The Technologists

by Matthew Pearl

  The words swelled inside Marcus. Only when he saw Albert’s stricken look did he realize that he had lost his inner compass as he listened to Rogers and had jumped to his feet. A few professors craned their necks to look over at him standing awkwardly in the corner. Fortunately, Professor Storer was holding his glass in a manner that suggested a request. Marcus grabbed the pitcher of water and filled it.

  “If I could but live to see it,” Rogers repeated, in softer tones, his eyes meeting Marcus’s as the student perched back on the edge of his stool. For a moment, it seemed they were the only two present, and that they were testing each other.

  “President Rogers, such noble sentiments are appreciated by every man here, to a person. But I only wonder if everyone has seen the late edition of the Transcript,” Runkle said reluctantly. “I have it right here. It seems the legislature has assigned Louis Agassiz a position as consulting detective in this matter.”

  The gavel thumped again to quiet the outbursts.

  “Agassiz!”

  “How awful!”

  “Humbugs!”

  The gavel’s echo traveled up to the high ceiling as the outrage continued.

  “That Harvard fossil, with his pickled mollusks!” added Watson.

  “Agassiz despises the Institute,” Rogers whispered gravely. Louder, he said, “Professor Agassiz does not conceal his wish that I—and our college—will fail.”

  “Indeed,” Runkle said, nodding. “I fear any involvement we attempt now, any assistance, however well-meaning, will be twisted by Agassiz. If we stepped forward and anything were to go wrong, the Institute would be harshly blamed.”

  “There is nothing new in that,” said Eliot sadly, eager now to prove his points beyond a doubt. “Nothing new. When I was a student at Harvard, my very interest in chemistry made me an outcast, and later Agassiz refused to allow me to teach it there. The Institute is on the verge of leading the way to a new age of scientific acceptance among the public, and we cannot risk delaying that. Agassiz will listen to nothing we say, regardless. We must protect ourselves and the Institute, first and foremost!”

  “Thank you, Professor Eliot. Let us put the matter to a vote,” Rogers said, regaining his composure. “Those in favor of the Institute insulating itself from any scientific inquiries involving the recent disasters, indicate your vote now.”

  Eliot raised his hand high in the air before Rogers had completed his sentence. Professor Watson, his angular cheeks reddened, crossed his hands across his chest and wore an expression of stubborn resistance. One by one, hands around both sides of the table were brought up, some assertively, others bashfully, until all but a few of the men present were showing affirmative votes on the motion. Marcus looked on, dumbfounded, as Rogers gingerly lifted his own hand.

  “The ayes have it, then,” Eliot crowed. “Resoundingly.” He looked around as though expecting gestures of congratulation.

  “The Massachusetts Institute of Technology faculty, students, and employees will hereby refrain from any involvement in these matters, and the committee shall censure with forceful action any who shall defy this agreement,” Runkle said, by way of dictating minutes of the meeting to the appointed secretary.

  Marcus was crushed by the decision.

  “Well? What are you going to do?” These words, hissed from the mouth of Albert Hall, broke his trance.

  “What?”

  “The hats and coats. What are you planning to do, wait for them to return themselves? The meeting is at an end.” Albert shook his head. “No wonder Eliot speaks of eliminating the position of the charity scholar, with you as one example!”

  * * *

  THE INSTITUTE’S FRONT STEPS appeared imposing to the outsider. But it was a monumental place to Tech students—a central gathering place, a meeting point, an outdoor dining room, the public debate forum. Near the middle tread of dark granite, Edwin Hoyt had propped his notebook on top of his Bible and was making notes between bites of his afternoon meal. He had conceived a new hypothesis: Heat did not, as believed, emerge from the vibration of molecules. If he could work it out, the topic could form a crucial part of the senior dissertation he was finishing. The intense mental exercise, moreover, helped put the ruins of State Street out of his thoughts. He had probably spoken about it too openly to his classmates, but maybe the more people who knew what he saw Friday—the panicked mobs, the injured lifted into ambulances, the screams of worried family members—the less it would be his responsibility to carry around.

