“The substitution of inanimate power for human labour,” writes William Armstrong, “must unfortunately always be attended in the first instance with the evil of depriving individuals of employment.”55 And yet, “the general welfare [. . .] is unquestionably promoted in every instance in which we succeed in coercing insensible agents into our service.” Man, says the magnate, “was designed to work by his head rather than by the mere strength of his arm” as he “continued to extend his dominion over the powers of nature.”56 It is right to suspect that George Shattuck Morison knew of these words—or else we are left to assume that engineers of his kind and temperament are cut of such similar cloth that even their hopes for the future use the same words and strike the same notes. Armstrong succeeds because he builds machines that the world already knows it wants: the drilling, punching, boring, tunneling, clipping, clanging, pressing machines. The machines that built cities and dug tunnels and laid rail. The machines that protected borders and the machines that crashed through them. When London’s Tower Bridge opened in 1894, it was powered by Armstrong’s hydraulic accumulators.57 When the navy built warships in the second half of the century, they used the same technology. Step by step, the engineers laid a path that other engineers would follow; the steps themselves might be matters of minutiae. They may seem but the subtle shifting of gears. But what was true of Hauksbee’s electric machine is just as true of those makers who came after: every new machine had its beginning in the last machine’s ending. When the troops failed and flagged at Sebastopol, stymied by war technology that hadn’t been updated since the days of Napoleon, both Armstrong and Brunel put their engineering facilities to the task. James Rendel, a civil engineer, worked over details for new artillery in an evening with Armstrong, blotting paper and sketches between them: “You are the man to do it,” he exclaimed. And in June 1887, the Illustrated London News showcased Armstrong’s 111-ton gun, crafted at Elswick Works. It shot 1,800-pound rounds at the rate of 2,020 feet per second; it could penetrate wrought iron to the depth of 30 inches from a thousand feet away . . . and most shocking of all in an age of close-range water warfare, it had an effective range of eight miles.58 The gun served as the main attraction at the Royal Mining, Engineering and Industrial Exhibition in 1887, held in Newcastle to celebrate the Golden Jubilee of Queen Victoria’s ascension to the throne—effectively also the anniversary of that fateful British Association Meeting at which Babbage, Armstrong, and others first gathered fifty years earlier. He had become the master engineer, a “magician” of electricity, and also the mastermind behind the deadliest weapon of its time. He would go on to supply armaments not only to the British government, but abroad as well—in fact, Armstrong outfitted both sides of the American Civil War. And he made a fortune doing it.
History always reveals patterns of resistance and change. Sydney Padua describes Babbage’s engine as a “beautiful machine,” almost an art installation. “He wasn’t aiming at the practical,” she explains; a device that—like Newton’s language of God—meant to tell a man about himself. The difference engine was for thinking, not for using, and Babbage “withheld the machine because he didn’t feel the world deserved his engine.”59 Why make for them what they could not understand? His language was math, and like Newton, he didn’t think math belonged to everyone. It wasn’t only the wider world’s failure to see the utility of Babbage’s machine—he couldn’t see it himself. And this is nowhere more apparent than in his correspondence with Brunel, who was his longtime friend. In July of 1857, Brunel offered to help him get the difference engine into manufacture, saying that once a workable system could be offered, “fresh wants would arise.”60 Build it, he suggests, and they will come. Except that they did not. And in 1914, when Lord Moulton visited an aging Babbage to see the finished machine, it still remained largely in Babbage’s head: “There lay scattered bit of mechanism, but I saw no trace of any working machine. Very cautiously I approached the subject, and received the dreaded answer: ‘It is not constructed yet, but I am working at it, and it will take less time to construct it altogether then it could have to complete [. . .] the earlier version from the stage in which I left it.’”61 We can see in the machine’s design the kernel of all the computers that run our world, but that leap wasn’t made by Babbage at all.
