Clockwork Futures

by Brandy Schillace

  Technology Becomes Us

  Descartes and La Mettrie, Vaucanson and Jaquet-Droz, William Blakey and William Smellie—each sought to reorder the complex machinery of being human. That they were not entirely successful might be gathered from our own strange and wondrous bodies, driven by purposes we scarcely understand and rarely control, unavoidably aging and in a constant state of incomprehensible change. We march toward death, though all of medical knowledge chases after the elusive mathematics of life, holding out some hope through gene sequencing and DNA that we’ll arrive at last to the sacred text Dr. Culpeper thought he’d already mastered: the cosmic map of us. We might chuckle at his model, but we so often see what we expect to see—and, as Descartes himself would remind us—none of it may be reality, if any such thing exists. He spoke of the body as hydraulics and pulleys; later, La Mettrie would speak of the mind in much the same way. Still later, Thomas Willis would give us our first idea of electrical nerves, and since the advent of computers, we find ourselves talking about brain power as a matter of circuits. But none of us is correct. “A machine, any machine,” says Elting Morison, “tends to establish its own conditions, to create its own environment and draw men to it.” That is, we bend to the new order because machines can be designed to do only a part of what a whole man can do—and so “wear[s] down those parts of a man that are not included in the design.”56 We built human machines to demonstrate an order we expected to be there, in the way that Kepler built machines to show that the universe itself corresponded to a text we could read, a riddle we could decipher. But that always anticipates the order to be found. And because the technology we invent irrevocably changes the way we see the world (and even which and what parts of worlds we see), the more ordered the machine becomes, the more we expect all things to be ordered just like machines. “Man is, not only because he thinks,” Elting explains, “but because he feels.”57 Descartes has it only partly right; we may be, of all creatures, the most intellectual and certainly the one most taken with our own cognitive abilities, but whether you house the immaterial in Descartes’s disembodied mind or La Mettrie’s organized parts, we remain a composite being, a “creature of rapture and despair,”58 Mama Engine and Grandfather Clock in a palpitating, organic, engine of becoming.

  Today, this strikes at the heart of the android project, undergirds the “emotion” machines and empathy robots already in design, if not in production. The fondest hopes of AI and the darkest dread of science fiction dystopia—the clockwork boys and the mother machines—linger in doubt over the same, singular issue: to build the human machine, we must first understand the human. To understand the human, we built machines. The inventor, in fiction and in fact, operates first as a unit of disruption, a wrench in the works who refuses the status quo (and even sensible defeat). The century that followed Newton and Descartes built upon their scaffolds. Chaos had not been overcome, but rather managed, subsumed, made part of the works and systems. Out of the chaos, we imposed order, a constructed reality—even a Matrix. And from those battleworks, the next generation sought to throw the doors off of Nature itself, and to the darkness, bring an increasingly scientific light. They would do so in contest, too, fighting for the right to be first, to be best, to be remembered beyond the grave.

  *The preface of Discourse on Method lays out his (incredibly ambitious) plan in six parts: in the first, “various considerations touching the Sciences”; in the second, the “principal rules of the Method,” in the third “rules of Morals” from the Method; the fourth he dedicated to the existential problem, the existence of God and the soul; and the fifth investigates the body itself, the motion of the heart and how body and mind interact (or not). In other words, his first five sections cover no less than all the known sciences, investigation methods, morality, religion, and medicine—and in the fifth, he at last gives “the reasons that have induced him to write” (without hope of profit or gain, but only the advancement of science).

  †A simplified version of what in fact is a highly complex argument; for a deeper understanding of Descartes’s scientific and philosophic vision of soul/mind/body, see Desmond Clarke’s Descartes’s Theory of Mind.

  ‡Despite its popularity, the machine disappears by 1780. There are others, mannequins, plush works like the “phantom” (birth mannequin) of Madame du Coudray (the midwife of Louis XV of France), that remain. But the mother machine has gone, and though we’ve plenty of descriptions, I haven’t found a single model, sketch, or student drawing of the device. Auctioned after Smellie’s death to obstetrician William Hunter (physician to Queen Charlotte), and later sold to Dr. Foster, assistant master of the Dublin Rotunda, the machine simply vanishes.

  PART TWO

  “I try in vain to be persuaded that the pole is the seat of frost and desolation; it ever presents itself to my imagination as the region of beauty and delight. There, Margaret, the sun is forever visible, its broad disk just skirting the horizon and diffusing a perpetual splendour. [. . .] What may not be expected in a country of eternal light? I may there discover the wondrous power which attracts the needle and may regulate a thousand celestial observations that require only this voyage to render their seeming eccentricities consistent forever. I shall satiate my ardent curiosity with the sight of a part of the world never before visited, and may tread a land never before imprinted by the foot of man.”

