Clockwork Futures

by Brandy Schillace

  Historian Philip Guedalla described the previous generation as “men in black coats who produced astonishing results while thinking hard all the time about something else”; men who invented railroads while thinking of communications and defense strategies, and who weren’t aware that they were by proxy building a brand new world of interconnections (that would ultimately make it as easy to invade as to defend).17 For all George Shattuck Morison’s aspirations for mankind in the latter nineteenth century, the decades he had himself lived through should have been fair warning. They weren’t. But by the second decade of the twentieth century, unexamined optimism was far less possible and certainly not advisable. Elting Morison, the author of the other little book—and my first introduction to his uncle’s New Epoch—put it best as a series of questions: why change? who changes? what design problems? what capital requirements? what industrial modifications? And most importantly, who gets hurt, and who profits?18 The questions aren’t new. But the way history answers them is bound up with the very machines we invented, and even today, with the most advanced of our difference engines, the computer, you can only get out what you put in.

  Steampunk’s fictional worlds try to have it both ways, offering technology via two competing visions. It can be the height of craftsmanship and reason and well-purposed parts; it can heighten and extend the human, but with characteristic Victorian charm. It runs like clockwork. But that same technology also breaks and destroys, tears and rends. Bodies are broken. Jobs are stolen. Death runs rampant. We can point fingers, but that mistakes the first principle: we use (and abuse) technology because someone, somewhere, sometime, sold us on the idea. Miller and Taddeo talk about the “magic” of the Victorian era, a time when scientists and medicine men appeared like magicians to control the elements. Heroes and captains and adventurers inspire us in a time of individual invention we can hardly find modern corollaries for—but they also worked as carnival barkers who shouted at the entrance of draped tents and offered to sell science for a nickel. Steampunk has been called “fantasy made real,” but much of what I’ve been describing comes from the actual history of actual inventions that actually worked (or didn’t, or blew apart in the furnace, or took off a limb or two in the process). George Morison claimed, “The records of the future must be made by men of different types and different habits, [. . .] who will exchange the pleasures and quiet of the university for the roar of the rolling-mill, the buzz of the machine-shop, the obscurity of the mine, the bustle of the railroad.”19 Elting, with the benefit of the Red Queen’s memory, revisited that idea fifty years on and recognized invention itself as “a hostile act—a dislocation of existing schemes.”20 Do we, finite and limited creatures in the vault of time under a vast continuum of expanding galaxies, dare disturb the universe? Looking backward to look forward in history offers us a chance to do something steampunk fictions, on their own, cannot do: first, we can look beyond the cogs and wheels and see not only how they work but what they are for, what demons they sought to thwart or contain, and what inherent disruption they caused in coming to be. Second, we can see where in this vast arrangement of human activity steampunk has its first origin—not, as some suggest, in the inventions themselves, but in the brilliant and glowing display of them by those who sought to overcome our natural resistance to change. Lastly, we can examine the very fine line between our desire and our dread—for dread and fear are not the same. We can almost always name the thing we fear; it has a face. That which we dread is more uncertain, a sense that something, somewhere, is about to go horribly wrong—a feeling that we cannot prepare for its assault. As far back as Newton in the seventeenth century, the hot-air balloon showmen and medical charlatans of the eighteenth, or the industrial magnates and electrical wonder-workers of the nineteenth century, innovators needed to “sell” science to those who would fund their explorations. . . . And to trade upon the fiction of control. Technology to serve men, not the other way around, they promised—and they often downplayed, ignored, or just failed to see tragedy and consequence along the way.

  In other words, we didn’t invent steampunk in the twentieth century as a response to today’s technology; the “steampunk” ethos has been with science from the beginning, the bright crest of war-works in a battle against our greatest foes: chaos, darkness, privation, anarchy, and death. To chaos, seventeenth-century mathematicians sought to bring order; to darkness, eighteenth-century explorers and experimenters tried to bring the light. The Victorians fought to bring industry and control to an expanding empire that threatened privation and anarchy—and at last, the unconquerable enemy that we still fear and face: death, the destruction of all our future plans in the fragile, finite human body. Science, and the power of the future, works always to this end: conquer the unconquerable. Showmen and cranks take their place right next to “real” science in this history, bringing the carnival to a waiting public in terror and in wonder. This book reveals a tangled history as much about our dread as about our love of discovery, as much about the train crash as about the gleaming rails. A social history of technology and the seduction of “clockwork futures”: this is the story of hope, trepidation, and the struggle of modern science in a steam-powered age. Salesmanship and indeed showmanship are the very spirit of steampunk, and the fictions we tell ourselves are part of the scientific framework we have inherited, part of how we “do” science and how we understand its destiny—yesterday, today, and tomorrow.

  *Many thanks to James M. Edmonson, chief curator, Dittrick Museum of Medical History.

  †Elting Morison makes the same connection:

  “Living backwards!” Alice repeated in great astonishment. “I never heard of such a thing!”

  ‘—but there’s one great advantage in it, that one’s memory works both ways.”

