Clockwork Futures

by Brandy Schillace

  Joseph Conrad published Heart of Darkness in 1899. The novella begins with the same exuberant descriptions that appear in Sir Joseph Banks’s and Cook’s accounts of Tahiti, and in Walton’s excited pronouncements about paradise: “Watching a coast as it slips by the ship is like thinking about an enigma. There it is before you—smiling, frowning, inviting, grand, mean, insipid, or savage, and always mute with an air of whispering, ‘Come and find out.’ This one was almost featureless, as if still in the making, with an aspect of monotonous grimness. The edge of a colossal jungle, so dark-green as to be almost black, fringed with white surf, ran straight, like a ruled line, far, far away along a blue sea whose glitter was blurred by a creeping mist.”48 Conrad’s book follows a voyage up the Congo River in the heart of Africa. What begins in adventure changes, throughout the novel, into something darker—a sense that the grim territory into which they are going is not so different from London; that imperialism has enacted a cost too great to be reckoned with. One of the novel’s principal characters, the ivory trader Kurtz, dies whispering the words “the horror, the horror”—and by the end of the novel, that dismal pronouncement might be leveled at anyone or anything, from the travelers to the colonists, from the jungle to the city, or even (as is more likely) at the man himself, the dark heart of a dark heart. Mungo Park died in the country of Houssa after a local chief determined to keep the gifts Park brought to the king for himself. Reports suggest that Park leapt into the river with his companions. His body was never found. His son Thomas risked all to find some word or some remains, and he, too, vanished, never to return. Other attempts were tried, writes Verne, “all were destined to fail.”49 The Victorian theologian George MacDonald would write, “In whatever a man does without God, he must fail miserably—or succeed more miserably.”50 By 1914, nearly 90 percent of the African continent had been colonized and claimed by European countries, a conquest that destroyed nations and uprooted tribes, and that led, by politically frayed routes, to the First World War. George Shattuck Morison’s prediction that “Savage and barbarous people disappear before the stronger arms of the more civilized”51 rings both true and hollow. The enlightenment sciences did not conquer the Dark Continent, greater and more destructive weapons did, and it becomes impossible not to shudder at the thought of such dreadful “civilization.”

  The Victorian Age could no more see that threat than they could the advent of steam engines and automobiles. Darkness could be conquered. Would be conquered. Had been, even, and the bright light of a new industrial age scintillated with promise. The new age and its new scientists would prove a different breed, and they would face different enemies. Captains gave way to engineers, the eighteenth century’s William Hershel to his son’s revolutionary discoveries, and Humphry Davy to a man like Charles Babbage and a woman, Ada Lovelace, as they moved from mechanics and mathematics to the rust-hued dawn of computing. This new world is the world steampunk claims as its home territory—shiny gears, corsets, top hats, and engines. The Victorian Age bursts with Victorian industry. But the new world inherited a new kind of demon too. Just as radical skepticism and doubt arose from the same birth chamber as Newton’s proofs of God, dread of privation, poverty, and loss claws its way forward in the very shadow of production. Heroes and villains, greed and debt, murders and medicine men, discoveries and detectives populate this history, and steampunk science (in fact and fiction) struggles to thwart old chaos in new guises. The Enlightenment was over. The Victorians had arrived.

  And the game was afoot.

  *The first documented landing wouldn’t happen until 1895.

  †The first vessel to make transit of the Northwest Passage.

  ‡Famed for the saying “Dr. Livingstone, I presume?” when locating the missionary in an African village.

  PART THREE

  “It is easy to understand that, when the new epoch is fully developed, all physical work may be dependent on inanimate power. It is easy to see that this means the concentration of enormous masses of power where power never could be had before; that it means the subdivision of power into units of a minuteness hard to conceive; that it means the unraveling of mysteries which have never been solved; that it means the construction of works of a magnitude before which the greatest monuments of antiquity become insignificant. The fighting ship of to-day is a floating machine-shop, though its crew of mechanics are confined as completely as the chained rowers of a Roman galley. [. . .] The camels of Persia will never again confront the elephants of India; fortifications will be factories filled with power. [. . .] It is interesting to speculate upon; it is foolish to prophesy about: these achievements are too close at hand for us to waste time in guessing what they will be.”