At the dawn of the Victorian Age, Britain sought to build its industrial empire and also to protect it; the difference engine made no difference at all to those aims, but cranes, and railway tunnels, ships, bridges, and guns did. For all our latter-day steampunk interest in the disputed birth of AI, possibly the image that most captures the aesthetic of the real Victorian steam-driven imagination is that of Brunel before his shipyard chains, or of Armstrong demonstrating the steam-driven spark of electricity. The latter half of the Victorian Age would turn on the possibilities of inanimate power, and Armstrong predicted it would be electrical power. The biggest challenge would be to make it cheap and abundant. “We have firstly the direct heating power of the sun’s rays,” Armstrong explains to the 1881 meeting of the British Association at York, “but have not yet succeeded in applying [it] to motive purposes.”62 Instead, he insisted, we must work toward water, wind, tidal, and the “preserved sunbeams” of coal. What they needed to harness the black rock into power for everyone was means of conducting the electricity produced and a means of conveying it over longer distances than seemed possible at the time. Someday would come, he prophesied, when conveyance and batteries would change the world, when solar power might be possible, when waterfalls might be tamed, and when “an electric horse far more amenable to discipline than the living one may be added to the bounteous gifts which science has bestowed.”63 Science, he says. Only we know already that this is not Babbage’s science, and not Newton’s either. The new masters of power would become prototypes of the steampunk hero, and be immortalized, too, in fiction as well as fact. And it’s important to note that Armstrong’s dream of water power would be realized, after all, only fourteen years after his address by a man as nearly mythic in status as the fictional heroes of Jules Verne: Nikola Tesla.
*It might be better described as an OnlyNow. The physical machinery exists, but its historical context is fiction.
†With thanks to the generosity of Sydney Padua, author and illustrator.
‡For a comprehensive biography of the “magician,” see Henrietta Heald’s William Armstrong, Magician of the North.
SIX
He Who Powers the Future
Thomas Alva Edison was high profile, high rolling, full of good humor and, not infrequently, practical jokes at the expense of others. He ate pie as a regular meal, barked orders, solved problems, and made brazen claims. In the retrospective of history, Edison was larger than life. Arthur Palmer, one of Edison’s employees, said this at his passing: “He led no armies into battle, he conquered no countries, and he enslaved no peoples . . . Nonetheless, he exerted a degree of power the magnitude of which no warrior ever dreamed. His name still commands a respect as sweeping in scope and as world-wide as that of any other mortal.”1 Edison was born in 1847, less than a decade after Queen Victoria’s coronation and an ocean away from Armstrong and Brunel. He held no advanced degrees and possessed no refined manners, but rubbed elbows with high society anyway. To his credit, he held over one thousand US patents; he invented the phonograph, the motion picture camera, and most famously (by hook and crook in a race against others), the first practical and mass-produced light bulb. Edison’s methods were far from the finesse of earlier scientists and engineers, but he was shrewd and knew how to produce results en masse. In fact, he is credited with the dawn of the industrial research laboratory, a space where all men worked more hours than they slept, slaving away at patents that would never bear their names. Edison shines as a hero of George Shattuck Morison’s engineering dream: a poor boy who pulled himself up by bootstraps and became the greatest mind of his generation. They called him the Wizard of Menlo Park.
The United States clawed its way out o
f civil war to face a rapidly industrializing world—and a rapidly expanding one too. By 1878, immigrants poured into New York Harbor, looking for work in factories and filling the tenements to the teeming millions. Like the underbelly of London, cities like New York, Chicago, and Cleveland boasted slums reeking of filth and rife with cholera and typhoid fever. But, as Jill Jonnes writes in Empires of Light, wealth poured into the city, too, and the “magnificent buildings of Wall Street” reflected the nation’s growing economic power.2 Southbound from Manhattan and on the New Jersey side of the river, a different kind of power stirred: Edison’s Menlo Park “invention factory”—where the Ohio native intended to develop “a minor invention every ten days and a big thing every six months.”3 He’d started out as a Western Union operator, spending his free time digesting what he could about telegraphy and electricity until, in 1874, he sold the rights to his quadruplex telegraph to Jay Gould (Western Union’s rival) for a shocking $30,000. Today, that would equal just over half a million dollars. He reinvested his worth back into Menlo Park lab, soon to be the center of the electric universe. Serious-faced, square of jaw, with eyebrows that curled up like a pair of ragged wings, Edison could thumb his suspenders with dogged determinism. “I haven’t failed,” he once remarked, “I’ve just found 10,000 ways that didn’t work.” If 1st Baron William Armstrong represented the top hat and tails of Victorian gentlemen engineers, Edison offered its thick-booted version, the epitome of American industry and blue-collar resolve. Instead of a wonder-house of working hydro-technology perched on the precipice of a vast country estate (à la Cragside), visitors to Menlo Park would find a rattling, humming machine of industry. On the first floor, visitors encountered “scribes and bookkeepers in one end, and at the other some ten or twelve skillful workers in iron,” while the second floor stood ablaze with natural light from wide windows, illuminating “batteries of all descriptions, microscopes, magnifying glasses, crucibles, retorts, an ash-covered forge, and all the apparatus of a chemist.”4 Through the din of metalworking, the dust of shavings, and the stink of battery acid, Edison moved like a benevolent dictator. Problems meant work. Work meant patents. America’s greatest engineer was on his way to powering the future. But he wasn’t getting there alone.