  This afternoon was pleasant, if chilly, though the Tech senior preferred to eat on the steps even when a dark sky or a rumble of thunder counseled against it. It gave him a valid excuse to keep his hat on, anyway, over the patch of salt-and-pepper at the back of his head of tangled hair. The truth was, it would have lent him a dignified air if not for his awfully boyish face and frame. Nobody at school really noticed anymore, but the taunting by Will Blaikie on the river brought back memories of past torments when he had first started at Tech. Not from Marcus Mansfield—never Marcus, who had seemed to Edwin from the first to be more man than boy, not simply because he was a few years older—nor did he have to suffer any teasing from Bob, who was too bewitched by his own majestic curls to notice the flaw atop someone else’s head.

  After the initial hazing, Edwin had considered himself friends with almost everybody at Tech, and for that matter almost everybody else. He never imagined having an enemy, and yet he knew in a way that reflected the chief deficiency in his own character: He did not possess the bravery to proclaim his beliefs or challenge those of others.

  If he did have an enemy—no, a rival—it would have to be Chauncy Hammond, Jr. Not personal, but strictly academic. The two were forever neck-and-neck for the top class rank of the ’68 boys. The rivalry was more acute in the eyes of others than in the hearts of the contenders, though the whole college wondering who the first Top Scholar of Tech would be could not but alter them, especially with graduation approaching. Edwin’s natural reticence was deeply jarred by knowing he was a subject of any gossip. This was the same young man who unconsciously left a little of every meal he ate so that he would not appear gluttonous.

  Edwin’s personal determination had been fired his first year at the Institute, the sophomore year for the Class of ’68, when President Rogers had proposed that the students create scientific demonstrations out of proverbs or sayings. Edwin had worked with a team that put out a well-liked version of “too many irons in the fire.” But Hammie, voluntarily toiling alone, filled a porcelain teapot with a third water, a teaspoon of chlorate of potash, three minuscule shavings of phosphorus, and a healthy quantity of sulfuric acid poured through a clay pipe to the bottom. A storm of hissing, popping, and explosions resulting inside made Hammie’s “tempest in a teapot” the undisputed victor. As Edwin watched the accolades, his own aspirations grew—not only to be scientifically correct, but to achieve scientific imagination.

  The tempest in the teapot turned out to be Hammie’s peak, bringing him good will and popularity. A few months later, at another college-wide assembly of demonstrations, Hammie had grandly proclaimed he would usher in a new age and announced plans for building a “steam man.” The steam-powered machine would be made of various metals in the shape of a man, with a complicated series of mechanisms that would allow the metal being to pull a carriage or complete other tasks with the strength of twelve horses. Even the technological mavens of the Institute, students and instructors alike, were confounded by Hammie’s intricate scheme to invent an artificial worker and his insistence that such “men” (he used this term, despite loud objections and a silent shudder in Edwin’s own soul) could ultimately not only save their human masters immense pain and labor, but also prevent future scourges of enslavement such as the one that had led the nation into war.

  “Man is nothing without steam, nothing more than animals, anyway. Steam has given us the power of machines; now we must give machines the power of free force and movement. The iron men will
be joined by iron oxen and iron horses to plow all arable land so no child will ever again starve and no man live in poverty. Carlyle says, our era, if we must give it a name, is not the Heroical but the Mechanical Age!” Hammie intoned portentously at the conclusion of his presentation, standing in front of his diagrams in the large hall. From that point on, Hammie was an oddity, at best, and would never regain a favorite, or even comfortable, status among his peers. When his idea was somehow discovered publicly, the Institute was written about in newspapers as far away as London, warning about their secret plans to diminish humankind with artificial beings, starting with the worry, of all things, that the ugly steam men would be put in hotels in the place of comely chambermaids. The steam man was held up in religious sermons to preach against the dangers of science, and used in magazine fiction to entertain juvenile readers.