  —“The New Epoch and the University,” George Shattuck Morison

  FIVE

  The Scientist and the Engineer

  I had a dream, wrote Mary Shelley, “I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the Thing he had put together. I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of some powerful Engine, show signs of life and stir with an uneasy, half-vital motion.”1

  The mad scientist, with his mad devices, has become for us a signature of both science fiction and steampunk; wild looks, secret plans, and a genius turned toward dark ends. But science fiction frequently brings us two types of scientists, corresponding to two methods or “vectors” of science: those whose principal aim is discovery, and those whose principal aim is invention. “Discovery assumed reorientation of human knowledge,” writes professor and co-editor of Science Fiction Studies Istvan Csicsery-Ronay Jr., while “Invention is the active intervention.”2 We can trace the two lines of thought backward as well. Newton wanted knowledge for his own stock and store, to break through the mysteries of the universe and learn the language of God for himself; Leibniz instead invented a language for calculus that could be used and shared. Galvani wanted to learn the secret of animal electricity for its own sake; Volta wanted to build batteries to give people power wherever they needed it. The search after power might have begun in the scientist-philosopher’s fascination with electricity, but its application—the only reason any of us have a use for it at all—has always resided in its manufacture. And so we’ve come back, at last, to where we began: the little book on the high shelf that proclaimed a new epoch on the coattails of that very principle.

  James Watt developed his first steam engine in 1763, the first machine that could, by its design, manufacture more power. Humphry Davy might have used Volta’s battery to power his arc light, but even he understood the limits of its utility: great stinking stacks of metal and acid could never power the future the way a steam engine could, and utility became the ultimate key to all the Victorian revolutions to come. The steam-powered looms replaced the need for weavers, turning cottage resources into massive industries—and turning a place like Manchester, England (or Newcastle, or Lancashire) into an industrial center. A century before, greatness meant increase of empire through exploration and colonization, but the nineteenth century opened a new portal to commercial and national success, and it rattled and clanked through the doors of invention. The world (and most particularly the paying revenues of political and national interests) had grown far less interested in what a discovery told man about himself—they wanted to know what does it do? Here and now, in the present mortal world, what can these things accomplish? “Seventy years ago,” wrote George Shattuck Morison, speaking of the dawn of the Victorian Age, “Engineering was defined as the art of directing the Great Sources of Power in Nature for the use and convenience of man.”3 It was, he maintained, “limited only by the progress of science,” and “its scope and utility would be increased with every discovery and its resources with every invention.”4 No one wanted a Newton, a man with knowledge locked up in his head. “The men who today are to direct the great powers of nature,” Morison concludes, are the engineers—the very mechanical workmen of greasy toil that Descartes’s contemporaries sneered at.
And better, “the greatest engineer is not the man who knows the most, but the man who, when confronted with a new problem, can best grasp the novel subject, and whose judgment will most correctly approve or condemn his solution of it.”5 In other words, the new heroes weren’t genius minds working away at solutions no one understood—they were everyday men and women with quick wits, oiled hands, and the ability to turn the abstract to practical use. So, even as the term “scientist” was coined by William Whewell in his 1833 review of Mary Somerville’s On the Connexion of the Physical Sciences, a new breed of scientist was already on the rise. “The railroad has replaced the stage coach; the steamship has supplanted the graceful sailing vessel; and the telegraph has supplemented the laggardly mail,” writes Morison, and “All this has been the work of the engineer.”6