  —Letter I, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein

  THREE

  Catching Lightning in a Bottle

  When George Shattuck Morison stood before an eager crowd of would-be engineers to announce the new age, he already lived in the future of power. Everything the nineteenth century had been, and all that the twentieth century aspired to be, depended upon that power, and upon the dark seams of coal that fueled it. The New Epoch was made of old death, the fossilized remains of onetime creatures, the vegetable and animal life of eons offering an industrial birth out of coal tar and soot ash. But this promise of resurrected life also sits at the heart of a singular story—one that still haunts us, suggesting with eerie composure that life may spring from dead tissue, that we may command life’s magical force. Mary Shelley, the daughter of William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, and the lover and later wife of poet Percy Shelley, wrote Frankenstein in the dread winter weather of 1814.

  The novel, like Frankenstein’s creature, is a composite body, built from hopes and dreams of a previous century when electricity itself was still new, a mythic fire controlled by the gods. The novel, also called The Modern Prometheus, begins by shaking fists at that Creator-God, borrowing a quote from Satan in Paradise Lost: “Did I request thee, Maker, to mould me?” Did I ask, in other words, to be born of this clay and heat and fire? Victor Frankenstein never gives the game away, but the novel’s greatest foreshadowing comes in the form of a lightning strike. Lightning, the first of our dreams of power, destroys indiscriminately, behaves unpredictably. The tongue of flame splits the darkness, and men would harness it—literally—by catching lightning in a bottle. Even so, power didn’t consist entirely in light, but in enlightenment, in turning the lens away from the heavens and toward the earth’s own distant corners.

  Shelley’s novel does not begin with the scientist’s laboratory but instead with the explorer’s ship, with Walton writing letters home about a country where there is no darkness at all. The “new philosophy” of science had spawned a new kind of “philosopher.” The Enlightenment, a European intellectual movement that spanned the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, relied on reason and rationality and method. It may have grown from thinkers like Newton and Descartes, but Enlightenment science privileged practical ends, observable methods, explainable principles, and a universe free from superstition—and not infrequently, from God. The gentleman of means experimenting at leisure slowly gave place to the engineer and businessman of which James Watt and Matthew Boulton, creators of the first effective steam engine, make perfect examples, and also to the botanist and explorer searching far-flung frontiers. “We
cannot conceive of any end or limit to the world,” said Francis Bacon, “but always as of necessity [. . .] there is something beyond.” We can scarcely find a place on earth today unlit by neon and streetlamp or at least the pink haze of far-off cities—and we can barely imagine a world with “undiscovered” countries. The eighteenth century had both, a vast and limitless unknown to which intrepid inventors and explorers would bring their separate kinds of “light.”

  While it might be common to think of steam power coming before electrical power in a linear progression, history tells a different story. In every way possible, men sought to make and control power. Hydraulic power, steam power, and the fiery possibility of electrical power enticed equally—and early. Long before steam engines ran upon Victorian rails, electricity fascinated Benjamin Franklin in a young America. And long before Ben Franklin envisioned his first storm kite this same mysterious power drove a controversy over life force between Allessandro Volta and Luigi Galvani, resulting in the discovery of the battery on the one hand, and a series of grisly experiments on the other. The century’s explorers sought a different kind of “enlightenment,” new worlds to discover that required wooden ships and steel determination, and which frequently led to the starvation and violent death of the explorers themselves. Frankenstein, in all its sprawling, stitched, and grim-lipped splendor, encompasses both the age of electricity and the age of “dark continents”—the power of life and the power of death. But first comes the spark.

  In January of 1746, Pieter van Musschenbroek reported the following to colleagues at the Académie des Sciences in Paris: “I would like to tell you about a new and terrible experiment, which I advise you never to try yourself, nor would I, who have experienced it and survived by the grace of God, do it again for all the kingdom of France.”1 Musschenbroek had been experimenting with a device for “storing” electrical “fluid,” but he got much more than he bargained for: “My right hand was struck with such force that my whole body quivered just like someone hit by lightning [. . .] the arm and the body are affected so terribly I can’t describe it. I thought I was done for.”2 As experiments go, it was, in his own words “explosive.” But the shaken professor concludes in despair, “I’ve reached the point where I understand nothing and can explain nothing.” He’d had the nearest experience one can reasonably get (and live) with electricity, but he had no idea how it worked, or why this experiment, of hundreds he’d performed, had worked so violently. Sixty years later, Humphry Davy would demonstrate this same strange fire to the Royal Institution—but in perfect command of the laws and convinced of the possibilities for lighting the future. Between these events, wonder-workers, charlatans, “electricians,” philosophers, and countless experimenters whom history has forgotten played a dangerous game with the most powerful force yet known to man.

  A Troubled History

  It’s no wonder the Ancient Greeks deified lightning strikes as weapons of Zeus, an armament that would split trees, rend earth, and destroy men and beasts with falling fire. The ancients did not, however, call the lightning electricity. Instead, the word comes from polished amber (ἤλεκτρον or elektron). Formed of fossilized tree resin, amber fascinated because of its color and texture, but also because it could be charged. Though a “stone,” amber feels strangely warm to the touch having gone through a process of molecular polymerization. A Greek philosopher circa 500 B.C.E., Thales of Miletus, discovered that rubbing amber with a cloth caused it to discharge a spark, and in 1671, Newton’s rival, Leibniz, discovered that sparks were associated with electrical phenomenon. Even so, for decades to come, no one would consider the humble static shock and the terrific bursts of thunderstorms to be one and the same. When Newton finally took the reins of the Royal Society in 1703, the first experiments had to do with air pumps, vacuums, and static generation, all as man-made (rather than God-made) wonders. But it would be the static generation machine that captured public imagination; the modern world owes a great debt to a draper’s son turned lab assistant and chief experimenter of the Royal Society: Francis Hauksbee.

