http:\/\/www.imaginaryfutures.net\/2007\/04\/16\/babbages-dancer-by-simon-schaffer\/<\/a><\/p>\n(…)<\/p>\n
Calculator or Dancer?<\/p>\n
\u2018They needed a calculator, but a dancer got the job\u2019 (The Marriage of Figaro, 1784)<\/p>\n
In the steam-punk metropolis of Gibson and Sterling\u2019s 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, \u2018outstanding pieces of British precision craftsmanship\u2019. Above them looms Lord Babbage, his original calculating engines already outdated, his scheme for life peerages on merit become part of everyday politics. Babbage\u2019s dreams doubtless deserve this treatment from the apostles of cyberfiction \u2013 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.<\/p>\n
The enterprise of the calculating engines was certainly dependent on the city\u2019s workshops, stocked with lathes, clamps and ingenious apprentices, and on government offices, stocked with ledgers, blue books and officious clerks \u2013 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s Street, just between Hanover Square and Oxford Street. A Li\u00e8geois 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 \u2018a very ingenious mechanic\u2019, in Fanny Burney\u2019s voluminous diaries, sat for Gainsborough, and used his mechanical skills to devise increasingly remarkable costumes for the innumerable masquerades then charming London\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
Merlin ingeniously prowled the borderlands of showmanship and engineering. He won prestigious finance from the backers of Boulton and Watt\u2019s 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\u2019s chair for sufferers from gout. After unsuccessfully launching a plan for a \u2018Necromancic Cave\u2019, 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 \u2018young amateurs of mechanism\u2019.<\/p>\n
Babbage was one of them. Merlin took the young Devonshire schoolboy upstairs to his backstage workshop to show some more exotic delights. \u2018There were two uncovered female figures of silver, about twelve inches high\u2019. The first automaton was relatively banal, though \u2018singularly graceful\u2019, one of Merlin\u2019s well-known stock of figures \u2018in 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\u2019. Babbage remembered that \u2018she used an eye-glass occasionally and bowed frequently as if recognizing her acquaintances\u2019. Good manners, it seemed, could easily be mechanized. But it was the other automaton which stayed in Babbage\u2019s mind, \u2018an admirable danseuse, with a bird on the forefinger of her right hand, which wagged its tail, flapped its wings and opened its beak\u2019. Babbage was completely seduced. \u2018The lady attitudinized in a most fascinating manner. Her eyes were full of imagination, and irresistible\u2019. \u2018At Merlin\u2019s you meet with delight\u2019, 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.<\/p>\n
Merlin died in 1803, and much of his Hanover Square stock was sold to Thomas Weeks, a rival \u2018performer and machinist\u2019 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 \u2018a variety of figures inert, active, separate, combined, emblematic and allegoric, on the principles of mechanism, being the most exact imitation of nature\u2019. 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, \u2018a 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\u2019.<\/p>\n
(…)<\/p>\n
The obscure objects of desire embodied in the automata were never self-evidently distinct from any of Babbage\u2019s 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 \u2018he might safely assure his friends in the celestial empire that it was in every sense of the word an out-of-pocket machine\u2019. 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\u2019d surely lose money on fiction. One such entirely abortive scheme involved designing an automaton \u2018to play a game of purely intellectual skill successfully\u2019. 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 \u2013 his close friend Ada Lovelace, Gibson and Sterling\u2019s dark lady of the Epsom motor-races, lost more than \u00a33000 on the horses during the later 1840s. \u2018Making a book seems to me to be living on the brink of a precipice\u2019, she was told by her raffish gambling associate Richard Ford in early 1851.<\/p>\n
The Games Machine<\/p>\n
Babbage\u2019s 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 \u2018with such attractive circumstances that a very popular and profitable exhibition might be produced\u2019. All his memories of Merlin, Weeks and the Regency world of mechanical wonders came into play. As he reminisced in his 1864 autobiography, \u2018I 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\u2019.<\/p>\n
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 \u2018every mamma and some few pappas who heard of it would doubtless take their children to so singular and interesting a sight\u2019, and though he could try putting three shows on at once, nevertheless the mid-Victorian public simply weren\u2019t interested any more. \u2018The most profitable exhibition which had occurred for many years\u2019, Babbage moaned, \u2018was that of the little dwarf, General Tom Thumb\u2019, Phineas Barnum\u2019s 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 \u2018with its chemical lectures and electrical machines\u2019 had by the later 1840s \u2018changed its guise, and in lieu of philosophical experiments we have the gay quadrille and the bewildering polka\u2019. 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.<\/p>\n
Ultimately, Babbage\u2019s Difference Engine suffered more or less the same end as a whole range of Victorian automata, ending its days as a museum piece….<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
*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\/ (…) Calculator or Dancer? \u2018They needed a calculator, but a dancer got the job\u2019 (The Marriage of Figaro, 1784) In the steam-punk metropolis of Gibson and Sterling\u2019s Difference Engine, the sickly Keats runs a cinema, Disraeli is a gossip […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5618","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorised"],"yoast_head":"\n
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