Clockwork Futures

by Brandy Schillace

  James Schafer and Kate Franklin’s assessment of why “steampunk” science matters reminds us of the original brilliance of firsts, the bold open plain of technological discovery. Hauksbee’s air pump had its ornaments, its dials and glass domes; his static generator whirred with gears and cranks. Franklin caught lightning in a bottle, Musschenbroek learned how to store it, and Volta how to generate it consistently. The greatest change in the history of innovation, says George Shattuck Morison, is the “manufacture of power,” that is, in making, through ingenuity and accident, something really and truly new. Volta’s battery had done this very thing, but the charge it created didn’t amount to much: a mild shock. To convince the world, science needed a showman—and Humphry Davy was ready for the stage. On April 25, 1801, Davy delivered his first lecture for the Royal Institution on the subject of galvanism—a lecture unlike any that had been given before to the London elite. Holmes described him as “bouncing” onto the stage as a showman, launching his course without pausing for breath. Each experiment became a narrative, a story of hope and discovery. He must have seemed a magician, and papers carried praises for his charm, his exuberance, his ability to hold an audience entranced and spellbound. Leibniz once desired a science carnival, but it was Davy who achieved it. From his own words, he shares the joy of public success, the adulation of men (and women), and the applause of crowds. He called it “public communication,” and he appears as perhaps the first public engagement specialist science had ever known, the nascent role that would become the most important signifier for science to come. Davy was a showman, a salesman, a suave engineer of the public: “I dream of greatness and utility—I dream of Science restoring to Nature what Luxury, what Civilization have stolen from her,” but also, Davy dreamed “of unbounded Applause, Amen!”57 Volta’s discovery made it possible, but it required Humpry Davy to make it shine. Here was the scientist and the dapper gentleman, the captain and the engineer in one. It was Davy who brought charged carbon rods together in the brilliant arc light demonstration, and it was Davy for whom science was light itself [Fig. 10]: “the dim and uncertain twilight of discovery, which gave objects false or indefinite appearance, has been succeeded by the steady light of truth.”58 In 1815, Davy would take a wholly new light into the Northumberland mines.

  In the dark heart of England’s interior, bituminous coal hid away in seams that trickled with water—and sometimes ran with underground rivers. No fiction of palatial mountain mines does justice to the cramped, cold filth, the endless black corridors sloshed with water and caked with coal dust. The vast subterranean veins required constant bailing, the lugging of buckets hand to hand in an uninterrupted chain so that digging could continue. It was to relieve this inherent problem that the first steam engines were built. Thomas Newcomen’s “atmospheric engine” used a piston in the Cornwall mines in 1712; heated air, once cooled and condensed, created a powerful vacuum—but Newcomen’s engine condensed the steam in the single cylinder, wasting fuel. In 1781, James Watt improved the design by adding a separate condenser so that the main chamber didn’t have to be cooled at all; far more efficient, this design required less fuel to remain at a constant temperature.59 Watt also changed the design to be rotary instead of merely up and down, a detail that would open up a wide world of industrial applications later on, especially with his partner, Matthew Boulton, adding in the rather brilliant idea of selling the design with royalties. Shrewd businessmen, Watt and Boulton cornered the market through patent, and Boulton sealed their popularity through public demonstration (and publicity stunts). His famous brag served as the seed of George Shattuck Morison’s claims about manufactured power: “I sell here, sir, what all the world deserves to have—POWER.”60 The first steam-powered loom factory opened in 1790 in Manchester, but in the very earliest days of the nineteenth century, the steam engine’s most important job remained its utility in getting at power’s source. Everything came down to coal. Davy himself connected it to “the necessaries, comforts, and enjoyments of life, but also with the extension of our most important arts, our manufacture, commerce, and natural riches.”61 By means of it, he continued, all the advancements and ingenuity of human labor are heightened and extended, and yet those luxuries came with a cost. Men caught lung maladies, inhaling the dust particulate and shivering in cold day in and out. They lost fingers, and they lost their lives. Most died coughing, others crushed under rock, or even submerged if the water rose to the low ceilings. But the coal seams hid another, secret threat, one that announced itself in earth-shattering explosions.