  Hauksbee began his life in the trades, in Colchester, England. He’d been apprenticed to his elder brother, but spent his time researching the experiments of the new philosophers. By 1699, Hauksbee had left off the fabric business and, like William Blakey and his clockwork trusses, turned his skills toward the manufacture of medical devices.3 He advertised “cupping” apparatus to the public—bell-shaped glass devices that could, with the aid of suction and depression, create a vacuum against the skin. In addition, Hauksbee experimented with engines for creating pressurized air, pumps, and barometers—all for practicing physicians. We have very little evidence of their medical efficacy, but we can speculate on one thing: through his advertisements, Hauksbee gained the attention not only of the physician members of the Royal Society, but of Newton himself. On the fifteenth of December, 1703, a then-elder Newton invited Hauksbee to revive the society’s demonstrations—and a few years later he invented the most curious (and arguably most famous) of his “machines.”

  A glass sphere with the air vacuumed out, a wooden support, a belt, a crank, and a wheel [Fig. 6]: standing before the waiting Society members, Hauksbee asked for the candles to be snuffed. He rapidly turned the crank, the spinning sphere clicking along in oscillating cadence. Then, in the hushed dark, he placed both hands upon the glass. Where only darkness had been, a dancing, ephemeral blue light emerged. It danced about his fingertips like a living creature, collecting, dispersing, a ghost light. Hauksbee’s machine generated static electricity on command, the very first mechanical generator ever invented. “The Learned World,” Hauksbee wrote in 1709, “is now almost generally convinced that instead of amusing themselves with Vain Hypotheses [. . .].”4 His “New Experiments” would not only demonstrate the reality behind Newton’s theories on light, they would explore the “Laws of Electrical Attractions,” that is, electricity and magnetism. More importantly by far, however, they invited others to do the same. Hauksbee published diagrams of his experiments, making them both accessible and replicable, and soon shocks were being generated for excited crowds at dinner parties. Self-proclaimed “electricians” would raise feathers with static-charged glass rods and even set fire to glasses of cognac with a spark from their charged fingertips [Fig. 7]. But Hauksbee didn’t take part in the further demonstrations, no matter how outlandish; the Royal Society lost interest in what they considered parlor tricks for street magicians. It wouldn’t be until the 1730s and ’40s that their attention, with that of a wider world, would be reignited for these curious blue sparks.

  Stephen Gray had been a silk dyer before an accident rendered him disabled. He became a pensioner at Charterhouse (for orphans and elderly), but Gray had an active mind and an interest in electricity. Now, with time on his hands and plenty of useful orphans about, he began a series of unusual, and not entirely safe, experiments. Gray suspended one of the youngsters by silk ropes in the great hall and charged his prone body using Hauksbee’s machine. Later called the “flying boy” and reintroduced to those parlors and back rooms as excellent and “innocent” fun, Gray’s swing-like contraption proved the next leap into electrical understanding. Electricity traveled. It could move from the machine to a rod, the rod to the boy, and from the boy’s fingers to a plate of feathers or gold foil that danced and sparked beneath him. Why the silk ropes? He must be suspended above the ground for it to work—and silk did not allow the electricity to move through it. Soon Gray was conducting other experiments with the aid of his friend Jean Desaguliers. A cork, for instance, could be electrified by means of hemp thread suspended on silk though nine hundred feet away, the same principle we use today for sending power through high-tension lines, the pulse skirted along wires through insulators to keep it from escaping. The world could be separated into conductors and insulators; electricity stopped dead in silk and resin, but it was conducted easily by metals, fluids, and—disturbingly—human bodies. Gray’s ideas whipped up national and int
ernational attention. Itinerant lecturers toured capitals and provinces with portable Hauksbee machines, offering demonstrations in public squares and aristocratic salons, with the human body at the center of experiment. Their activity, says historian Paola Bertucci, made electricity “one of the most discussed topics of polite conversations.” In 1745, readers of the Gentleman’s Magazine would hear of “wonderful discoveries, so surprising as to awaken the indolent curiosity of the public,” even for “ladies and people of quality, who never regard natural philosophy but when it works miracles.”5 The Newtonian maxim of preserving God’s secrets for the chosen had been overrun by an increasingly literate public of pleasure-seekers. No longer God’s thunderbolts, electricity was, as the Gentleman’s Magazine explained, “new fire which a man produced from himself, and which did not descend from heaven.”6 On the wings of rational intellectualism, electricity traveled fast, but it still could not be contained. How, the wonder-workers asked, could they make the spark brighter and more long lasting? Could it be contained and saved?