In Gibson and Sterling’s novel, the “winner” isn’t Sybil or Ada Lovelace/Byron, but the tech itself. It ends ominously enough, in stilted, stuttering, stream of consciousness. “It is 1991,” the narrative voice explains, “it is London. Ten thousand towers, the cyclonic hum of a trillion twisting gears, all air gone earthquake-dark in a mist of oil, in the frictioned heat of intermeshing wheels. Black seamless pavements, uncounted tributary rivulets for the frantic travels of the punched-out lace of data, the ghosts of history loosed in this hot shining necropolis.” From the disconnected images, emerges “a dry foam of data, its constituent bits and motes [. . .] swift tireless spindles flinging off invisible loops in their millions.” Data and networks, communication hubs and wireless signals: even in the alternative history, a structure must undergird computational logic. Lovelace might be able to explain the difference engine and analytic engine: one calculates arithmetic and is finite, while the other has “no finite line of demarcation which limits the powers of the Analytical Engine.”33 Her work might negotiate the mathematics of program language, even the necessities of how to put data to use in the machine. Like Isherwood and his ship, Lovelace could easily explain what the engine could do—but not what it was for. The world did not need the difference engine. Not yet. What it needed, what the rapid industrialization of Britain required, and what leading figures of the British Association most wanted, were engines of an entirely different sort.
In 1836, the British Association for the Advancement of Science upheld a man named Andrew Crosse as the perfect picture of the scientist. He was “disinterested and humble,” solitary, quiet, and in search of “nothing beyond nature’s truth.”34 He spent his time coaxing crystals by passing electrical current through various substrates, and strung his property with wires for collecting atmospheric electricity. Fifty Leiden jars packed the music room “flashing and crackling [. . .] with playful intermittence all the livelong night.”35 But this vision of science—divorced from the material, depoliticized, and shut away in the private laboratories of private men—was about to be electrified out of existence. In 1837, Charles Wheatstone and William Fothergill Cooke patented the electromagnetic telegraph, building on work that Faraday had begun but for the first time applying it. Long-distance communication became the first Victorian electrical industry, and launched an age of entrepreneurs36—and in 1838, the year of Queen Victoria’s coronation, the British Association met in Newcastle, a town on the rise and soon to be a center of industry. Attending the meeting were the scientific greats, including Babbage, Herschel, and Whewell, as well as a singular man of singular (pre)occupation: an engineer, armament magnate, and inventor, he would (with the near-mythic Isambard Kingdom Brunel) build the machines that worked—the engines that could.
Newcastle’s Engineering Giant
The steampunk aesthetic—the blowing whistle, the whirring engines, the clockwork cams, and retro-futurist Zeppelins with their pilots in frock coats and top hats—offers a whole world bright with color and alive with moving parts. But this extraordinary ethos didn’t emerge from a vacuum (unless you count the vacuum tubes of the static electricity generator). Up to the 1830s, Britain’s scientific endeavors rolled along in service of King George—rational, methodical, and if Faraday had anything to do with it, entirely and immanently respectable. There were showmen; there had to be. But there must also be more than plans; the show needed substance. It needed a man with invention on the brain, but with the ability to turn it to civic good; someone who charmed with his good nature, his intellect, and his eclectic habits; someone who would turn ideas into money and then back into more ideas. It needed a tall, elegant, top-hatted figure stepping from a train platform designed especially for the purpose of connecting his estates to the rest of the wide world—it needed, in other words, Baron William George Armstrong.‡