  “Soon after my brother’s return from the Continent,” writes John Davy in 1836, “he entered upon a new train of inquiry: the investigation of fire-damp.”62 Fire-damp. The word has fallen into disuse and conjures conflicting images. What could be both damp and ready to ignite? The damp here refers to dampf, the German word for vapors.63 We think today of natural gas smelling of rotten eggs, but that odor has been added by man to track an undetectable enemy. Untreated natural gas is actually nearly odorless. The coal seams held pockets of methane, formed from the same hydrocarbons as the coal, but silent, invisible, and deadly. Humphry Davy’s publication on flame offers a simple but clear vision of the possible damages: when accumulated in a shaft or gallery and mixed with oxygenated air, a single spark—and particularly the flame or an open candle—will cause it “to explode, and to destroy, injure, or burn whatever is exposed to its violence.”64 He refrains from giving detailed accounts, as such would “merely [serve] to multiply pictures of death, and of human misery” and because “the phenomena are always of the same kind.”65 Many hundreds of lives were lost to mine explosions, but the most famous of Davy’s time occurred at Felling mine (near Newcastle) in 1812. Early in the morning on May 25, a hollow boom sounded, followed by what felt like an earthquake.66 Debris flew into the air like volcano ash, dusting a mile downwind, and 96 miners lost their lives—the youngest of them two eight-year-old boys.† It was for this reason that Davy had come back to the subject of flame, and light, and how to contain it safely. But instead of starting with the existing coal miners’ lamps, as other inventors had done, he started with the gas.67

  Davy’s object was to find a light that miners could use safely even in the presence of an explosive atmosphere—but which would also consume the “fire-damp” or methane gas. He started at the most minute level; Davy began his career as a chemist, and so he examined the chemical compounds of the gas to work out its several elements: hydrogen, oxygen, and carbon. Through lab work, he realized that it required a great deal of atmospheric air before it would explode, but that “when mixed with three or four times its bulk of air, it burnt quietly.”68 He changed the quantities methodically, tried different thicknesses of glass, and measured the heat of combustion. The most remarkable conclusion had to do with the latter—temperature held the key, and opened the “possibility of constructing a lamp, in which the cooling powers [. . .] should prevent the communication of explosion.”69 Glass caused the temperature of combustion to spike dangerously, but certain metals, and later a fine mesh of iron, could keep the lamp burning without igniting the gas. Davy related the discovery in “cool” terms, as well, providing a reserved account in print of the trials to reach his conclusions. Letters and journals say otherwise though. Richard Holmes reports that Davy’s “true genius as a man of science—his impetuosity, his imagination, his ambition and his seething energy” rushed him toward better models, but he also harassed his associates and assistants—notably Michael Faraday (who would play a much bigger part in the nineteenth-century science to come).70

