Clockwork Futures

by Brandy Schillace

  A new wizard had taken the stage. His success with AC propelled him into the circle of the scientists. It was Lord Kelvin, upon being presented with one of Tesla’s coils, who suggested he go further—that he “concentrate upon one big idea.” As Seifer explains, such a charge, coming from so great a hero of science (Kelvin worked out the wavelength of light and atomic weights of metals, among other things), shook Tesla with a sense of destiny. He wanted to do something greater than AC power, greater even than the Niagara power station. The future, he thought, must be in wireless—in his eventual “telautomatics,” his version of vril, and with weapons of mass destruction that he never built.

  Tesla’s days as the premier electrical wizard may have been longer than Edison’s, but they were still numbered. He’d tasted success, but he longed for an ideal future. In the midst of his Niagara speech, Tesla told the gathered audience that it means little in comparison to a future of free power. He was necessarily interrupted by the businessmen who found that idea both ludicrous and unprofitable—what did Tesla mean by saying men could pluck energy from the air as easily as plants take nourishment from the sun? “Electric energy can be applied to bicycles, carriages, and vehicles of all sorts,” Tesla explained in an interview to Electrical World, “so cheap that any man in ordinary circumstances can own a boat and propel it by these means.” After all, “it would be a gloomy prospect, indeed, for the world if we did not think that this great power will be used to the advantage of the vast majority of the human race.”55 But the careful control of his early narrative—the successful story that ultimately brings down Edison and converts the raging Niagara of his childhood vision into cheap and reliable power—fractures in Tesla’s late career. Inventions chase inventions; he’s on to the next before the last one is complete, to the frustration and alienation of his investors, supporters, and friends. Adam Steltzner, a Delta Systems engineer from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, claimed that “as engineers, we don’t get paid to do things right, we get paid to do them just right enough.”56 Or as a colleague of mine has put it, “don’t aim for the stars, aim for the door.”§ Tesla’s greatness and also his weakness lie in his far-flung desires and otherworldly designs. The success of his first quantum leap, that of AC power, had in fact been made possible by the Wizard of Menlo Park, the businessman who had laid the wires and made the bulbs and, by extension, created a market for power. DC was “just right enough.” AC led to a future none had foreseen but Tesla, but it was still a future that made sense to them, a future of business and power and money and industrial strength. The practical was never part of Tesla’s own narrative, and certainly not the crown of his achievements. But his shadow is long, and suggests in its shapeless dark greater possibilities than light bulbs and electric motors. There is a sense of singular greatness, of a height and breadth of achievement that pushes the limits of a single lifetime, and it makes Tesla’s story larger than his life—a great woven tapestry of fact and fiction that seduces with its very ambiguity. He knew, or thought he knew, what power was for: wireless technology, cheap manual labor, remote control planes, radio transmitter torpedoes, and telecommunications. Sometimes, in aiming for the stars, you accidentally reach them, but the future (and in fact, the present) was far darker than Tesla—or George Shattuck Morison, imagined. In that, Tesla is perhaps no engineer at all, but a harbinger of a future where we, too, take leaps in the dark without first taking a sounding, a Babbage, and not an Armstrong at all.

  “Oh, we marched and ranted, for the rights of labor and such—fine talk, girl!” says Mick to Sybil in The Difference Engine. “But Lord Charles Babbage made blueprints while we made pamphlets. And his blueprints built this world!” Sybil feels the mechanism beneath her feet: “the digging went on, this and every night, for she’d heard their great machine huffing, as she’d stood by Mick on the Whitechapel pavement; they worked unceasingly, the excavators, boring newer, deeper lines now, down below the tangle of sewers and gas-pipes and bricked-over rivers.” Can we imagine a world such as this? We can—we can because we live in it, in great craters of cities over great canyons of steel pipe and turbines and twisting tunnels of electricity and conductors. The danger threatens when change comes too fast. Gibson and Sterling’s fiction is exactly this kind of collision, a point at which man invents faster than he can accommodate. But we are always, already, in just such a position. Newton and his ilk engaged science to fight our dread of chaos and destruction; by the time of Tesla, scientific and technological advance threatened what we had hoped to thwart or control. The real Babbage had complained of the decline of science; he stood at a crossroads rather than a new epoch, and his work borrowed from John Herschel the language of the cosmos: where were the bright stars? Where were those whose light offered the possibility of great nebula, clearly visible to distant nations, a beacon, a guide into the future of ideas? He could not pursue his original grand plans of the sort that drives The Difference Engine’s plot. But the point had tipped, the spark ignited—and as George Morison so aptly summarized, “The old and the new cannot exist together. It is hard to realize how rapidly the appearance of the whole earth may change.” The explorers, the captains of sailing ships, steamships, and starships, have the comfortable fiction that the difference is always “out there.” Home remains familiar and safe. But what about the changes right under your feet, the ones that destroy the town you always knew, raze the house you were brought up in? “The tendency is apparently involuntary and immediately to protect oneself against the shock of change,” writes Elting of his uncle’s work. It strikes again at the same old bell: the advent of automatons riddled us with uncanny dread; the age of machinery threatened to fit men to the machines rather than machines fit to serve men—and the possibilities of the difference engine find their most dreadful expression in our fears of inanimate sentience. The Difference Engine ends in a single line—but one we can imagine thundering in the cacophony of waking. The machine knows itself. “I see: I see, I see,” until it concludes only “I!” It’s a sentiment we feel—the uncanny and dreadful, shot through with something like black magic and thunder. In life, both Babbage and Tesla would be forgotten (at least temporarily) by engineers. But they would be remembered in fiction.

