Clockwork Futures

by Brandy Schillace

  Dufrenoy seems unlikely to be a labor martyr; he is disposed to hope against odds, making friends with the pianist Quinsonnas, falling in love with young Lucy, and feeling that even the Ledger might be bearable. But Verne did not intend his novel to be one of acceptance in the face of mechanical and political tyranny, and Dufrenoy’s first brush—soft as it may have been—against the devastation of machinery is only a taste of what awaits. The anarchists and Verne had this in common: mankind and machinery could not abide together peaceably. But for an increasing number of people, the anarchists were the real threat to peace. British psychologist Henry Maudsley attacked the French Revolution as the worst of mankind, and that too many freedoms actually caused more damage than careful strictures. (It was a common enough sentiment in Victorian Britain, a backlash of reserve and politesse in the wake of a rather bawdy and boisterous eighteenth century.) But there were tensions erupting in “alarmist” fiction, too, novels like Charles Fairfield’s The Socialist Revolution, which blames immigrants and foreigners for inciting terror and degrading society. Long before the communist revolution, the laborer had taken on a suspicious aspect. The public, and the factory owners, had seen the violence of strikes and their repercussions. Labor reformers claimed workers were victims, exploited by capitalism and by the rich, but Verne’s novel captures the insurmountable gap of sympathy—not only among the wealthy Boutardins, but even among Dufrenoy’s closest friends.

  Cast on the street for accidentally defacing the Ledger, and cast from the protection of his mechanical uncle, Dufrenoy believes he has tasted freedom. He tells his friends that his fondest desires are “life in the open air,” “the love of a woman,” “detachment from all ambition,” and “the creation of a new form of beauty.”62 It’s of a kind with the pastoral suggestions of revolutionaries, who recommend the laborer to the field, breaking from the politics of industry and gain. “Nothing happens by itself in this world,” Quinsonnas explains, “as in mechanics, you must consider the milieu [. . .] a good engineer has to take everything into account.”63 Having invented a transforming piano/table/bed/commode, Quinsonnas’s marriage of music to practicalities offers a middle road that Dufrenoy refuses. He will not sing for his bread, he tells them. But in aspiring to be “an artist in an age where art is dead,” he falls victim to poverty and the shamefaced search for bare necessities. Dufrenoy even seeks manual labor, only to find (like the Luddites before him) that “everywhere machines were advantageously replacing human hands; there were no further resources.”64 Verne imagines the future well beyond the labor workers, the socialists and the strikes—he sees the triumph of Tesla’s mechanic age as one entirely devoid of humanity. We shudder at the gutted sense of loss and shame: the young poet’s “shirts yellowed and gradually fell to pieces, like leaves from the trees at the beginning of winter, and there was no spring to make them grow again. He grew ashamed of himself [. . .] he reeked of poverty [. . .] he would have inspired pity, if pity had not been banished from the age.”65 His story ends in the desperation of famine, as agriculture fails following a difficult winter. The penultimate chapter finds Dufrenoy clutching a single flower for his fiancée, and searching in vain for friends who have themselves been cast out. No one recognizes him, but he is followed anyway; he tries to run from the shadow of dread tech, feeling that “the demon of electricity” was pursuing him with sickening glare. He glimpses an electric concert, with electric pianos; he stumbles upon an electrocution of juvenile offenders by electric battery. It’s a far cry from the wonder that Tesla expressed at Paris’s gloriously lit boulevards; it’s far more like the sickening descriptions of AC electrocution that rattled even Thomas Edison’s constitution. And in the striking account of a frozen and starving France, Verne does his first real future-telling, unaware.

