Something like a yellow-brown smoke was issuing from a hole in the bank a few yards away, and resolved itself into a cloud of angry Vespula vulgaris. It bore down on the horrified Darwin –
‘Over here, waspies!’
Darwin stared.
This mission had created a difficult decision for Rincewind, when he’d been presented with the task of preventing Charles Darwin being stung to death by wasps. Right from the start it was obvious that Darwin would see him, and if Rincewind was invisible the wasps wouldn’t see him. He’d therefore undertaken the mission carrying two buckets of warm jam and wearing a pink tutu, an acid-green wig and a red nose, reasoning that (a) Darwin wouldn’t believe that he had seen him and in any case (b) wouldn’t dare tell anyone …
Darwin watched the apparition skip away over the fields. It was quite astonishing. He’d never seen wasps swarm in such a manner.
A piece of paper fluttered to the ground. The curious clown must have dropped it.
Darwin picked it up and read, aloud, ‘“Return me, Hex”. What does—?’
The afternoon dozed on. The grassy bank went back to its buzzing, humming, flowering busyness.
On the forlorn shore, a man appeared, hid two buckets behind a rock, and removed his false nose.
Rincewind scanned the landscape while extracting his hat from inside his shirt.
This was one of the most famous islands in the history of technomancy? It looked, frankly, rather dull.
He’d been expecting forests and streams and a riot of creatures. You couldn’t move for vibrant, striving life on Mono Island, home of the God of Evolution. Everything wanted to leave. But this place had a skinflint look. You’d need to be tough to survive here. You’d have to fit in.
He couldn’t see any giant tortoises, but there were a couple of large, empty shells.
Rincewind picked up a length of driftwood, baked by the sun into something like stone, and hurried up a narrow path.
Hex was good. The man Rincewind was after was striding ahead of him along the track.
‘Mr Lawson, sir!’
The man turned.
‘Yes? Are you from the Beagle?’
‘Yessir. Heave ho, sir,’ said Rincewind. Lawson stared at him.
‘Why do you wear that hat with “Wizzard” written on it?’
Rincewind thought fast. Thank goodness Roundworld had some strange customs.
‘Crossing the Line ceremony, sir,’ he said. ‘Took a fancy to it!’
‘Oh, King Neptune and so forth,’ said Lawson, backing away a little. ‘Jolly good. How can I help you?’
‘Just wanted to shake you by the hand and say how glad we all are that you’re doing such a wonderful job out here, sir,’ said Rincewind, pumping the man’s unresisting arm vigorously.
‘We … that’s is very kind of you, Mr – what was that noise?’
‘Sorry? Shiver my timber, by the way.’
‘That … whistling noise …’ said Lawson, uncertainly.
‘Probably one of the tortoises?’ said Rincewind, helpfully.
‘They hiss or – wasn’t that a thump?’ said Lawson. Behind him, a small cloud of dust rose above the bushes.
‘Didn’t hear one, yo ho,’ said Rincewind, still shaking the hand. ‘Well, don’t let me keep you, sir.’
Lawson gave him the look of a man who feels has inadvertently fallen into dribbling company. The hat was clearly preying on his mind.
‘Thank you, my man,’ he said, pulling his hand away. ‘Indeed, I must go.’
He headed away at some speed, which increased when he noticed Rincewind following him, and completely failed to notice what was, after all, just another small, rubble-filled hole among many. Rincewind spotted it, though, and after some effort pulled out a small, warm lump.
Something hissed, behind him.
Rincewind had ascertained that the only way a giant tortoise could go as fast as him was by falling over a cliff, and also that they were highly unlikely to savage a man to death. Still, he was ready.
He turned, stick upraised.
Something, a greyish something, something just transparent enough to show the landscape behind it in a dreary light, was hovering a few feet away. It looked like a monk’s robe for a very small monk, and minus the monk. The empty hood was more worrying than almost anything that could have filled it. There were no eyes, there was no face, but there was nevertheless a stare, as malignant as razor-blade pants.