  In the novel and film The Prestige, Tesla builds a “machine” for Mr. Angier,¶ only to encourage him to destroy it: “Such a thing will bring you only misery.”57 In this story, the genius has become the mad scientist, ill obsessed, guilty of hubris, possessed of the world’s greatest mind (and possibly just possessed). “Exact science, Mr. Angier, is not an exact science,” Tesla explains. Anything is possible. Even when it is not advisable. “The truly extraordinary is not permitted in science and industry,” the fictional Tesla claims, but he also adds, “I followed [my obsessions] too long. I’m their slave . . . and one day they’ll choose to destroy me.”58 That complaint, at least, is real. The historical Tesla has as much bitter invective: “I had to cut the path myself, and my hands are still sore [. . .] would you mind telling a reason why this advance should not stand worthily beside the discoveries of Copernicus?”59 He would try, to the day of his death, to bring about his dream of wireless electricity, but it never came to be. He would attempt to build death rays, and though unsuccessful, the imagined devastation caused hearts to shudder. The government seized and shut down Tesla’s fifteen-story transmission tower; it posed a security risk, they claimed, as the Second World War thundered into being on land, sea, and air. Ruptured becoming thwarted plans. But what would it mean if Tesla had succeeded? Ultimate weapons? Machines of destruction? Upon Tesla’s death in 1943, the FBI seized his notebooks and papers, fueling skepticism and rumor about what they contained. Possibly nothing important could be gleaned from them. But the future roared on with plenty of firepower nonetheless, and the atom bomb would be dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki two years later. By these technological means, says Elting, we have “moved ourselves from a position of terrifying ignorance and dependence, frail beings in the hands of a
n angry God, to a place of knowledge and power” in which we become that god, the supreme measure of all things. “This too,” he says, “has its terrifying implications.”60 We began with a book, a warning, and the Red Queen. The book proclaimed the New Epoch would wash away our troubles; the warning suggested it would break us in the process . . . And the Red Queen stands at the crossroads of an unruly clockwork of what-ifs and how nows, of machines that didn’t get built and stories not often told. There are no fictions about William Armstrong, some few about Edison, and fewer that feature the likes of Brunel. Success stories of “practical” engineering, they offered up a future of progress. But fiction chose Babbage and Tesla to resurrect. In their struggles, even in their failures, they offer something other, something darker, something brought to life like Frankenstein’s monster with the stitches still showing. But what if I told you that this dark un-history was no fiction? What if the steampunk otherworld of Whitechapel Gods had been bubbling away all the time in a corner, spiking the air with gunpowder, acid, explosives, and dread? Rotate the dial and turn the gears back we’ve seen through the eyes of the inventors, engineers, and scientists. Now, we’ll set out for the back streets and mine shafts, the upturned world of digger, factory boy, match girl, and urchin on the crusted streets of London at the dawn of the (same) steam-powered age.

  *In French, from 1820, Il n’est point de progrès dans les sciences, d’invention dans les arts, d’innovation importante qui n’aient servi de causes à la monomanie, ou qui ne lui aient prêté leur caractère.

  †Sie rückt und weicht, der Tag ist überlebt, Dort eilt sie hin und fördert neues Leben. Oh, das skein Flügel mich vom Boden hebt Ihr nach und immer nach zu streben [. . .] Ein Schöner Traum indessen sie entweicht, Ach, zu des Geistes Flügeln wird so leicht Kein körperlicher Flügel sich gesellen!

  “The glow retreats, done in the day of toil;/It yonder hastes, new fields of life exploring;/Ah, that no wing can lift me from the soil,/Upon its track to follow, follow soaring! [. . .] A glorious dream! Though now the glories fade./Alas! The wings that lift the mind no aid/Of wings to lift the body can bequeath me.”

  ‡Marc Seifer describes the stalemate at Westinghouse; Tesla had said all along that the motor could not be adapted, but to admit it would be costly in terms of money and pride. A coup of sorts resulted in promoting Lamme as the inventor of the “solution” rather than the motor (protecting patents), just one more way that Tesla’s name was pushed further from the center of credit.

  §With thanks to Sean Gordon.

  ¶The machine is meant to transport the user from one place to another; instead it transports a copy of whomever uses it. Mr. Angier spends the last part of the story repeatedly shooting or drowning “himself.”

  PART FOUR

  “The invention of the boat was the invention of shipwrecks. The invention of the steam engine and the locomotive was the invention of derailments. The invention of the highway was the invention of three hundred cars colliding in five minutes. The invention of the airplane was the invention of the plane crash. I believe that from now on, if we wish to continue with technology (and I don’t think there will be a Neolithic regression), we must think about both the substance and the accident—substance being both the object and the accident. The negative side of technology and speed was censored. The technicians, by becoming technocrats tended to positivize the object and say, ‘I’m hiding it; I’m not showing it.’”