  “I’m sure mine only works one way,” Alice remarked. “I can’t remember things before they happen.”

  “It’s a poor sort of memory that only works backwards,” the Queen remarked.

  —“Wool and Water” Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There, by Lewis Carroll.

  ‡With obvious ethical consequences. Ghosh, Pallab. “Mammoth Genome Sequence Completed,” Science and Environment, BBC News, April 23, 2015.

  PART ONE

  “I am much occupied with the investigation of the physical causes [of motions in the Solar System]. My aim in this is to show that the celestial machine is to be likened not to a divine organism but rather to a clockwork . . . insofar as nearly all the manifold movements are carried out by means of a single, quite simple magnetic force. This physical conception is to be presented through calculation and geometry.”1

  —Johannes Kepler

  ONE

  The God of Mathematics

  In the small hours of morning, when sleep has fled and the strange noises of night crowd young imaginations, numbers can be magical. I do not mean math proper, not yet; I mean the solidity and reality of counting. We counted sheep, we counted our toes and small fingers, our elbows and knees—strange preparation for the infinite, uncountable stars that awaited in the velvet dark. I remember feeling small, but with my back against grass and the warm earth under me, I don’t ever remember feeling lost. The world as I knew it had concrete foundations. I believed it immovable and unshakable. And for many centuries, most of humankind held a similar view. Aristotle claimed as much in 355 B.C.E.: “In the whole range of time past, so far as our inherited records reach, no change appears to have taken place either in the whole scheme of the outermost heaven or in any of its proper parts.”1 Aristotle’s universe had no creator; it preexisted all things: an I HAVE BEEN rather than the great I AM. But Aristotelian ideas would be used by Christian Medieval and Renaissance astronomers to build complex mathematical systems for understanding the cosmos as a purpose-built machine. This universal clockwork—the mathematics, even the numbers—they claimed, proved the presence of an intelligent creator.

  In this book’s perambulation, I suggested that the e
arth was old and technology new. David Wootton, a historian used to taking the long view, explains that tool-making humans have been around for about 2 million years, with Homo sapiens (our own particular brand of human) arriving about 200,000 years ago, pottery 25,000 years ago, and agriculture between 12,000 and 7,000 years ago.2 George Shattuck Morison described these “ages” of men, too, from his lecture of 1896. He calls them the “three periods of savagery, followed by three periods of barbarism,” with the taming of fire as the initial precondition—fire led man from the first to the second stage, the weapon from the second to the third, and so on until we arrive at written language and “civilization.”3 Despite our long history, written records have existed for only about 6,500 years, and modern technological and scientific innovations of the sort we’re talking about occupy only the last 400.4 Four hundred years: just less than twice the age of the United States Declaration of Independence, a good 125 years after Columbus stumbled into North America, a bare slip of time. Wootton rightly calls the world we live in today “box fresh”;5 Science as we know it was “invented” between the discovery of a new star in 1572 and the publication of Newton’s Opticks (on light) in 1704.6 What Morison described as the “new epoch” is the crescendo of a movement forty generations old, heralding the end of “old buildings, old boundaries, and old monuments, and furthermore of customs and ideas, systems of thought and methods of education.”7 Ironically, in 1664 a man named Henry Power claimed almost exactly the same thing: “Me-thinks, I see how all old Rubbish must be thrown away, and the rotten Buildings be overthrown, and carried away with so powerful an Inundation. These are the days that must lay a new Foundation of a more magnificent Philosophy.”8 An English physician and one of the first elected Fellows of the Royal Society, Power felt that he, too, stood on the heaving deck of a brand new epoch. You can only move forward, never back; the wave of change will come. Both men were right about that, but the story can’t begin in the shining future with its gleams of promise. It starts in the stench and decay of those “rotten buildings” at the dawn of the seventeenth century, and mankind’s firm conviction that no new knowledge existed.9

  Imagine a city, circa 1600: Animals were slaughtered and the entrails and blood left to seep in straw, home to flies and larva and all manner of bacteria. Light came from guttering animal-fat candles, foul smelling and sooty. Close living and no plumbing meant human and animal excrement mixed in streets. Science writer Edward Dolnick describes London as particularly crusted and bleak, but even the palace of French king Louis XIV only cleared its corridors of feces once a week.10 Today, we may argue over sexing public restrooms, but until fairly recently there were no public facilities, and in fact no toilets, at all. Pests were naturally everywhere—from the rat down to the louse. Even “romantic” writing included reference to the ubiquitous flea (most famously John Donne, who attempts to woo by reference to the mixing blood in the insect’s gut). Skin disease, rot, and various infections scabbed over the bodies of urban dwellers, rich or poor. Country folk fared only marginally better, their bodies broken under heavy manual labor. War and religious tumult, from the Thirty Years War in Germany to the English Civil War, meant that national governments existed in flux and instability. And to make matters worse, the Black Plague swept across Europe in deadly waves from the fourteenth century to the devastating outbreaks of the 1650s–60s. Medicine stood mostly helpless under the onslaught, and too often the cure killed as fast as the ailment. It could not have been a great comfort to think God was in his heaven and all was right with the world. It was, however, the only comfort going. The educated man before 1600, says Wootton, would have believed that the earth remained fixed and still, and all else revolved around it, and that God was minutely involved and interested in man.11 Man’s only recourse in this deeply flawed but fixed little world was to that same God, whose ways he little understood, but who nonetheless provided the answer to all questions. Even death. The world was just so because God ordained it, and mathematics could prove it.