Other robe-shadows appeared around the shape and began drifting towards it. When they reached it they vanished, and the central shape became darker and, somehow, more present.
Rincewind didn’t turn and run. There was no point in trying to run from Auditors; they were certainly faster than anything with legs. But that wasn’t the reason. If it was time to run, he’d considered, no other calculations applied. He wouldn’t even worry that his escape route was blocked by solid lava; most things could be overcome if you ran at them hard enough. There was, however, another reason. It had pink toes.
‘Why meddle?’ said the Auditor. The voice sounded windy and uncertain, as if the speaker was having to assemble the words by hand. ‘Entropy will always triumph.’
‘Is it true that you die if you have an emotion?’ said Rincewind. The Auditor was quite dark now, which meant that it has assembled enough mass to move something quite heavy, like a human head.
‘We do not have emotion,’ said the Auditor. ‘It is a human aberration. In you we detect the physical manifestation recognisable to us as fear.’
‘You can’t just kill people, you know,’ said Rincewind. ‘That’s against the rules.’
‘We believe there may be no rules here,’ said the Auditor, moving forward.
‘Wait, wait, wait!’ said Rincewind, trying to back away into solid rock. ‘You’re saying you don’t know what fear is, right?’
‘We have no requirement to do so,’ said the Auditor. ‘Prepare to cease coherent function.’
‘Turn around,’ said Rincewind.
And a weakness of the Auditors is that they find a direct command hard to disobey, at least for a second or two. It turned, or, rather, flowed through itself to face the other way.
The lid of the Luggage closed with a ‘clop’ like the sound of a trout taking an unwary mayfly.
I wonder if it found out what fear really is, Rincewind thought.
But more grey shapes were distilling out of the air.
Now it was time to run.
EIGHTEEN
STEAM ENGINE TIME
THERE WAS DARWIN, SITTING ON a bank, watching the bees, the wasps, the flowers … In the last paragraph of The Origin we find a beautiful and important passage that hints at afternoons of that kind:
It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent on each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us.
Go ahead Paley, make my day.
All that wizardly effort to get him to write The Origin, not The Ology. It mattered to Darwin, of course, and it matters to those who chart the course of history. But, just as we can ask whether Lincoln’s assassination really had much effect on subsequent events, so we can ask the same about Darwin’s life’s work. Would it really have mattered if the wizards had failed?
Metaphorical wizards, you appreciate. Yes, those happy coincidences that got Charles on board the Beagle and kept him there do look a tad suspicious, but wizards?
Let’s ask the question in a more respectable way. How radical was Darwin’s theory of natural selection, really? Did he have insights that no one before him had considered? Or did he just happen to be the person who caught the public eye, with an idea that had been floating around for some time? How much credit should he be given?
The same can
be – and has been – asked of many ‘revolutionary’ scientific concepts. Robert Hooke got the idea of inverse square-law gravity before Newton did. Minkowski, Poincaré, and others worked out much of special relativity before Einstein did. Fractals were around, in some form, for at least a century before Benoît Mandelbrot energetically promoted them and they developed into a major branch of applied mathematics. The earliest sniff of chaos theory can be found in Poincaré’s prize-winning memoir on the stability of the solar system in 1890, probably 75 years before the subject was perceived as ‘taking off’.
How do scientific revolutions get started, and what decides who gets the credit? Is it talent? A flair for publicity? A lottery?
Part of the answer to these questions can be found in Robert Thurston’s 1878 study of another important Victorian innovation, which Ponder Stibbons unerringly homed in on in Chapter 3. The book is A History of the Growth of the Steam Engine. The second paragraph says:
History illustrates the very important truth: inventions are never, as great discoveries are seldom, the work of any one mind. Every great invention is really either an aggregation of minor inventions, or the final step in a progression. It is not a creation, but a growth as truly so as is that of the trees in the forest. The same invention is frequently brought out in several countries, and by several individuals, simultaneously.