  Morison lived his life in the roiling, rollicking industrial revolution of the latter Victorian era. He’d seen some of the greatest and most alarming shifts of any generation (excepting our current digital one): from horses to steam engines, from letters to telegraphs, from complete ignorance about infection to the establishment of germ theory. The greatest threats, in Morison’s estimation, came from within, not without: “from the poisons, both moral and physical, which endanger concentrated populations,” from bad air, bad water, and bacteria to bad construction and corrupt administration.7 For Morison, anyone having to do with the steel bars and wood beams of the utilitarian and practical were by their nature engineers. He counts medicine, electricity, even the gas light of Humphry Davy or the achievements of bacteriology as but the further extension of the engineer—the extra fingers and toes of a vast mechanism that begins, in its way, to resemble the clockwork of Whitechapel. Humphry Davy’s death signaled its beginning; his vacant chair at the Royal Society ushered in the first real struggle between old and new, between those who would discover and those who would invent, between the thing itself—power, bright, and terrible, electricity arcing and dazzling in its cosmic, godlike halo—and the thing that made it possible: the grit and grime of mines, the sludge that oiled the gears and regulators. In the rapidly industrializing future, time is annihilated and space contracted by trains and travel and telegraph wires, and the Victorians fought their demons from both sides: industry against poverty, waste against want. But the most interesting contest of all erupted over who controlled scientific knowledge, who had a right to participate, and who would get to direct the future (for better or worse). This is a story of engines. It’s also a story of power. And we can learn almost as much from the machines that failed as from the ones that succeeded.

  When we think of “engineering power” today, we might think of huge stacks and cylinders, spinning turbines, coal elevators and rails and earth movers the size of cities. Taichung Power Plant in Taiwan is the world’s biggest power station—but England (motherland to most steampunk Victoriana) is home to its own megalith, Drax. Drax bristles with 139 conveyors, 12 cooling towers, 6 boilers, 200 railway wagons, and 1,800 miles of steel tubing. The manufacture of power on such a scale, to homes across a nation by virtue of connected wires, could scarcely have been imagined at the start of the Victorian age—but the seeds were planted, and germinating back in 1807, when Davy’s arc lamp created a streak of light only four inches long, and took the power of two thousand voltaic cells to do it. By 1881, Paris hosted the first International Exposition of Electricity, featuring Zénobe Gramme’s dynamo, Edison’s light bulbs, Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone, electric networks, electric tools, and electric trams. It would be followed by the electrically (and politically) charged World’s Fair of Chicago in 1893. But the electric revolution began with far less fanfare, with the struggle of four leading minds over a singular problem, and with the greatest machine that was never built.

  The Little Engine that Couldn’t

  “Have you never heard of Lady Ada Byron [Lovelace], then? The Prime Minister’s daughter, and the very Queen of Engines! [. . .] Ada Byron, true friend and disciple of Babbage himself! Lord Charles Babbage, Father of the Difference Engine and the Newton of our Modern Age!”

  —William Gibson and Bruce Sterling, The Difference Engine

  I want to return for a moment to the Neverwas Haul described in the perambulation, part steamship, part automobile, all fantasy. The Track Banshees of the Nevada desert built the vessel to bring some of that fantasy into reality, to toy with the edges of space and time and to wonder about possibilities. What does it mean to change history? they ask—what does it take to build tomorrow’s unknown from today’s known, to blow upon that unsteady spark until it ignites? What-ifs light the steampunk world with diffusions as bright as Davy’s arc lamp—but history had no Track Banshees. The Neverwas never was,* and despite launching one of the best known examples of twentieth-century steampunk and igniting the imaginations of AI enthusiasts, the world’s first calculating machine, the difference engine doesn’t exist in history either. The designs weren’t fully executed until 1991 at the Science Museum of London. The most interesting part of this story, however, isn’t that the difference engine failed—it’s that it should have succeeded.

