear on Fulton Ferry Landing in Brooklyn: a six-foot-tall metal drill bit seemed to emerge from the wooden pier, covered in genuine East River mud and revolving slowly beneath the glow of the Manhattan skyline. On Wednesday it will grow into a 12-foot-tall industrial-looking behemoth erupting just in front of the quaint Brooklyn Ice Cream Factory. And on Thursday? Imagine an enormous brass and wood telescope, 37 feet long by 11 feet tall, connected to a mirrored dome, like a child’s drawing of something that will see into the future. Voilà: the Telectroscope will have materialized.

A fanciful device born equally of history and imagination, it will visually connect New Yorkers to people in London, where an identical scope will sit on the banks of the Thames in the shadow of Tower Bridge. Spectators who step right up will have a real-time, life-size view across the pond 24 hours a day, until June 15, thanks to ... no spoilers, yet. (The queue will generally be first come first served, but to make an appointment to connect with a friend in London, visit telectroscope.net.)

The Victorian-looking contraption is the invention of Paul St George, a 53-year-old artist based in London  or, if you believe the gadget’s supposed history, of his great-grandfather Alexander Stanhope St George. According to his very own fake Wikipedia entry, Alexander (born July 8, 1848; died Oct. 12, 1917) was “a British inventor and researcher” who came up with a feasible design for a device to connect places on opposite sides of the world visually through a very long tunnel, and even began digging under the Atlantic to make his creation work. According to Paul St George  well, all of this is according to Paul St George.

And some of it is true, sort of. Mr. St George did have a relative named Alexander  his grandfather, a tailor. The extra generation was added, as was the Stanhope; it’s the name of a type of magnifying lens. And the Telectroscope is a real 19th-century creation  sort of. It was written about, Mr. St George said, by a reporter who misheard a story about an electroscope, a device used to measure electrical current.