  Three years after the Paris Exposition sought to put France on the map as a center for technology, Napoleon III’s empire crumbled to dust. By 1870, rumblings of war with Prussia turned into outright support, with crowds in Paris crying, “To Berlin! To Berlin!”66 Six weeks into the conflict, and the emperor faced his last stand, was captured, and exiled from France. In Paris, the laborers and revolutionaries cheered, and feminist journalist Juliette Adam proclaims “we shook off the empire as though it had been a nightmare!”67 For a moment, the steampunk femme declaring victory for freedom and France tantalizes with what the future might hold; frozen there, we have the best example of those symbolic warriors who turn up trumpeting in fiction. But the heroine (and even the hero) in Verne’s narrative is silenced by snow, freezing, emptiness. And following the apparent return of the Republic, the real Paris faces a cruel siege as well. Butterworth’s history describes the harsh winter, closed off from resources. The “lucky” ones (including Victor Hugo, who had returned) ate the flesh of zoo animals and other exotics still within the city limits. Meanwhile, the populace grew “half starved and frozen, grief-stricken for infants who had died on a diet of cloudy water masquerading as milk.”68 Two days after Christmas, the German Krupp cannon (cousin to those displayed, ironically, at the Paris Exposition) rained shells on Paris in the worst of its bombardments. Those “machines of war” would lead to Paris’s surrender, while revolutionaries desperate to get news out of France climbed aboard the unstable and stinking exhibition balloons to take their chances against the skyline and the pepper of gunshot. But this was not apocalypse. By the 1880s, Paris would welcome the likes of Tesla and Edison; by 1900 the Paris World’s Fair (Exposition Universelle) would crown France’s achievements with a medal featuring electricity towers, dynamos, photography, and the aeronautical zeppelin [Fig. 15]. Verne would live to see it too. And by then, he had become technology’s greatest celebrant. Out of darkness, (artificial) light. For better, and for worse.

  Opposing Forces

  As George Morison so aptly summarized, “It is hard to realize how rapidly the appearance of the whole earth may change.” The old and the new cannot exist together. Or rather, the old must feed the new, must serve as the vital fluid of the very thing that replaces it. There are consequences. We ignore them at our peril.

  In 1878, headlines proclaimed EDISON’S NEWEST MARVEL as cheap electricity. The light had come, but the coal must be gotten somewhere—and brought to the surface with as little expense as possible. “The essence of slavery,” preached Henry George, “consists in taking from a man all the fruits of his labor except bare living, and of how many thousands [of men called] free is this the lot?”69

  In 1881, Paris hosted the International Exposition of Electricity, featuring the dynamo engine. Meanwhile, laborers had been pushed to their limits (or pushed out of work) by those same machines. A few years later, socialist agitators Johann Most and Morris would hit the streets preaching the justice of dynamite and terrorist acts as anarchists paraded on millionaire’s row. That same winter, the Chicago Tribune recommended that wealthy farmers poison leftover crops so the hungry scavengers couldn’t steal them.70 “A society corrupt to the core,” Morris wrote, “engaged in suppressing freedom with just the same reckless brutality and blind ignorance as the Tsar [of Russia].”71

  In 1884, Armstrong hosted a prince in his Cragside wonderland. Three years later, the same year Tesla sold his patents to Westinghouse, the Royal Mining, Engineering and Industrial Exhibition would celebrate Victoria’s Golden Jubilee on same river that separated the common laborer from the scientific elite in 1838. A brilliant show, the exhibition occurred on the very heels of an April demonstration of nine thousand Northumberland miners for better wages, conditions, and rights—and just months before labor revolutionaries would be hanged in Chicago.

  There are, we must concede, two histories—two stories, side by side and marching into the late Victorian future. One is shining wheels and bright brass gears. The other is coal-grimed faces, oily waters, and satanic mills. And at once, the steampunk aesthetic comes into steel-sharpened focus: this is the True Victorian Engine. This is the electric carnival with its dark underbelly, the bright tents hiding
hellish weapons of war. This is Grandfather Clock’s illusion of order, fueled in secret by the burning heart of Mama Engine. The Age of Machinery had come and there was no going back.

  But there was still plenty of room for resistance.

  *Notably, the Abolition Act didn’t actually apply to territories in possession of the East India Company (an economic and political loophole). It would continue in Sri Lanka and Saint Helena until 1843, persisted illegally into the 1850s, and by some accounts continued in various forms in Australia well into the twentieth century.

  †Also called “rickets,” a condition caused by lack of vitamin D, phosphorus, or calcium.

  EIGHT

  Of Acid and Accident

  In the 1960s television series The Wild Wild West, steampunk hit the American frontier. A steam engine serves as home base to industrious Secret Service agents Jim West (Robert Conrad) and Artemus Gordon (Ross Martin), who fought criminals with high-tech gadgetry circa 1880. The 1999 movie adaptation went further still, pitting Will Smith and Kevin Kline against Western-Victorian villainy, complete with nitroglycerine-powered bicycles, flying machines, and a giant clockwork spider—but it’s the television series that I remember best. And my favorite episode has far more to offer than just gizmos and gadgets.