  Charles Babbage had a full head of steam. Described as a polymath, he had all the trappings of a young Newton: wealthy, elite, educated, and left (perhaps too much) to his own devices. His subject, like Newton’s, was mathematics, but he arrived at Cambridge determined to upend the Newtonian system of calculus. Newton’s complexity could not compete with continental mathematics, based as they were on the far more useful Leibniz calculus, and in 1812, Babbage established the Analytical Society to challenge it with his closest friend, John Herschel (son of the famous and eccentric astronomer, William). Babbage was bold, noisy, blustery, and rich enough to avoid most trouble. He joined a ghost society, he published tracts on religion dangerously close to blasphemy; he drank and gambled and otherwise led a life in keeping with the eighteenth-century genius. John Herschel, by contrast, was solid and sound—hard-working and brilliant in his own right, tutored generously by his father and guided by one of the century’s most undervalued thinkers: Caroline Herschel, the Lady Astronomer. Despite their differences, the two were fast friends and eager for wider spheres than the stony and rule-bound Cambridge provided. In 1821, they traveled to the continent together, rogues on the trail of nature’s hideouts, where they met Alexander von Humboldt, studied geology, and made excursions to the Alps (and the same glacier traversed by Victor Frankenstein’s creature).8 They returned home by November, and later that same year, the two of them stumbled into a problem without a solution—and the very beginning of a grand idea.

  Stars don’t always align. The story has it that Charles and John stayed late, poring over columns of numbers representing the position of stars in the sky at regular times through the year. Two different clerks compiled them faithfully, but the reports didn’t match and calculation errors mounted. “I wish to God,” complained Babbage, “these calculations could be done by a steam engine.”9 In June 1822, he presented a small model of just such a machine to the Royal Astronomical Society in London, an organization he founded, and which included as guest members John’s aunt Caroline Herschel and the mathematician and astronomer Mary Somerville. His announcement mimics, in its breezy confidence, the style of Humphry Davy: “I have contrived methods by which type shall be set up by the machine in the order determined by the calculation. The arrangements are such that . . . there shall not exist the possibility of error in any printed copy of tables computed by the engine.”10 At its most basic, an electric calculator, it presaged much more. In 1825, Babbage’s interest was piqued by electromagnetism—and Herschel claimed that the strange phenomenon would lead the sciences of the new age (if only they could understand what it was). In its mythic properties, electromagnetism resembled Galvanic electricity, the concept so chased by Davy and the “Royal Society Hounds” in 1800.11 At the time, Davy still held sway, though his powers were waning. In his service, however, was a young man named Michael Faraday, who had spent years labor
ing over Davy’s experiments, traveling with him, putting up with his humors and ill treatment by Davy’s wife. He was, by all accounts, a star on the rise. Despite this (or more probably because of it), Davy blocked Faraday’s election to the Royal Society eleven times. A more disturbing story suggests that Davy engineered an experiment meant, literally, to blind the young Faraday by suggesting a lethal mixture of chemicals that exploded in his face once heated.12 Holmes calls the contest one between “sorcerer and apprentice,” but Faraday would climb well beyond Davy’s shadow. In 1825, he took the position Davy held when he introduced the arc light: director of the Royal Institution. Modest, spiritually minded, monogamous to a fault, he doesn’t fit the “genius” model of extravagance, but his lectures scintillated just like Davy’s. Faraday took the stage as a shining light, described by onlookers as somehow unearthly, raptured: “his enthusiasm sometimes carried him to the point of ecstasy when he [. . .] lifted the veil from [Nature’s] deep mysteries. His body then took motion from his mind; his hair streamed out from his head; his hands were full of nervous action; his light, lithe body seemed to quiver with its eager life”—and the audience, the onlooker proclaimed, “took fire with him, and every face was flushed.”13 The interaction between Michael Faraday and Charles Babbage, writes K. K. Schwarz, offers a key intersection for combining fields: science, industry, economics. But though the two of them are, respectively, inventors of the modern age—we only see it by detecting the current of history backward. Their lives may have been linked by “personal friendship, scientific interest, and a wide circle of friends,” but they are rarely mentioned together, their separate works standing as evidence of minds, even genius minds, working apart rather than in collaboration.14 But they do represent the gentleman of science at a pivotal moment, when the battle lines were being drawn between old and new.