Conceivably the only reason Armstrong has never been rendered as a fictional hero of his own steampunk story is because we already have Verne’s Captain Nemo. Armstrong doesn’t captain an electric submarine, but he does build the first electric house complete with lightbulbs (arc, and then incandescent), running water, central heating, dishwasher, vacuum cleaner, passenger lift, fire alarm, electric dinner gong, and self-turning kitchen spits. As obsessed with clockwork as Phileas Fogg from Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days, he observed exact (and exacting) timetables on his guests. “There are few deviations,” wrote one guest, “Breakfast is on the table at 8 to a second! Luncheon at ½ past 1, tea at 5, and dinner at from ½ past 7 to ¼ past 8.”37 He had a reputation as a “modern magician,” changing not only the technology but reforming the landscape; he dammed the Debron Burn waterway and installed a water-powered dynamo, supplying electrical wonders. “Ten thousand small glass lamps were hung from the rocky hillsides or upon the lines of railing which guard the walks, and an almost equal number of Chinese lanterns were swung across leafy glades” wrote contemporary visitors, “little lamps” all “hung like fireflies.”38 Armstrong had his own observatory for stargazing, but he attracted stars of another sort. Though descended from common stock, the son of a lawyer and grandson of a shoemaker, the engineer played host to the Prince of Wales and other dignitaries who longed to see the magic of Cragside house. To commemorate the occasion, the Times praised Armstrong as “a name which embodies all the great industries and interests of the city.”39 The prince paid the compliment, too, in his dedication of Armstrong park, twenty acres along the Jesmond Dene: “his name is known in the British dominions as that of a great man and a great inventor, but may safely say it is known all over the world.”40 He was likewise known for the Elswick Works, a huge and sprawling plant for the production of hydraulics, shipbuilding—and later, armaments. As Armstrong’s premier biographer, Henrietta Heald, explains, the great engineer and “magician of the north” was known as equally for wringing “the blood and sweat of thousands of men [. . .] whose demands for improved working conditions he cavalierly dismissed” and for the creation, manufacture, and sale of the “most ferocious killing machines the world had ever seen.”41 Armstrong operates at the edge of hero and villain, remembered fondly as benefactor and friend, antagonized as a merchant of death. But most importantly, he rises as the first of those engineers George Shattuck Morison described as champions of a New World.
Civil engineering, says Morison, embraces all other types—and to build the very means by which engineering itself is carried out. In his swift and breathless prose, he lays out the groundwork for this feted designer of the future: “The civil engineer is briefly a man who, with knowledge of the forces and materials around him, uses that knowledge in the design and construction of engineering works”—his business is “to design the tools” of power, by power, so that power might be directed by man.42 Even in Armstrong’s lifetime, those who knew him claimed that he “cast his thoughts into iron.”43 If Babbage and Herschel longed for a day when young minds and active bodies would overturn a crusty Royal Society, here they had their wish—but though Armstrong would be made a member of the Royal Society, he was not, nor would he have considered himself, primarily a scientist. Granted, the term was only coined in 1833, a few years before the British Association meeting that saw all those upon whom Whewell might bestow it in the same place at the same time. Even so, before the 1840s, Armstrong was a lawyer secreting a passion for mechanics, engineering, and electricity. Sent to London’s Temple district to learn law, Armstrong spent his Friday evenings at the Royal Institution, listening to the same dashing and charismatic Faraday lectures than inspired Ada Lovelace. Faraday’s compelling lectures now included something more tangible; his discovery of electromagnetic rotation led not only to his invention of the first transformer, but also of the first dynamo, an electrical generator that used a commutator to produce direct current (DC). As DC, it didn’t produce enough energy to be of much use, but it proved the first practical step for a mind geared toward electricity’s possibilities. Armstrong made his own electrical discovery by 1840;
in a letter to Faraday, he tells of an accident where a steam-engine operator received a violent shock from the steam itself.44 Through a series of experiments, Armstrong isolated the phenomena: the steam electrified as it entered the atmosphere due to the action of friction as it emerged from the pipe. That meant steam power could be electric power—and he set about building the boiler that would change his career, the future of Newcastle, and the course of two wars. The manufacture of power had begun.