  “Night of the Bubbling Death” opens with swagger and suavity; two fine-looking gentlemen in their best Western-Victorian duds gallop into town on the Mexican border. The US Constitution has been stolen, and Agent West leads an expert archivist to examine the villain’s supposed booty. A revolutionary angling for independence from both Mexico and the United States, Victor Freemantle’s hideout resembles a curious fortress—with a vat of boiling acid in place of a welcome mat. Declare the Panhandle Strip independent of its neighbors, and pay the ransom of one million dollars! West and Gordon aren’t to be outdone; why return to Washington, DC, to negotiate when they can attempt a daring rescue on their own? The plot may be far-fetched, but it takes only a bit of imagination to recoil in horror as West dangles above the festering pool (from a wire cable conveniently tucked into his sleeve toolkit). The acid, a lurid orange-red, bursts in reforming bubbles. It may not have a mind of its own, but by comparison, the actual villain seems patently dull. Not very surprising, then, when Freemantle meets his doom in the treacherous ooze. Our heroes have more luck; they have more technology too. Sleeve guns, hidden explosives, smoke pellets—there are times when they seem as much Batman and Robin as Western do-gooders. Of course, Batman has his steampunk moments, as well. DC Comics’ Gotham by Gaslight pits the Caped Crusader against Jack the Ripper in a Victorian Gotham City, reminding us that steampunk isn’t confined to the British Isles. (Jules Verne’s Voyages certainly weren’t.) But there are other points of comparison. It wouldn’t be Batman without an appropriate villain with a vat, and movie characters from James Bond to Hugh Jackman’s reboot of Van Helsing feature grappling minions over bubbling cauldrons. Acid even makes its way into plenty of modern steampunk novels, too, such as Scott Westerfeld’s Leviathan, and its “strafing hawks,” birds of prey equipped with acid-filled spider silk to slice up airplanes. There comes a point when the discerning viewer has to wonder if every abandoned warehouse came automatically equipped with unguarded, skin-melting Jacuzzis. And the discerning viewer would be right (in a way). The hijinks of “Night of the Bubbling Death” might be pure fantasy, but that viscous vitriol over which West’s feet precariously dangle is more than artistic license, and it comes down to something we might not think of as technologically significant today: acid.

  When we talk about electricity, we have sparks in mind. But acid, as a technology, seeps into several different innovations at once, each with its own specialty. In 1865, Joseph Lister introduced the steam-propelled carbolic acid sprayer for use in surgery. Five years later, Lord Armstrong began building Cragside, the “house of the future” sustaining electric light with fifty-six acid-filled, power-generating tanks. But as with Freemantle’s devilish designs, acid had a far darker side. It could be weaponized. “Vitriol throwing” doesn’t just appear in Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Illustrious Client,” it eats away faces, appears at inquest, and zings through newspaper headlines—at the height of labor revolts, enraged and impoverished employees would turn to its viscous horror to attack job bosses and masters. Carbolic acid saved lives by killing germs; sulfuric acid (vitriol) destroyed lives by mangling faces. Acid, in all its forms, haunts our imagination whether it’s burning through steel or powering the house of the future; on some level we know how effectively that same liquid would eat through flesh. Jim West escapes an acid bath; Victor Freemantle does not, but we don’t need to see beneath the roiling liquid to know that brined bones are all that remain. Killer and cure, medical wonder and horrifying weapon: the rise of three acid technologies (and the tragedies, calamities, and accidents that follow) do more than inspire steampunk bravado—they prove that, though we may have two stories, they pivot on the same gears, rely on the same science. Every new technology invents its own perilous accident.1

  Carbolic Acid: The Technology of Cure

  “Frequently the acid was so poorly mixed that large globules floated in the solutions in which we bathed our hands or immersed our instruments. The result was minor burns of the fingers and distinct numbing of the sense of touch.”