Thurston’s topic reminds us of a common metaphor for this kind of apparently simultaneous invention: steam engine time. When it’s steam engine time, suddenly everyone is making steam engines. When it’s evolution time, everyone is inventing a theory of evolution. When it’s VCR time, everyone is making video cassette recorders. When it’s Dotcom time, everyone is setting up Internet trading systems. And when it’s Dotcom-going-bust time, all the Dotcoms are going bust.
There are times when human affairs really do seem to run on pre-constructed tracks. Some development becomes inevitable, and suddenly it’s everywhere. Yet, just before that propitious moment, it wasn’t inevitable at all, otherwise it would have happened already. ‘Steam engine time’ is a convenient metaphor for this curious process. The invention of the steam engine wasn’t the first example, and it certainly wasn’t the last, but it is one of the best known, and it’s quite well documented.
Thurston distinguishes invention from discovery. He says that inventions are never the creation of a single individual, whereas great discoveries seldom are. However, the distinction isn’t always clear-cut. Did ancient humans discover fire as a phenomenon of nature, or did they invent fire as a technology to keep predators away, light the cave, and cook food? The natural phenomenon surely came first, in the form of brush- or forest fires triggered by lightning, or possibly a droplet of water accidentally acting as a lens to concentrate the Sun’s rays on to a piece of dry grass.1
However, that kind of ‘discovery’ doesn’t go anywhere until someone finds a use for it. It was the idea of controlling fire that made the difference, and that seems more of an invention than a discovery. Except … you find out how to control fire by discovering that fires don’t spread (so easily) across bare soil, that they can be spread very easily indeed by picking up a burning stick and dropping it into dry brushwood, or taking it home to the cave …
The inventive step, if there is such a thing, consists of putting together several independent discoveries so that what emerges has genuine novelty.
So inventions are often preceded by a series of discoveries. Similarly, discoveries are often preceded by inventions. The discovery of sunspots rested on the invention of the telescope, the discovery of amoebas and Parameciums in pond water rested on the invention of the microscope. In short, invention and discovery are intimately entwined, and it’s probably pointless to try to separate them. Moreover, the significant instances of both are much easier to spot in retrospect than they were at the time they first happened. Hindsight is a wondrous thing, but it does have the virtue of providing an explicit context for working out what did, or did not, matter. Hindsight lets us organise the remarkably messy process of invention/discovery, and tell convincing stories about it.
The problem is, most of those stories aren’t true.
As children, many of us learned how the steam engine was invented. The young James Watt, aged about six, was watching a kettle boil, and he noticed that the pressure of the steam could lift the lid. In a classic ‘eureka’ moment, it dawned on him that a really big kettle could lift really heavy bits of metal, and the steam engine was born.
The original teller of this story was the French mathematician François Arago, author of one of the first biographies of Watt. For all we know, the story may be true, though it is more likely a ‘lie-to-children’, or educational aid,2 like Newton’s apple. Even if the young Watt was indeed suddenly inspired by a boiling kettle, he was by no means the first person to make the connection between steam and motive power. He wasn’t even the first person to build a working steam engine. His claim to fame rests on something more complex, yet more significant. In Watt’s hands, the steam engine became an effective and reliable tool. He didn’t ‘perfect’ it – many smaller improvements were made after Watt – but he brought it into pretty much its final form.
Watt wrote in 1774: ‘The fire engine [= steam engine] that I have invented is now going, and answers much better than any other that has yet been made.’ In conjunction with his business partner Matthew Boulton, Watt made himself the household name of the steam engine. And it has done his reputation no harm that, in the words of Thurston: ‘Of the personal history of the earlier inventors and improvers of the steam-engine, very little is ascertained; but that of Watt has become well known.’