One dark night near Christmas, a deep frost set in. The dark streets ghosted white, breath feathered from chapped lips, and bodies huddled into winter wool. A young man named John Wigham Richardson waited in the dim audience of the Literary and Philosophical Society for a wondrous glimpse of the electrical machine: “It was a weird scene,” he later wrote, “the sparks and flashes of electricity from the machine were, I should say, from four to five feet long and the figure of Armstrong in a frock coat [. . .] looked almost demoniacal.”45 We hear, in the description, echoes of Shelley’s mad Victor; we see, in the flying sparks, a hint of wizardry to come. But Armstrong did not launch his career in thunder and lightning. He began (while still diligently pursing life as a solicitor) by studying hydraulics. We talked of Newton’s year of magical thinking; Armstrong had a magic year, too; his greatest discoveries did not come then, but the tracks were laid. Victoria had taken the throne, and Armstrong had taken to water, specifically hydraulics. In 1838, he published an article about a water wheel in Mechanics’ Magazine, suggesting that water power could be concentrated during descent to propel machines; the following year, a working model was installed at Watson’s Works. Armstrong’s lifelong friend and fellow engineer Thomas Sopwith called it marvelous in its simplicity, with water pressurized and applied to a piston.46 He even speculated on its many uses—but, as with Babbage’s difference engine, the hydraulic engine generated no real interest. Not then. He’d invented a hydraulic crane as well, able to lift weight with the action of a single piston. Again, no interest. In an early history of Elswick (1909), Alfred Cochrane remarked that the most “curious” thing about the cranes was that no one seemed to care for them. Armstrong invented, modeled, and then built devices whose utility we take for granted now as much as we do Babbage’s calculating engine, but he suffered from the same trouble: the world didn’t need to know what the machines did. They needed to know what they were for. Armstrong needed a public, and in December 1842, shortly after demonstrating his electric steam engine to the delight and terror of young John Wigham Richardson, the device appeared on display at the Polytechnic Institution. The feat had been accomplished by Thomas Sopwith, and by threats of taking the crowd-pleasing, spark-producing dynamo elsewhere. Like Matthew Boulton to James Watt, and with equal success, Sopwith gave Armstrong room to work wonders. A year later, the Lit and Phil Society lectures were so crowded that Armstrong himself had to climb in through a window to the stage—he appeared in print, jocularly touted a wonder-worker by the press, and awed his audience like a latter-day Humphry Davy, lighting a cannon with a spark from his finger to conclude the show.
The flash and bang may have been the chief attraction (and no one can argue the results were more interesting than a list of mathematical figures calculated by steam). But the difference between Babbage, Lovelace, and Armstrong goes deeper. Part of Armstrong’s allure, writes Heald, was his ability to explain. Unlike the unspooling mathematical code annotated and translated by Lovelace, or Babbage’s own bitter invectives against those who did not clearly grasp his work, Armstrong—a layman himself—spoke in laymen’s terms. “Although not an outstanding orator,” Heald explains, and without the stage charisma of either Faraday or Davy, “he had a clear, precise, authoritative method of delivery, shot through with wit and humour.”47 And he always had a ready audience. By 1846, at the young age of thirty-five, Armstrong was made a Royal Society fellow. Sponsored by Faraday and Charles Wheatstone (inventor of the telegraph), “What is the Royal Society for,” they asked, “if not for such men as Armstrong?”48 He was, by any measure, a remarkable man—he had a remarkable network, and a remarkable partner in his wife Meggie, who aided him in his projects and experiments. (Heald recounts a story about wood slats and lime that suggests the Thrilling Adventures of William and Meggie would be worth reading.) But he continued to work as a lawyer with his friend and partner Armorer Donkin till 1845, until an unexpected set of circumstances, coupled with his head for business, created a true public need.
In this case, the need was water. Clean water. Charles Dickens’s Hard Times provides one of the best fictional descriptions of the foul waters brooding about industrial centers, but the truth was often darker and harder still. In Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor, poor river boys pick coal and debris out of the Thames, picking it out of the muck.49 In 1858, the Thames became known as “the Great Stink,” industrial waste and sewage combining with a singularly hot summer to create an oppressive and relentless stench that literally shut down the city of London. Michael Faraday staunchly supported water reform as early as 1855 and published a paper called “Observations on the Filth of the Thames” where he described “the whole river [as] an opaque pale brown fluid.”50 But the Rivers Pollution Commission of 1874 would sum up their Thames and Lea River findings as follows: “that the river receives the sewage from a large number of towns [. . .] the washings of a large cultivated land, and the filthy discharge from many industrial processes and manufactures”—and that it floated with excrement and animal carcasses.51 Problems with the water system had become endemic, growing up in slime and sludge from the industries that fed national capital and growth. The stench alone, rot and filth and excrement combining with the waste of stagnation, would move legislation—but the smell was hardly the only problem, and London wasn’t the only locus.
