“Ground-water, pumped from the depths of the mine, by Mr. Newcomen’s Engine,” announces Lostwithiel. This is unnecessary, since the three visitors have come all the way out from London expressly to see it. And yet it’s important for Lostwithiel to come out and say it, as when the pastor at a wedding intones, I now pronounce you man and wife.
Orney and Saturn are keen to clamber down into the bowels of the Engine and know the particulars. Daniel goes with them as far as a plank platform from which he can get a good prospect of the valley. There he stops for a look round. It is the closest thing to solitude he’ll have until he reaches Massachusetts. He can now see Minerva anchored beyond the bar, some miles down where the estuary joins the sea. The crew of the longboat have already marked him through their prospective-glasses and are rowing directly for him, building speed to ground their keel in the soft sand where the Engine spits out the mine-water.
Slowly shaking its fist above Daniel’s head is an arm made of giant, knot-ridden timbers joined by iron hasps that must have been sledge-hammered out in a forge somewhere nearby. Depending from its end is a gargantuan chain, its links about the size of a grown man’s femur, joined together by hand-forged cotter pins as big as bears’ claws. In Newcomen’s mind, Daniel knows, these links are meant to be of uniform size. In practice each is a little different, the differences averaging out as the chain disappears over the horizon of the curving arch-head that terminates the great arm. From it depends the piston, which fills a vertical cylinder the size of a mine-shaft. Packed round the piston’s edge to form a seal is a matted O of old rope yarn, called junk, clamped down by a junk ring, secured with rustic nuts. Plenty of steam leaks out around it, but most stays where it belongs. The opposite end of the arm is linked to a pump rod consisting of several tree-trunks squared off and bound together with iron bands, plunging into the earth and pulling on giant sucking and splurging equipment too deep down for Daniel to see. Compared to all of this, the brains of the thing are tiny, and easy to miss: a man, on a platform a storey or two below where Daniel is standing, surrounded by pushrods, bell-cranks, and levers and supplying information to the machine when needed, which is not very frequently. At the moment, he is supplying information to Orney and Saturn, who have joined him down there.
This platform is dripping wet, and yet it’s warm, for the used steam exhaled by the Engine drifts round it and condenses on the planks. Daniel lets the Engine breathe down his neck while he surveys the other works of the Proprietors of the Engine for Raising Water by Fire. He means to dash off a note to Eliza, letting her know just what has been done here with the capital that she and the other investors have entrusted to Lostwithiel and Newcomen. Mr. Orney will then take the letter back to London and see that she receives it. Orney will have a lot more to say, of course. Being a man of commerce, he’ll mark things to which Daniel would be blind, and he’ll know, without having to think about it, just which details Eliza shall and shan’t find interesting. For Orney himself has put a bit of money in this thing now, and if he likes what he sees here, he’ll go back to London and talk it up among his brethren.
So there’s no need for Daniel to make some foolish pretense of seeing this venture through the shrewd eyes of a businessman. He tries, rather, to see it as what he is: a Natural Philosopher. As such it is the experimental aspects of it—its failures—that draw his notice. The level ground below the Engine is pocked, all around, with wreckage of Newcomen’s boilers. The natural and correct form for such a thing is a sphere. Knowing as much, Newcomen has been learning how to fabricate large spherical shells out of iron. And just as a schoolboy’s waste-book is littered, page after page, with smeared and scratched-out failures, so the deep soil of the river-bottom is strewn with ineradicable records of every idea that Newcomen has ever had on the subject, and striking visual proof of why and how certain of those ideas were bad. He can’t possibly beat out a single billet of iron into a vast seamless bubble and so he has to piece the things together of many smaller curved plates, lapped and riveted.
Fifty years ago Hooke had caught sparks struck off of a steel, and put them under the microscope, and shown Daniel what they really were: pocked spheres of shiny metal, like iron planets. Daniel had supposed they were solid, until he saw some that had been blown open by internal pressure. For the sparks weren’t globules, but hollow bubbles, of molten steel that flailed, then froze, when they burst, leaving wild out-flung extremities that looked a little bit like clawing hands and a little bit like ancient tree-roots cast up on a beach. Some of Mr. Newcomen’s failed boilers look like those exploded sparks. Others have failed in ways not so obvious, and lie half-embedded in the earth, like meteors fallen out of the sky.
Some miners come up out of the ground talking in a language he’s never heard before: half a dozen Cornish men in black, sodden clothes. Daniel can see just from their stumbling gait that their feet are half frozen, and from the way they carry themselves that they’ve been working hard for a long time. They fetch hampers and gather round the one boiler in the vale that actually works: the one below Daniel, which is driving the Engine. This rests in a massive collar of masonry with holes in the bottom to admit air and coal. The miners pull off their boots and their dripping socks and stretch their feet out in the fire-glow and take great loaf-sized pasties out of the hamper and begin to tear out mouthfuls. Their faces are all black from coal, much blacker than Dappa’s. Their eyes are white as stars. A pair of eyes leaps up and marks Daniel on the platform, and then all the others follow suit. There’s a moment, then, when Daniel’s looking down at them and they are all looking up trying to decide what to make of this strange visitor. How must he seem to them? He’s in a long woolen coat and his head is swaddled in a knit sailor’s cap. He’s growing a beard. He looms above them wreathed in whorls of exhausted steam. He wonders if these Cornish men have the faintest idea that they are sitting around an explosive device. He concludes that they are probably as intelligent as anyone else, and know it perfectly well, but have made peace with the idea, and have decided that they can accommodate it in their day-to-day lives in exchange for what passes, around here, for prosperity. It’s no different from what a sailor does when he takes ship knowing that he might drown. Daniel supposes that the wizards of the Technologickal Arts will be proffering many more such choices to people in years to come.