Was Darwin just another Watt? Did he get credit for evolution because he brought it into a polished, effective form? Is he famous because we happen to know so much about his personal history? Darwin was an obsessive record-keeper, he hardly threw away a single scrap of paper. Biographers were able to document his life in exceptional detail. It certainly did his reputation no harm that such a wealth of historical material was available.
In order to make comparisons, let’s review the history of the steam engine, avoiding lies-to-children as much as we can. Then we’ll look at Darwin’s intellectual predecessors, and see whether a common pattern emerges. How does steam engine time work? What factors lead to a cultural explosion, as an apparently radical idea ‘takes off’ and the world changes for ever? Does the idea change the world, or does a changing world generate the idea?
Watt completed his first significant steam engine in 1768, and patented it in 1769. It was preceded by various prototypes. But the first recorded reference to steam as a source of motive power occurs in the civilisation of ancient Egypt, during the Late Kingdom when that country was under Roman rule. Around 150 BC (the date is very approximate) Hero of Alexandria wrote a manuscript Spiritalia seu Pneumatica. Only partial copies have survived to the present day, but from them we learn that the manuscript referred to dozens of steam-driven machines. We even know that several of them predated Hero, because he tells us so; some were the previous work of the inventor Cestesibus, celebrated for the great number and variety of his ingenious pneumatic machines. So we can see the beginnings of steam engine time long ago, but initial progress was so quiet and slow that steam engine time itself was still far in the future.
One of Hero’s devices was a hollow airtight altar, with the figure of a god or goddess on top, and a tube running through the figure. Unknown to the punters, the altar contains water. When a worshipper lights a fire on top of the altar, the water heats up and produces steam. The pressure of the steam drives some of the remaining liquid water up the pipe, and the god offers a libation. (As miracles go this one is quite effective, and distinctly more convincing than a statue of a cow that oozes milk or one of a saint that weeps.) Similar devices were commonplace from the 1960s to make tea at the bedside and pour it out automatically. They still exist today, but are harder to find.
Another of Hero’s machines u
sed the same principle to open a temple door when someone lit a fire on an altar. The device is quite complicated, and we describe it to show that these ancient machines went far beyond being mere toys. The altar and door are above ground, the machinery is concealed beneath. The altar is hollow, filled with air. A pipe runs vertically down from the altar into a metal sphere full of water, and a second inverted U-shaped pipe acts like a siphon, with one end inside the sphere and the other inside a bucket. The bucket hangs over a pulley, and ropes from the bucket wind round two vertical cylinders, in line with the hinges of the door and attached to the door’s edge. They then run over a second pulley and terminate in a heavy weight which acts as a counterbalance. When a priest lights the fire, the air inside the altar expands, and the pressure drives water out of the sphere, through the siphon, and into the bucket. As the bucket descends under the weight of water, the ropes cause the cylinders to turn, opening the doors.
Then there’s a fountain that operates when the sun’s rays fall on it, and a steam boiler that makes a mechanical blackbird sing or blows a horn. Yet another device, often referred to as the world’s first steam engine, boils water in a cauldron and uses the steam to turn a metal globe about a horizontal axis. The steam emerges from a series of bent pipes around the sphere’s ‘equator’, at right angles to the axis.
In design, these machines weren’t toys, but as far as their applications went, they might as well have been. Only the door-opener comes close to doing anything we would consider practical, although the priests probably found the ability to produce miracles on demand to be quite profitable, and that’s practical enough for most businessmen today.
Looking back from the twenty-first century, it seems astonishing that it took steam engine time so long to gain proper momentum, with all these examples of steam power on public display all over the ancient world. Especially since there was plenty of demand for mechanical power, for the same reasons that finally gave birth to steam engine technology in the eighteenth century – pumping water, lifting heavy weights, mining, and transport. So we learn that it takes more than the mere ability to make steam engines, even in conjunction with a clear need for something of that kind, to kick-start steam engine time.
Science of Discworld III Page 24