George Shattuck Morison described the new age as one of collaborators rather than inventors: “The first steps in invention and in new developments are taken by individuals; the best work is done later when the path into which the bold inventor ventured alone is trodden by the crowd who find it their usual course.”5 Like a latter-day Royal Society Newton, Edison collected men. Many of his best associates moved with him from Newark, including Charles Batchelor, a Manchester mechanic with extensive skill in motors, and John Kruesi, the Swiss machinist who “translated” Edison’s rough sketches into “high-quality working models.”6 When, on September 16, 1878, the New York Sun published the headline of EDISON’S NEWEST MARVEL: SENDING CHEAP LIGHT, HEAT, AND POWER BY ELECTRICITY, the wizard was capitalizing not on his own discoveries, but on the hours of his labor force, the men who would help him bring it to fruition. Edison’s vision “had already vaulted beyond mere light bulbs into a glorious and immediate future of electrical grandiosity,” explains Jonnes, for “not only did he have in hand a workable incandescent light bulb” (the holy grail of engineers), he planned to “create an entire electrical power system.”7 Of course, Edison had yet to achieve the necessary patents in 1878, and though he’d worked out how to keep an incandescent lamp filament from melting (one of the principal problems), he still had only vision and hope. Even so, he claimed he could, and would, “light the entire lower part of New York city, using a 500-horsepower engine.”8 Like Armstrong and Brunel, Edison had grasped not only what power could do, but what it could be used for.
The New York Daily Graphic praised Edison for his practicality in business: “the keynote of his work is commercial utility. He asks himself when a new idea is suggested, ‘Will this be valuable from the industrial point of view?’”9 Will it turn a profit? Success followed money, and money followed success. If the world were to be lit by electric light, someone needed to produce it—and to distribute it—and at a price. Investors poured in and the Edison Electric Light Company launched on October 16 of the same year with 3,000 shares. Edison retained 2,500 of them (at an astonishing $250,000) and the remaining 500 went to key investors, including the Vanderbilts.10 And Edison was good for it—flourishing his new light with gusto. No more of Davy’s too-bright arc lights, no more of the flammable gaslight, or the increasingly rare whale oil; Edison’s light burned “clear, cold, and beautiful” with the “phosphorescent effulgence of the star.”11 Edison had closed the circuit in a way even Faraday couldn’t have imagined (though he read all Faraday’s works): he created the light bulbs—which created the need for electricity—which he supplied by his power stations on his lines to his customers. On September 4, 1882, Edison’s Pearl Street Station came online, providing direct current (DC) to fifty-nine customers in Manhattan. The reasons for direct current were manifestly simple: there wasn’t any other kind. Not then. And until 1888, there could be no doubt that Edison was the world’s most formidable engineer, a name known in France and Germany as well as England and the United States. A decade later, however, and it would be Westinghouse, not Edison Electric, powering the astonishing lights, Ferris wheels, show boats, and bulbs at the Chicago World’s Fair—and not with DC but with AC (alternating current). That incredible force, a force that changed the entire electrified world, had been made possible not by Edison, but by a quirky Serbian engineer who once worked for him: Nikola Tesla. So how did a man like Tesla, a seer of visions with less grasp of business than even Charles Babbage, eclipse the practical engineer of Menlo Park? Tesla’s story begins where many early inventors’ stories end; in nearly every way, he lived perpetually in the future, having overshot the science entirely. So brilliant were his plans for use five, ten, twenty years down the line that the actual work of building and making the technology today seemed a sort of annoyance, an afterthought, a thing to surmount rather than the thing itself. Elting described this risky behavior in his story of the Wampanoag: skip too many steps and you will lose. The path to greatness from Armstrong to Edison built on the tech that came before for a market that was ready to receive it. It sunk Babbage’s engine, and it nearly sunk Brunel’s big ship. We can usually predict the failure of those inventors who don’t align; as I said in chapter 5, history’s inventions never jump the rails. The trouble is, nonfiction doesn’t have to be plausible . . . and no one predicted Tesla.
