on Toshareproject.it - curated by Bruce Sterling
*In which Charles Babbage makes a half-hearted effort to build some popular-entertainment kinetic-art computational contraptions.
http://www.imaginaryfutures.net/2007/04/16/babbages-dancer-by-simon-schaffer/
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Calculator or Dancer?
‘They needed a calculator, but a dancer got the job’ (The Marriage of Figaro, 1784)
In the steam-punk metropolis of Gibson and Sterling’s Difference Engine, the sickly Keats runs a cinema, Disraeli is a gossip journalist unwillingly converted to using a keyboard, and fashionable geologists visit the Burlington Arcade to buy pricey mechanical trinkets, ‘outstanding pieces of British precision craftsmanship’. Above them looms Lord Babbage, his original calculating engines already outdated, his scheme for life peerages on merit become part of everyday politics. Babbage’s dreams doubtless deserve this treatment from the apostles of cyberfiction – he touted his schemes in pamphlets and exhibitions all over early nineteenth century London. It was a city apparently obsessed by displays of cunning engines, enthusiastic in its desire to be knowingly deceived by the outward appearance of machine intelligence, and Babbage heroically exploited the obsession in his lifelong campaign for the rationalisation of the world.
The enterprise of the calculating engines was certainly dependent on the city’s workshops, stocked with lathes, clamps and ingenious apprentices, and on government offices, stocked with ledgers, blue books and officious clerks – a heady mixture of Bleeding Heart Yard and the Circumlocution Office. But, as Gibson and Sterling see so acutely, it was also tangled up with the culture of the West End, of brightly lit shops and showrooms, of front-of-house hucksters and backroom impresarios. Put the Difference Engine in its proper place, perched uneasily between Babbage’s drawing room in wealthy Marylebone, the Treasury chambers in Whitehall, and the machine shops over the river in Lambeth, but at least as familiar in the arcades round Piccadilly and the squares of Mayfair, where automata and clockwork, new electromagnetic machines and exotic beasts were all put on show.
It was in the plush of the arcades that Babbage, barely eight years old, first saw an automaton. Some time around 1800 his mother took him to visit the Mechanical Museum run by the master designer John Merlin in Prince’s Street, just between Hanover Square and Oxford Street. A Liègeois in his mid-sixties, working in London for four decades, Merlin was one of the best-known metropolitan mechanics, deviser of new harpsichords and clocks, entrepreneur of mathematical instruments and wondrous machines. His reputation even rivalled that of Vaucanson, the pre-eminent eighteenth century designer of courtly automata. As he rose through fashionable society, Merlin hung out with the musical Burney family, figured largely as an amusing and eccentric table-companion, and ‘a very ingenious mechanic’, in Fanny Burney’s voluminous diaries, sat for Gainsborough, and used his mechanical skills to devise increasingly remarkable costumes for the innumerable masquerades then charming London’s pleasure-seekers. To help publicise his inventions, Merlin appeared at the Pantheon or at Ranelagh dressed as the Goddess Fortune, equipped with a specially designed wheel or his own newfangled roller-skates, as a barmaid with her own drink-stall, or even as an electrotherapeutic physician, shocking the dancers as he moved among them.
Merlin ingeniously prowled the borderlands of showmanship and engineering. He won prestigious finance from the backers of Boulton and Watt’s new steam engines. He opened his Mechanical Museum in Hanover Square in the 1780s. For a couple of shillings visitors could see a model Turk chewing artificial stones, they might play with a gambling machine, see perpetual motion clocks and mobile bird cages, listen to music boxes and try the virtues of Merlin’s chair for sufferers from gout. After unsuccessfully launching a plan for a ‘Necromancic Cave’, featuring infernal mobiles and a fully mechanized concert in the Cave of Apollo, he began opening in the evenings, charged his visitors a shilling a time for tea and coffee, and tried to pull in ‘young amateurs of mechanism’.
Babbage was one of them. Merlin took the young Devonshire schoolboy upstairs to his backstage workshop to show some more exotic delights. ‘There were two uncovered female figures of silver, about twelve inches high’. The first automaton was relatively banal, though ‘singularly graceful’, one of Merlin’s well-known stock of figures ‘in brass and clockwork, so as to perform almost every motion and inclination of the human body, viz. the head, the breasts, the neck, the arms, the fingers, the legs &co. even to the motion of the eyelids, and the lifting up of the hands and fingers to the face’. Babbage remembered that ‘she used an eye-glass occasionally and bowed frequently as if recognizing her acquaintances’. Good manners, it seemed, could easily be mechanized. But it was the other automaton which stayed in Babbage’s mind, ‘an admirable danseuse, with a bird on the forefinger of her right hand, which wagged its tail, flapped its wings and opened its beak’. Babbage was completely seduced. ‘The lady attitudinized in a most fascinating manner. Her eyes were full of imagination, and irresistible’. ‘At Merlin’s you meet with delight’, ran a contemporary ballad, and this intriguing mixture of private delight and public ingenuity remained a powerful theme of the world of automata and thinking machines in which Babbage later plied his own trade.