  Why the pretended calm? The collected manner in which Davy introduces the lamp doesn’t represent a lack of energy and inspiration; it was instead a calculated move. The published account reads like a story, moving from Davy’s presentation of the problem (the need for coal to fuel England’s bright future and the devastation of explosions) to his remarkable solution (the safety light), and never once throws the reader off track. Simp
le, plain language, presented as a “seemingly inevitable” discovery, removes any possibility that Davy’s lamp owed its invention to luck, chance . . . or even Providence.71 Even Davy’s setbacks only confirm success—and we hear the whisper of Victor Frankenstein in those words: “I doubted not that I should ultimately succeed,” says Shelley’s Romantic scientist. “I prepared myself for a multitude of reverses; my operations might be incessantly baffled, and at last my work be imperfect, yet when I considered the improvement which every day takes place in science and mechanics, I was encouraged to hope my present attempts would at least lay the foundations of future success.”72 Davy works tirelessly, until he at last creates a platinum cage of wire gauze where “fire-damp may be entirely consumed without flame, yielding only a beautiful light.”73 Davy had achieved the impossible, and the “safety lamp” would be hailed as the single greatest public achievement of his life, and upon testing the lamp 1,000 feet below the surface, John Buddle (a mining engineer) spoke as though he had seen a miracle of the first order: “it is impossible for me to express my feelings at the time when I first suspended the lamp in the mine, and saw it red hot [in the explosive mixture]; if it had been a monster destroyed, I could not have felt more exaltation than I did” (author’s italics).74 Frankenstein creates a being we have, through countless revisions and adaptations, called a monster—Davy gets credit for slaying one. He wasn’t without his detractors and rivals for this place in history (and in fact patent disputes turn up even as his lights are being delivered to collieries all through the Northeast), but Davy’s coat of arms tells a tale of undampened success: Igne constricto vita secura—fire restrained, life is secure. Or, as provided by Holmes from the coat of arms illustration in 1829, I Built the Light that Brings Safety.75

  Davy completed the design for his crest of light in 1817. A year later, Mary Shelley published Frankenstein, in which Davy (at least his darker shadow) appears, most particularly in the form of the learned professor and lecturer whose praise of chemistry set the young Victor on his path of destruction. John Abernethy, professor of anatomy at the Royal College of Surgeons, described the power of Davy’s lectures in his Enquiry into the Probability and Rationality of Mr. Hunter’s Theory of Life, 1814. “The experiments of Sir Humphry Davy seem to me to form an important link in the connexion of our knowledge of dead and living matter,” he explains. “He has solved the great and long hidden mystery of chemical attraction by shewing that it depends upon the electric properties which the atoms of different species of matter possess.”76 He goes on to say “that electricity is something, I could never doubt [. . .] therefore it follows [. . .] that it enters into the composition of every thing, inanimate or animate.”77 Davy’s achievement may have been the creation of safe light, catching, like Franklin before him, an incredible power in a bottle and subduing it. But in the mind of Mary Shelley, these experiments with vitalism and galvanism, the promise that electricity offered life itself would combine with her own experience of death and disorder. She’d lost her mother, who died of fever after giving birth to her. An outcast from her stepmother, she read books atop her mother’s grave—where she met the dashing (and married) Percy Shelley. Following him alienated her yet again, and the pregnant and unmarried Mary would lose her first child in 1815; the baby lived only two days. She never gave her a name, and though Shelley would lose more children, the first haunted her nightmares. Victor’s creature, also nameless, though far more articulate in the novel than in the early films, calls himself “the miserable and the abandoned [. . .] an abortion, to be spurned at, and kicked, and trampled on.”78 He is forgotten. Ambiguous. The “light” that broke in upon Victor Frankenstein means to be a scientific one, not the flash of the magician, but his creature remains as horrifying as a conjurer’s monster. Victor Frankenstein is not meant to be a supernatural villain; he is instead a genius, ready to risk consequence for discovery, to proceed at any cost to himself or to others, a willing acolyte to the progress of science. And perhaps, suggests the novel, this is worse. It’s death, not life, that Victor wields. Put another way, his science released dread tech into the world rather than serving as protection from it. In 2012, Shelley’s novel was rereleased with steampunk illustrations from Zdenko Basic and Manuel Sumberac, full of twisted metal and gearwork that turns organic creation to automaton AI. Frankenstein’s “monster” appears in the steampunk Van Helsing, too, and though the movie makes no bones about including supernatural vampires and werewolves, the creature has been built not born. Instead of the uncanny dread of the “mother machine,” here we have the motherless being, a thing born of electric fire engineered by man—and full of man’s desires. Davy fought the darkness by being a worshipper of light, but even he took his risks in the dark.