  The Mechanics of the Universe

  Nicholas Kratzer arrived in England in 1516, bringing with him the latest ideas in mathematics and astronomy (something that made him a favorite in the court of infamous Henry VIII). A Renaissance man in the literal sense, he believed the “secrets of the universe could be unlocked with precision engineering”—but that’s not all. As Dr. James Fox points out in the BBC TV series A Very British Renaissance, Kratzer made good on his word. He crafted small, intricate, unbelievably accurate sundials (one with a dial on nine sides), and in so doing “harnessed” the sun itself. Here was the grand design, rendered sensible, miniature, mechanized. And it proved to his eager patrons that all was right and orderly: In the beginning, there was God, and God created the heavens to revolve around the earth. And since Kratzer engineered the dials to be timed for England’s particular place on it, the sun rose and set right over king and court as the center of their world. Nothing in the divine clockwork suggested otherwise, and Kratzer’s friend, collaborator, and fellow German Hans Holbein further solidified this orderly understanding with his painting The Ambassadors [Fig. 1]. Fox, a Cambridge historian with a particular interest in art, takes the time to reveal the work’s somewhat mystical symbols: a table with celestial materials on top (many of which were tools Kratzer used in his study of the heavens) and earthly matters on the bottom (including human means of entertainment, like the lute). The painting, like Kratzer’s clocks, contained the heavens and the earth, summing up the celestial bodies for human scale consumption. Aristotle and those who followed, like Claudius Ptolemy in 100 C.E., were no longer just men who thought deeply about the cosmos; they were part of a system that, nearly two millennia later, served as the structure undergirding everything, from the king and court, to the religious centers, to men and women out in the muck and mire of daily existence. But the system wasn’t without its problems.

  If you looked carefully at the night sky, and you did so every night for a year, you would notice something unusual. Stars and planets don’t just spin around the visible hemisphere, sliding along the horizon in a predictable way. Instead they appear in odd quadrants at different times of year—and to the careful observer, especially one who believed all of these heavenly bodies were spinning around the earth, the movements would seem erratic and out of order. Given that the precision and permanence of the cosmos offered just about the only succor in the dying world, the anomalies had to be figured into the system. The astronomer Ptolemy tackled this puzzle in the second century. Taking it as unquestionable truth that the sun went around the earth, he theorized planets must move in something called “epicycles” or miniature circles while on the big loop or “deferent” around it. But an intrepid and stalwart star watcher might notice something else amiss too. Planets and stars appear to speed up and slow down. Now what? Ptolemy wasn’t discouraged. He decided that half the epicycle runs counter to the deferent, which makes it appear that things change speed or reverse direction. He even took it a step further by inventing a point called the “equant,” meaning Ptolemy moved the observation point explicitly off the center to account for variation. If that sounds confusing, it should. The system worked on mathematical principles that are not terribly easy to explain. You can model them, however, and Giovanni de’ Dondi created a complex gearwork called the astrarium in Padua in the 1380s to demonstrate exactly how the solar system, as Ptolemy understood it, functioned. In order to answer the need for mathematical precision, Ptolemy gave rise to the concept Kratzer would later take for granted: we live in a universe that operates like a clock. The mathematics was correct. But the model, with its assurance of a constant and predictable universe, was wrong.

  In 1572, a new star appeared. The discoverer, Tycho Brahe, used trigonometry to show that what he saw through his telescope, a brilliant star that could be seen with the naked eye inhabited the heavens, not the corruptible lower spheres.12 Who among us would be so lucky? New stars are rare phenomena—an earthbound explorer might
only view one in a thousand years. But for it to appear in the “unchanging” cosmos at a time when demons still caused ill winds and witches were still burned (along with those who challenged deeply held views), this nova signified terrifying portents. Why was it there? How was it there? Was the world ending? Brahe spent the next fifteen years observing the heavens and measuring the immeasurable, though he never entirely questioned that the Earth remained stationary. That was left to another: Italian astronomer, mathematician, and engineer Galileo Galilei. The ill-fated Galileo wasn’t the first to see the flaw in the Earth-centered design, just the first to run afoul of the Inquisition (a series of offices of the Catholic Church charged with combating heresy and prosecuting heretics). Renaissance mathematician Nicolaus Copernicus made arguments against Ptolemy in the 1500s. He published De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres) just before his death in 1543 and ushered in a true “paradigm shift”—a radical shift in thinking that some have credited with the dawn of the “Scientific Revolution.” But the new system did not make waves; it didn’t even capture the attention of the Church until six decades later, when Galileo was condemned for holding Copernican beliefs. Timing, as they say, is everything.