  —Paul Virilio, Pure War, 1997

  SEVEN

  A Wrench in the Age of Machinery

  Let’s return to 1838, the year of Queen Victoria’s coronation, and that legendary meeting of the British Association in Newcastle. It was the beginning of Armstrong’s rise to glory—the company he would seek after for the rest of his life, and the first sparks of his future inventions. But the meeting, in the eyes of local people, offered little more than a “vanity fair,” a “philosophical traveling circus” of celebrity scientists and their coterie of admiring groupies.1 Journalist Harriet Martineau left the fanfare in disgust, rather than adulation; “What I saw of that meeting convinced me of the justice, in the main, of Carlyle’s sarcasms,” she wrote in her biography. “Sadly spoiled [. . .] by the conceit of third-rate men with their specialties, the tiresome talk of one-idea men.”2 She referred to Thomas Carlyle (a satirist and philosopher); he would go on to attack the British Association in his Fraser’s Magazine, leveling his invective against “all this squabbling” about discoveries they “pretend accurately to determine.” How could they boast, he asks, compared to the “vast surface of those unfathomable depths where man’s mightiest works are but an atom”?3 Despite their criticism, the lavish affair sparkled on in Newcastle, with balls, dinners, and 10,000 yards of red and white fabric wound into decorations, a gleaming pinnacle of decadence in a burgeoning factory town.

  But 1838 also marked the dawn of the Chartist movement, comprised of political reform activists from the working class who wanted suffrage and an end to corruption. The years before and after it saw the advance of textile mills (from which all that calico fabric had come), and a labor force of children under the age of fourteen, which made up to 57% of workers in some cases. A corresponding “coal boom” hit the north, too, as demand for industrial and personal use rose precipitously. Newcastle’s River Tyne offered the chief English port for its exportation, and great floating piles of black rock drifted down on their way to London. Newcastle was also home to the Heaton mine where flooding led to the loss of seventy-five lives, thirty-four of them young boys. They had not drowned, but were instead trapped alive to suffocate slowly on foul air in their living tomb.4 Over five thousand children worked the mines of Cornwall, a figure that continued to rise after 1838 because they offered cheap labor to factory owners, were “obedient, submissive, likely to respond to punishment” and—perhaps above all—“unlikely to form unions.”5 Small nimble fingers and tiny frames could scamper in tunnels and avoid the slicing edge of dangerous machines: children were a commodity. Well into the 1880s, the years of Tesla’s shining success, more than fifty thousand boys and eighty thousand girls would be employed in Britain’s textile and dye factories, what poet William Blake called the “dark Satanic mills.” Thomas Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus didn’t blame the industrialization by itself; he placed fault with the very engineer-scientist, whose “progress” worked to “destroy Wonder.”6 From the lowest beggar to the day laborer, to the clerks and professionals of a rising middle class, real human beings had to live with the changes wrought by genius minds. In this new world, “the living artisan is driven from his workshop, to make room for a speedier, inanimate one.”7 It is wise to remember that for all Armstrong’s generosity to his beloved Northumberland, he was still on the wrong side of workers’ rights. His friendship with Armorer Donkin, member of the coal owners association and embroiled in battles with miners over child labor, long hours, and low pay, and his own refusal to raise wages or reduce hours at his Elswick works mar his reputation. Technology brought with it dread and chaos, proof that the same dark twin that arose with the first scientific revolution had not been idle. A storm was coming, and in the 1860s and ’70s, it would erupt into one of the most significant industrial battles of nineteenth-century Britain.8

  The first power loom appeared in 1785, designed by Edmund Cartwright, but it would be nearly fifty years before the machine became truly automatic—meaning the warp, the dressing frame, the lathe, and the shuttle worked by cams and gears. Imagine the endless clacking of a Volkswagen-sized contraption, the monotonous drone of its engine and noise, powered by steam and fueled by coal. Charles Dickens’s haunting description in Hard Times of a melancholy elephant bobbing its head in chained madness comes close, but ink and paper can scarcely convey the fumes, the rumbling, the noise. The textile industry built major cities like Manchester and, through automatic looms running on steam power, mills launched the industrial revolution. But they did so at terrible cost. Before the power shuttles, guilds of highly
skilled weavers produced the fabric, the colors, the patterns. These same workers were promised that technological advances would ease their work, saving them time and effort. In the beginning, it did just that. But owners soon realized they could hire cheap, unskilled labor to run the machines (including children) instead. Having paid for the expense of a long apprenticeship, weavers found themselves suddenly without work, and it was this, rather than a particular hatred of machines, that drove the “Luddites” to break looms. Machines might not be the whole problem, but they had made it possible—first for mill owners to replace skilled labor with unskilled, and finally, to replace the worker altogether. We can imagine it, because we have seen it in our own age; a factory closes on three thousand auto workers; it opens again to employ three hundred, the rest being handled by efficient machines. Engineering changes everything.