  Unwell and alone in Rome, Davy wrote back to his brother in consideration of all that had been lost when science banished superstition, when chemicals and batteries took the place of divine visions and poetic expression. Then he recounts a kind of near-hallucination: “I had on the 7th April, 1821, a very curious dream,” the letter begins. “I imagined myself in a place partially illuminated with a reddish light; within it was dark and obscure; but without, and opening upon the sky, very bright.”79 At the division of dark and light, Davy “experienced a new kind of sensation [. . .] as if I became diffused in the atmosphere.” He rises upon wings, to find himself in the same dread cosmos of Newton and his forebears: “I, for some time, reposed upon the highest of these galaxies, and saw as it were the immensity of space—systems of suns and worlds, forming a sort of abyss of light.”80In this transfixed state, Davy exclaims, “I had always been of opinion that the spirit is eternal, and in a state of progression from one existence to another more perfect; that I had just left a world where all was dark, cold, gross, and heavy; that I now knew what it was to have a purer and better existence.”81 The dialogues he wrote at the end of his life continue in the metaphysical vein; he ached for a world of “intellectual light,” where the causes of all things would be understood, and where the ultimate pleasure would be “unbounded knowledge.” The future would tell a story where darkness retakes the battlements, smudging it with war and industry—some of it made possible by Davy’s own safety light, as men burrowed out coal for boilers, factories, and a growing and greedy population. He wanted Science to champion Nature, but in the end, it mostly pillaged. Davy’s career ended in frustrating turmoil as he fought with other intellectuals, even Faraday, whom he once championed—and his marriage collapsed into increasing disharmony. He died of stroke in Geneva in 1829, his last work finished just before (and in which his metaphysical dialogues appear): Consolations of Travel, or The Last Days of a Philosopher. His brother’s hope was that Davy might, himself, be a “beacon of light to young and erring genius,”82 in the way that Frankenstein hoped, by his example to “Learn from me, if not by my precepts, at least by my example, how dangerous is the acquirement of knowledge and how much happier that man is who believes his native town to be the world, than he who aspires to become greater than his nature will allow.”83 Instead, Davy’s strange last farewell, with its half-strangled and desperate desire for light, its fictional flights and disembodied cosmic dialogues, would “take a surprising hold” on the next generation of scientists to come, offering a broad vista and even a map for pursuing nature to her hiding places, come what may.84 The urge for knowledge and for light kicked off a new generation of discovery, not only for the chemist and natural philosopher, but for the explorer willing to follow it into dark country.

  *From the 1867 version of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass: “I sing the body electric/The armies of those I love engirth me and I engirth them/They will not let me off till I go with them, respond to them/And discorrupt them, and charge them full with the charge of the soul.”

  †Michael Hunter and Thomas Gordon died with the rest of the men in their family that day; it was common for the youngest to work as “trappers” responsible for opening and closing doors. A great number of the dea
d were under the age of twenty.

  FOUR

  Into Dark Country

  Imagine a landscape of heaving white pinnacles, where darts of sheer crystal pierce skyward, shatter, and reform in spiked fortresses of ice. Liquid water swells through broken holes as black as night sky; the sun never rises, but slides around earth’s rim, ever distant, far, and white. The Arctic induced snow blindness; in desperation did men search for color, for contrast, and in desperation listened to the howl of winds that obliterated senses. We cannot now fathom the hope that drove explorers north: that when they reached the pole, they would find a paradise instead of frozen tundra, a passage, a land of wonder. “I try in vain to be persuaded that the pole is the seat of frost and desolation,” says Walton in the first pages of Frankenstein. But despite the wracking cold all around him, he believed that where the sun is ever visible, it must produce a glorious country of beauty and eternal light. Walton’s fervor echoes 1 John in the King James Bible: men should seek God, for “God is light, and in him is no darkness at all,” except that Walton instead seeks a natural deity, “the wondrous power which attracts the needle,”1 and the establishment of his own legacy: to see what no man has seen, to walk where no man has walked. The explorer does not mean only to commune, but to command, to see but also to understand. Newton wanted to order the cosmos; explorers wanted to order their world.