  If Edwin could work out his new theory about heat and molecule vibration, he thought he could beat Hammie by a hair—although he reminded himself that it did not matter one brass farthing who was at the head of the class. He was not at Tech to win anything or to prove himself to others, but to be a scientist. He had started his college career at Harvard, enrolling in the science curriculum overseen by the celebrated Professor Agassiz. When the bashful freshman quietly chafed about learning chemistry through memorization of theories from books, rather than in a laboratory, Agassiz scoffed and noted that Harvard was not a place of “practical education” and would not tolerate a desire for “industrial science.”

  “You are totally uneducated, Mr. Haight! Yet you presume to question my methods?” When Edwin later expressed sympathy with theories held by Charles Darwin, and the idea that science, just like the species, would have to change and advance to survive, Agassiz asked him pointedly if he believed in God.

  “Professor. I have carried a pocket Bible since I was twelve. But didn’t God make the world a workshop for us to discover all His earthly machinery?” Edwin asked earnestly.

  There was nothing personal in Agassiz’s exclamations and outbursts—he would often forget a student’s name or substitute one pupil’s name for the other as he did with “Haight” for “Hoyt.” Yet Edwin found himself, as some kind of punishment, locked in a room filled with turtle shells, with no teacher, where he was expected to classify the markings on each and, in doing so, recognize some higher truth. Edwin grew certain during that first year that what he sought existed only at the new Institute of Technology he had read about. Of course, Agassiz would be furious at the defection. He and Rogers had had six public debates on Darwinian evolution at the Society of Natural History several years before. Even those who sympathized with Agassiz’s position admitted that Rogers won these contests. He had remained calm and collected, methodically presenting scientific fact, while Agassiz was quick with his temper and insults, thrown into an absolute fury when he was speaking and Rogers shook his head in silent disapproval. Patient and irresistibly tranquil, Rogers seemed almost to trick Agassiz into admitting several errors key to his whole argument. He used his own guns against him.

  After being examined by President Rogers, Edwin was permitted to skip freshman status and left Harvard to be placed with the Technology Class of 1868.

  The only part of the sublime Tech schedule Edwin dreaded as a sophomore was Military Drill Day, which the Institute was required to conduct for freshmen and sophomores as the price for receiving a federal grant for their plot of land. After the first session, Edwin nearly decided he had made a mistake leaving the comfortable Cambridge confines of Harvard. The dusty marching, made worse by the sandy wasteland surrounding the college, severely irritated his throat, nor could he keep pace with his faster classmates. Marcus Mansfield, whom Edwin had encountered briefly in the laboratory, had been exempt—having already been a volunteer for the army during the war—but he went outside and helped Edwin with the formations, earning the younger man’s eternal gratitude.

  “You know Greek and Latin,” Marcus said casually one day as he coached him.

  “How did you know?”

  “Oh, Bob Richards. He said you two were in the same preparatory academy together before college.”

  “Yes, though I never thought he noticed me. Not that he was a snob, mind you! Only, I wasn’t the most popular boy at our academy.”

  Though his countenance resisted reading, Edwin suspected Marcus was timid about what he really wanted to say.

  “Technology. I’ve wondered about it—about the word,” Marcus finally murmured.

  Edwin didn’t make Marcus say more. “Techne means ‘art,’ logos can be interpreted as ‘sciences.’ The science of the practical arts, you might say.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Hoyt.”

  “Edwin. Please call me Edwin. May I ask you something? They say you were on the machines.”

  “Who did?”

  “Well, I think his name is Tilden. I gather he’s a friend of yours.”

  Marcus smirked. “Only for a few minutes as freshmen.”

  “Will you tell me what it feels like to have the machine in your power?”

  “Monotonous. Every year the machines improve, and there is less and less to think about in their operation. At first, it becomes a part of you, then you become a part of it.”

  Now, as Edwin grappled with his ideas on heat, something new was in the air at Tech. In the long corridors, talk turned to the future with the slightest prompting. So much would be finished. There would be no more convening at the start of a new year teasing friends about new styles of neckties and mustaches. No more summers volunteering for mining companies or in a naval yard, surveying caves and mountains, inspecting the construction of ironworks or paper mills. No more sitting on these hard steps. Soon—in two months—they would leave the Institute and begin life after college, what they had worked toward these last four years. A college term had never passed so swiftly. The members of Tech ’69, ’70, and ’71 looked on with special interest, envious of their positions but also thankful Edwin and the fourteen other ’68 boys—men, perhaps, maybe gentlemen, daresay—would be the pioneers. The most daring experiments produced from the Institute so far: graduates.