This journey began with a wizard walking into his door. Now it ends with a new kind of wizard standing on an Engine. Gazing down on this boiler from above, the wizard has the sense of being an angel or demon regarding Earth from Polaris. For, chastened by his failures, Mr. Newcomen has become most regular in his practices, and in this, his master-work, the seams and rivet-lines joining one curved plate to the next radiate from top center just like meridians of Longitude spreading from the North Pole. Below is a raging fire, and within is steam at a pressure that would blow Daniel to Kingdom Come ( just like Drake) if a rivet were to give way. But that does not come to pass. The steam is piped off to raise water, and the wasted heat of the fire affords a measure of comfort to the miners, and for the time being it all works as it is supposed to. At some point the whole System will fail, because of the flaws that have been wrought into it in spite of the best efforts of Caroline and Daniel. Perhaps new sorts of Wizards will be required then. But—and perhaps this is only because of his age, and that there’s a longboat waiting to take him away—he has to admit that having some kind of a System, even a flawed and doomed one, is better than to live forever in the poisonous storm-tide of quicksilver that gave birth to all of this.
He has done his job.
“I’m going home now,” he says.
HERE ENDS The BAROQUE CYCLE
This I have now published; not for the public good (which I do not think my poor abilities can promote), but to gratify my brother the Stationer. The benefits of that trade do chiefly consist in the printing of copies; and the vanity of this age is more taken with matters of curiosity, than those of solid benefit. Such a pamphlet as
this, may be salable, when a more substantial and useful discourse is neglected.
—John Wilkins
Acknowledgments
THE BAROQUE CYCLE would have been unthinkable—in the most literal sense of that word—had it not been for the efforts of scholars, scientists, explorers, poets, preachers, pamphleteers, raconteurs, artists, translators, and cartographers dating back to the era of Wilkins and Comenius, and extending into the present day. A few of them are listed below. Some lived three hundred years ago, but others are still alive. I am a little hesitant to publish the names of the latter because it is much easier than it used to be to look people up, and so I am afraid that it will lead to these people being pestered. Nearly all of the people who bother to read three-thousand-page novels and their acknowledgments pages wouldn’t dream of disturbing the privacy of the acknowledged, but there are always a few exceptions; if you are one of those, please leave these people alone!
The project would not have happened at all had it not been for serendipitous conversations seven years ago with George Dyson and Steven Horst. A crucial midcourse correction, equally unlooked-for, was supplied by Piers Bursill-Hall after he sat through an infamously long lecture delivered by yours truly in Cambridge in 2002.
The following scholars (in alphabetical order) have done work that was essential to the completion of this project. While eager to give them due credit, I am aware that those who are still among us, and who actually bother to read my work, may be chagrined by my tendency to whip out my artistic license and make stuff up whenever it’s convenient: Frank Dawson Adams, E. J. Aiton, Maurice Ashley, Julian Barbour, J. M. Beattie, Olivier Bernier, Peter L. Bernstein, Bryan Bevan, Roger Lee Brown, Florian Cajori, Gale E. Christianson, Sir Archibald Geikie, David M. Gitlitz, A. Rupert Hall, John E. N. Hearsey, David Kahn, Henry Kamen, John Maynard Keynes, Mark Kishlansky, Meir Kohn, Maria Kroll, Andrew Lossky, Robert K. Massie, Nicholas Mayhew, John Read, H. Stanley Redgrove, Bertrand Russell, Hans Georg Schulte-Albert, Barbara J. Shapiro, J. G. Simms, Lee Smolin, William Spencer, Hugh Thomas, David Underdown, Henri and Barbara van der Zee, Maureen Waller, Richard Westfall, D. T. Whiteside. Though her biography of Hooke came out too late to influence this project, Lisa Jardine should also be mentioned, simply out of the hope that readers who would like to learn more about this period will read her work. Likewise Carl Zimmer and his recent biography of Thomas Willis, and Vladimir I. Arnol’d for Huygens and Barrow, Newton and Hooke.
In general there is not room to mention specific titles here, but I’ll make exceptions for Fernand Braudel’s Civilization and Capitalism series; Sir Winston Spencer Churchill’s six-volume biography of Marlborough; Giovanni Franceso Gemelli Careri’s incredible Voyage Round the World; and every ribald, scabrous, mordant, teeming libel Ned Ward ever wrote. I am thankful Ned was around to describe Baroque England, and even more thankful that he died before he could get around to describing me.