Cholera. Dysentery. Typhoid. For years, doctors had been helpless in the face of mystery illness. Fevers seemed to come out of nowhere, wretched stomach complaints, and worse. But the king of these epidemics, cholera, could kill in days. Cholera rendered the body viscerally incapable of taking in fluid; vomiting, diarrhea, severe dehydration—the hands and feet would wrinkle and shrivel, the skin would turn blue or green. Death occurred in the midst of twitching, cramping muscles, a vile, unsanitary end that spread through whole communities and felled seemingly healthy people overnight. John Snow, a physician in London, finally traced the source to contaminated water in 1855, but long before his discovery, residents and officials recognized the relationship between unsanitary conditions and disease. Where towns were growing quickly—towns like Tyneside and Newcastle—overcrowding and waste rapidly turned good drinking water into dangerous cesspools. Edwin Chadwick published a report titled Sanitary Conditions of the Labouring Population of Great Britain in 1843, and shortly following, William Armstrong (with Thomas Sopwith and building Richard Grainger) submitted his first proposal for a solution: he would convey clean water from Whittle Burn (a clean-running tributary west of Newcastle) to the residents of Tyneside. The project was an ambitious one: they must build a series of reservoirs and lay pipe through large tracts of land. But by 1848, the Whittle Dene Water Company laid more than twelve miles of iron pipe, two feet in diameter—the largest in the world.52 The success certainly served the public good, but as Heald remarks, the continuous supply of water served something else too; Armstrong now had the means to make a case for hydraulic power. A lengthy lecture and a brilliant display of the hydraulic crane later, and W. G. Armstrong & Company began building the Elswick Works. Armstrong would not go back to law. He would become, instead, one of the foremost engineers of the Victorian Age by explaining not only what water power could do—but by showing, without doubt, what you could do with it. Technology thrills best when used against the disintegration we fear, the chaos, the dread. When we, that is, control it and not the other way around.
The Elswick Works became the single largest industrial plant of Great Britain, employing thousands. They constructed the first hydraulic cranes in 18
47 for the Edinburgh and Northern Railway, then more for the Allenhead Lead Mines.53 A few years later orders came from everywhere, most notably from a man who, even more than Armstrong, embodies the Victorian engineer: Isambard Kingdom Brunel. The man behind the Great Western Railway, the network of tunnels, bridges, viaducts, and all that linked the land between, dark double lines of rail from London to Bristol—Brunel offered something of the panache of Babbage in caricature. His most famous photo, one taken by Robert Howlett, features Brunel in disheveled gentleman’s apparel and top hat: jaunty, determined, hands in pockets and cigar in teeth, Brunel stands astride the giant chains not of a railway bridge, but of a ship: the Great Eastern. And Armstrong’s Elswick would get into the shipbuilding business too. And yet, neither the cranes nor the ships would ultimately make Armstrong’s career. Instead, by the 1850s, he and Brunel would be designing engines of war, building big guns for the Crimean War and the siege of Sebastopol.
A Natural Resistance
We like to think of flashes of genius, of thunderbolts like those described by Victor Frankenstein when he suddenly knew the secret of life, when the curtains were thrown back to reveal the great shining truth beyond truth. Or, if not genius, then the madness-induced vision of the castaway in Moby-Dick, “carried down alive to wondrous depths, where strange shapes of the unwarped primal world glided to and fro before his passive eyes; and the miser-merman, Wisdom, revealed his hoarded heaps [. . .] He saw God’s foot upon the treadle of the loom.”54 But history’s greatest inventions do not leap ahead of the rails. They do not, because they cannot—or rather, because we cannot. We can’t want a thing we haven’t a need for; the smart phone could never have come before the Internet. When Brunel built the Great Eastern, the 22,400-ton behemoth upon whose chains he stands puffing in his photo, it was the largest ship in the world. It also took three months to get her afloat, and by the end, she was more than bankrupt, her original company gone under the surface and the new owners at a loss about what to do with a great empty hull that no one wanted to ride upon. It might have suffered the same fate as the Wampanoag, except that in this case, there was now a need. Wheatstone patented the telegraph, and soon telegraph had become the most fundamental communication network of any kind—it revolutionized the world, and from 1866, it would connect the world too. Thousands of miles of transatlantic cable needed to be run, and for that, they needed the world’s biggest steamship. Brunel has been lionized as a genius, a madman, a superhuman inventor—but he was, more than anything, an engineer building upon the engineering of others: ships to bigger ships, rails to the Great Western Railway, and rifles to the world’s largest guns. Our human resistance is overcome only at cost, only by the slow building of engine upon engine; and after all, even the “clacks” of Whitechapel Gods creeps, rather than collides, a slow shifting of man into metal like the steady accumulation of Elswick Works on the river Tyne.
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