  —Frank Emory Bunts, Marine Hospital, 1883

  A technology need not have nuts and bolts and moving parts. Newton’s calculus paved the way for the machines of the future, without a single brass dial or copper wire. And a peculiar property of phenol (C6H5OH) or carbolic acid, would lead to the single greatest advance in medicine before the twentieth century. And we can be glad of it, because surgery in the era of Armstrong, Edison, and Tesla was a blunt, perilous, and bloody affair.

  Dr. Robert Liston may not have been the fastest gun in the west, but he was the “fastest knife in the West End.”2 In the 1840s, the best option for a gangrenous patient was the swift removal of the offending limb—and Liston had the record. Known for beginning a surgery by shouting “time me, gentlemen!” the good doctor enjoyed not only success but fame. His most (in)famous case, detailed by historian Richard Gordon in Great Medical Disasters, aptly demonstrates the principal problem of speed-racing a bone saw. The patient had been strapped down (a necessity, since writhing and screaming made surgery rather difficult) and Liston’s assistant held on to the infected leg. The knife flashed, tendons popped, and the saw severed the limb in under 2.5 minutes; unfortunately, Liston had also severed the fingers of his assistant and slashed the coat of a spectator.3 All three men died, two of infection, and the last from “fright.” Richard Gordon suggests a heart attack—though we can’t lay that strictly at Liston’s feet. Still, according to Gordon, it remains the only operation in history to have a 300% mortality rate.4 With odds like that, Liston sounds more like a practiced villain than a practicing surgeon, but his was an illustrious career. The accepted wisdom of the day ensured it: busted legs led to infections, infections led to death, and the quicker you could hack off the affected limbs the better your chances.

  For me, the most shocking thing about Liston’s checkered past isn’t the mortality rates. Those were high to begin with—after all, the development of germ theory wouldn’t get off the ground until experiments by Louis Pasteur and Claude Bernard in the 1860s, some thirty or so years after Liston’s famously deadly surgery. The idea that microorganisms lived on our bodies and could make us ill sounded more like demonic imaginings than hard science—like vril, or the pseudo cures of electric quacks. Liston himself published a case of “spontaneous mortification” in 1835, suggesting that the sudden shriveling and rotting away of an elderly woman’s arm simply happened on its own: “You are well aware,” he writes in the Lancet, “that at any period of life, and in every texture . . . death may take place to any extent.”5 That is, death just “happened,” sometimes piecemeal, and most doctors assumed a stoic acceptance of mortality. No, the truly surprising thing about Liston’s
surgical career isn’t that he made haste to remove limbs (or even that this occasionally went quite badly). It’s that his method of speedy removal persisted even after the introduction of anesthesia to knock the patient out when, by all accounts, a surgeon could take his time. The reasons followed tradition and grim reality. Death by infection continued well after the introduction of germ theory, and doctors understood (correctly) that the longer they lingered in the body with their tools, the worse things were likely to go. Simply put: knowing that microorganisms existed, even knowing that they made people ill, didn’t do the surgeon much good in practice. And that assumed the surgeon accepted the reality of germ theory in the first place.

  People can prove surprisingly resistant to new ideas. Soap doesn’t seem like a huge leap in technology, but though it was available in the operating room, many doctors simply weren’t interested in scrubbing up. The ill-fated Ignaz Semmelweis, a Hungarian physician (1818–1865), discovered that pregnant women who delivered inside the hospital died of puerperal fever (or blood poisoning) far more often than those who gave birth in the filthy street. The mystery persisted until a doctor in the same institution died of fever, too, after cutting himself while dissecting a corpse. Semmelweis made the connection. As was the case in many hospitals, space shortages meant cadavers were located shockingly near the women and babies, and doctors frequently traded bone saws for forceps without pausing to wash. Something in the dead body had infected and killed the doctor; that same thing, he reasoned, must be killing women. While Semmelweis never gave these invisible killers a name, he instituted the shockingly unpopular policy of handwashing. It doesn’t seem like much to ask, but soaps of the time were drying and harsh, made with sodium chloride, soda ash, or other agents. Doctors hated it, and Semmelweis’s dictatorial insistence cost him two positions. Unemployed, he took to the streets admonishing women never to get pregnant. Seemingly unhinged, his behavior landed him in an asylum, where, in grim irony, he died of gangrenous blood poisoning (puerperal fever).