Bright eyes, raven hair, fitted suit (the cut and size of which he would wear well into his sixties), Tesla moved like a cat, ate like a lion, and swam like the wood ducks he’d grown up with in lakes and rivers of Serbia. Tesla was a walking mathematical enigma; he counted everything compulsively, and ensured that all his activities (even the laps he swam or meals he ate) were divisible by three. His autobiography reads like Frankenstein, and his career zings with Edison-like newspaper headlines. Biographer Marc Seifer took an academic’s method to sorting fact from fiction, but even he leaves gaps and makes leaps, revealing a composite being part-hero, part madman, an invalid, a manipulator, and a super-brain. Given his bizarre temperament and habits, it isn’t surprising that Tesla failed so often in his life; it’s surprising that he ever succeeded at all. And we have to ask why—why did the careful narrative of science and engineering grind its gears in the explosive years between 1880 and 1899, between Armstrong and Tesla, between the Victorian Age and the dawn of a new modern era? Stepping from the train platform amid the smoke and steam and man-made light of Paris, Nikola Tesla walked into the future ready-made for fiction and the myriad films and novels that would resurrect him for the twenty-first century.
Changing the Story
For Tesla, power was life; he was born to claim it as his own. He was also born (so he writes in his autobiography) during the tumult of a violent electrical storm. It reads so much like
Victor Frankenstein’s family narrative that it’s tempting to assume he modeled his own story upon it, and in fact, this wouldn’t be the first time Tesla stood accused of copying fiction. His inventions seem sprung from the pages of a nineteenth-century novel, Vril, the Power of the Coming Race, though Tesla denied needing any motivation except that of nature herself. At the age of twelve, he saw a picture of Niagara Falls. The impressive sweep, slung round in a horseshoe of thunderous and foaming cascades, sends an average six million cubic feet of water over the crestline every minute. Though a black-and-white image, the falls made a deep impression. Tesla told his uncle then that “one day” he would harness it. A pretty childhood dream, except that, in 1897, Tesla would give the inaugural speech of the Niagara Power Station. The years between would be hailed as the “war of currents,” as ready-made for fiction as any wizard’s duel: American grit, ingenuity, and bullish pride against a near-clairvoyant visionary from abroad, with his flashes of light and electrical wonders. It’s little wonder the two men appear so often in steampunk. A fictional Tesla turns up in Ralph Vaughan’s four Sherlock Holmes/H. P. Lovecraft crossovers, The Adventure of the Ancient Gods (1990), Sherlock Holmes in the Dreaming Detective (1992), “The Adventure of the Laughing Moonbeast” (1992), and Sherlock Holmes and the Terror Out of Time (2002). He turns up, too, in Christopher Priest’s 1995 novel and later Christopher Nolan’s steampunk movie adaptation, The Prestige. Edison gets his mentions too. In Five Fists of Science by Matt Fraction, Tesla teams up with Mark Twain to fight a dastardly Thomas Edison and his financiers J. P. Morgan and Andrew Carnegie. Tesla’s quirks are taken as rote and amplified, while Edison’s brash and bullying ways make him ready fodder for evildoing. In The Lives of Eccentrics by Hirohiko Araki, Edison is violent and cruel to his workers, while in Five Fists, he performs occult human sacrifice. The desire and dread of technological progress shows itself best when fiction and fact collide: light and life, dread tech and death. The real-life men and their real-life contest were not nearly so dark, but they’re not as straightforward either.
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