  Marcus carried out his tin of food. He sat down with a nod as Edwin made room next to him. He looked almost as distracted as Edwin was as they both stared out into the fields. Their company alone put each a little at ease without having to say a word—about the reluctant rivalry with Hammie, on Edwin’s mind, or about whatever it was that made Marcus appear as if he had just seen a ghost.

  “I suppose we should go secure our seats in Watson’s class,” Edwin said after a while, checking the time.

  “It’s begun,” Marcus whispered.

  Edwin was about to object, looking at his watch again, but then heard the footsteps approaching and looked up, nearly dropping the heirloom in his hand. A dozen, maybe fifteen, blue-garbed policemen were heading right toward their building in a double-quick march.

  XI

  Plymouth

  WILLIAM ROGERS HAD CHANGED HIS LIFE, had shown himself the most original man Marcus had ever known, had built an institute that could be the pathway to the future for the whole country. Still, he was wrong this time, wrong to yield to Eliot and the others. Rogers was wrong. The words finally confronted Marcus as he rode back to Newburyport that evening. They were not easy words to come by, even contemplating them silently to himself, and he realized they had never before appeared in his thoughts.

  No institution in existence had the resources Tech did to inquire into scientific causes. They were even preparing the first laboratory of physics in the country. Perhaps offering to help would indeed provoke criticism from those who distrusted any new sciences, but what if it did? Was it not worth it in order to identify the scientific means that had led to such unthinkable acts? Was that not their moral responsibility?

  Now Agassiz had turned the police into his puppets, no doubt directing their visit to the Institute. The entire afternoon, uniformed men wandered up and down their halls, interru
pting classes to ask professors what they were teaching, standing at the back of the laboratories as students tried to concentrate on their experiments, obstructing freshmen on the stairs and asking at random if they had learned anything “dangerous,” “strange,” or “suspicious” lately. Albert Hall shook in his boots as one patrolman leaned over his shoulder, poking confusedly at his test tubes and beakers.

  “And what’s this?”

  “A blowpipe,” Albert said meekly.

  “A what?”

  “It’s an instrument that safely communicates gas into a mixture,” Albert explained.

  “What’s in this one now?” another of the policemen said as he recklessly picked up a glass crucible at Hammie’s station.

  “Nothing much,” Hammie said, with a lurking grin. “Sulfur and saltpeter. I’ve just mixed it.”

  “Well!” the policeman said, unimpressed.

  “Here,” Hammie said. “You may add this dash of carbon to it if you like.”

  “Perhaps that’s not the best idea,” Marcus said, swiping the vessel Hammie was reaching for from the shelf. Then he whispered aside to his classmate, “Are you mad, Hammie?”

  “How?” Hammie replied defensively.

  “Sulfur, saltpeter, carbon? You’re about to have him manufacture gunpowder!”

  He didn’t deny it. “They deserve a little explosion,” Hammie said, sulking.

  Hammie aside, most of the students and professors tried to go about their business as though everything were normal. There was no indication the police would come back again the next day, but to Marcus the passivity of the faculty was unforgivable.

  When he calmed down enough to open his notebook to study during the train ride back to Newburyport, a note slipped onto his lap. It was a sketch of the Charles River exquisite enough to have been rendered by a professional surveyor. At the bottom, in Bob’s hand, it indicated to meet at seven the next morning. Marcus sighed—he did not know if he had much taste for rowing after their last time out and after all the serious news since. But before the train reached Newburyport, he had decided he would meet Bob, as requested. He had not talked about the faculty meeting with Edwin as they ate their dinners on the steps—Edwin appeared occupied enough, and Marcus still was contemplating the debate he had witnessed. But he would talk about it with Bob.