Merlin died in 1803, and much of his Hanover Square stock was sold to Thomas Weeks, a rival ‘performer and machinist’ who had just opened his own museum on the corner of Tichborne and Great Windmill Streets near the Haymarket. The danseuse went too. The show cost half-a-crown, in a room over one hundred feet long, lined in blue satin, with ‘a variety of figures inert, active, separate, combined, emblematic and allegoric, on the principles of mechanism, being the most exact imitation of nature’. Like Merlin, Weeks also tried to attract invalids, emphasising his inventions of weighing-machines and bedsteads for the halt and the lame. There were musical clocks and self-opening umbrellas, and, especially, ‘a tarantula spider made of steel, that comes independently out of a box, and runs backwards and forwards on the table, stretches out and draws in its paws, as if at will. This singular automaton that has no other power of action than the mechanism contained in its body, must fix the attention of the curious’.
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The obscure objects of desire embodied in the automata were never self-evidently distinct from any of Babbage’s projects. For example, like the automata of Cox, Merlin and Weeks, the Difference Engine apparently was also an object of fascination to the Chinese, and one visitor from China asked Babbage whether it could be reduced to pocket-size. Babbage replied that ‘he might safely assure his friends in the celestial empire that it was in every sense of the word an out-of-pocket machine’. Indeed, in the later 1840s, when all his engine schemes had run into the sand, he cast about for new ways of raising money to revive them, including writing novels, but was dissuaded because he was told he’d surely lose money on fiction. One such entirely abortive scheme involved designing an automaton ‘to play a game of purely intellectual skill successfully’. This was at least partly an attempt to assert the very possibility of building an automatic games-player. Babbage knew, at least at second-hand, of just how seductive gambling could be – his close friend Ada Lovelace, Gibson and Sterling’s dark lady of the Epsom motor-races, lost more than £3000 on the horses during the later 1840s. ‘Making a book seems to me to be living on the brink of a precipice’, she was told by her raffish gambling associate Richard Ford in early 1851.
The Games Machine
Babbage’s attention turned to the prospects of a games machine. In a brief memorandum, he demonstrated that if an automaton made the right first move in a game of pure skill with a finite number of possible moves at each stage, the machine could always win. Such a device, he reckoned, must possess just those faculties of memory and foresight which he always claimed were the distinctive features of his Analytical Engine, the features which made it intelligent. So Babbage began to design an automaton which could win at noughts-and-crosses, planning to dress it up ‘with such attractive circumstances that a very popular and profitable exhibition might be produced’. All his memories of Merlin, Weeks and the Regency world of mechanical wonders came into play. As he reminisced in his 1864 autobiography, ‘I imagined that the machine might consist of the figures of two children playing against each other, accompanied by a lamb and a cock. That the child who won the game might clap his hands whilst the cock was crowing, after which, that the child who was beaten might cry and wring his hands whilst the lamb began bleating’.
But there was, of course, a hitch. One point of his games machine was to raise money for the more portentous Analytical Engine, and Babbage soon discovered that though ‘every mamma and some few pappas who heard of it would doubtless take their children to so singular and interesting a sight’, and though he could try putting three shows on at once, nevertheless the mid-Victorian public simply weren’t interested any more. ‘The most profitable exhibition which had occurred for many years’, Babbage moaned, ‘was that of the little dwarf, General Tom Thumb’, Phineas Barnum’s famous midget money-spinner, displayed in 1844 before gawping London audiences at the self-same Adelaide Gallery where a decade earlier the Difference Engine models, steam guns and electromagnetic engines had drawn large audiences. According to London journalists the Adelaide ‘with its chemical lectures and electrical machines’ had by the later 1840s ‘changed its guise, and in lieu of philosophical experiments we have the gay quadrille and the bewildering polka’. So however apparently distinct, the fate of the automata shows and the calculating engines was remarkably similar, as metropolitan fashion switched away from the machines that could simulate human motions and emotions to the high life where the genteel tried these activities out for themselves.
Ultimately, Babbage’s Difference Engine suffered more or less the same end as a whole range of Victorian automata, ending its days as a museum piece….