Period writers were indispensable: John Bunyan, Richard F. Burton (who was not really of this period but who wrote much that was useful), Daniel Defoe, John Evelyn, George Farquhar, Henry Fielding, (the Right Villainous) John Hall, Liselotte, John Milton, Samuel Pepys, the Duc de Saint-Simon, Jean-Baptiste Tavernier, Jean de Thevenot, Joseph de la Vega, John Wilkins, Lt.-Gen. Adam Williamson of the Tower of London, and the translators of the Geneva Bible. And of course, Hooke, Newton, and Leibniz. But an author of my limitations would be unable to make heads or tails of Leibniz’s body of work without the help of scholars, translators, and editors such as Robert Merrihew Adams, H. G. Alexander, Roger Ariew, Richard Francks, Daniel Garber, and R. S. Woolhouse. Likewise Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar for his Newton’s Principia for the Common Reader.
A certain kind of debt, which might make sense only to novelists, ought to be acknowledged to the late Dorothy Dunnett and to Alexandre Dumas.
People who fund and staff museums—especially wee, peculiar museums—ought to be acknowledged. I don’t have any of those people’s names, but here are some interesting museums: Newton’s Room at Babson College in Wellesley, Massachusetts; Newton’s house at Woolsthorpe; Musée Carnavalet in Paris; the Bank of England Museum; the Hague Historical Museum; the Upper Harz Mining Museum and the Bergapothek in Clausthal-Zellerfeld; and the Berg-baumuseum Röhrigschacht in Wettelrode.
Thanks to Béla and Gabriella Bollobás; Doug Carlston and Tomi Pierce; and Barry Kemp of Connell Cars for providing me with access to places I could not have seen (Bollobás), worked in (Carlston/ Pierce), or found (Kemp) otherwise. George Jewsbury and Catherine and Hugo Durandin provided timely assistance. Charles McAleese had a thing or two to say about Irish history. Likewise the balance of the HBC on all other topics under the sun. Greg Bear lent me two books and did not object when the loan stretched out to a length that a lesser man might have denominated theft (the books have now been returned in front of many witnesses).
Many others have, knowingly or not, contributed to a milieu in which it was possible for me to consider writing something like this without seeming completely mad. And here I am tempted to list the names of a lot of mathematicians and physicists. But out of a concern for their privacy and a desire not to seem like I’m clinging to their ankles, I’ll draw a veil over those conversations. Suffice it to say that the Royal Society crowd written about in these books has many descendants and heirs today, who are capable of talking learnedly about monads, cellular automata, the calculus dispute, absolute time and space, &c. at the drop of a hat, and that it’s been my privilege to know a few of them. They seem pleasantly surprised to learn that someone actually wants to write a novel about such topics, and I in turn have been pleasantly surprised to find that they are actually willing to spend time talking to me, and out of this, quite a few good conversations have arisen over the years.
Helping in many ways to make this possible on the publishing end, and exhibiting superhuman patience over its seven-year span, were Jennifer Hershey, Liz Darhansoff, Jennifer Brehl, and Ravi Mirchandani.
Jeremy Bornstein, Alvy Ray Smith, and Lisa Gold read the penultimate drafts and supplied useful commentary. The latter two, along with the cartographer Nick Springer, participated in creation of maps, diagrams, and family trees.
The dialect spoken by Lord Gy in the third volume is a good faith effort by the author to approach eighteenth-century Scottish with all due respect and to get it as right as possible. If I’ve botched it; and if you know enough Scottish to know that I have; and if you’re thinking of giving me a piece of your mind, know that I am one-quarter MacPhail. The uncanny vibrations you have been feeling in the soles of your feet the last couple of years are seismic disturbances created by my ancestors turning over in their graves at Preston Pans and other locations. Worse, the clan’s last chieftain—no admirer of the Hanovers, apparently—was transported to Virginia in 1715 but died en route. He probably haunts the sea-lanes even now, and, for all I know, may have a bone to pick with me. Which is a roundabout way of saying that even before the ink has dried on the manuscript page, novelists’ families—nuclear and extended—have had to put up with a lot from us. The greatest share of my gratitude, always, goes to them.
Neal Stephenson
May 2004
Credits
Cover design by Richard L. Aquan
Cover illustration of world map by Frederick de Wit from De Zee Atlas Amsterdam, 1662, Birmingham Library, UK
Copyright
This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
THE SYSTEM OF THE WORLD. Copyright © 2004 by Neal Stephenson. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in o
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EPub Edition © SEPTEMBER 2004 ISBN: 9780061793400
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About the Author
NEAL STEPHENSON issueth from a Clan of yeomen, itinerant Parsons, Ingenieurs, and Natural Philosophers that hath long dwelt in bucolick marches and rural Shires of his native Land, and trod the Corridors of her Varsities. At a young age, finding himself in a pretty Humour for the writing of Romances, and the discourse of Natural Philosophy and Technologick Arts, he took up the Pen, and hath not since laid it down.
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The Baroque Cycle: Quicksilver, the Confusion, and the System of the World Page 338