Schriftenreihe der Forschungsgruppe "Große technische Systeme"
des Forschungsschwerpunkts Technik - Arbeit - Umwelt am Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin für Sozialforschung
FS I I 94-502
Babbages’s Intelligence:
Calculating Engines and the Factory System
Simon Schaffer
Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin fur Sozialforschung gGmbH (WZB) Reichpietschufer 50, D-10785 Berlin
Tel. (030)-25 491-0 Fax (030)-25 491-254 od. -684
BABBAGE’S INTELLIGENCE: CALCULATING ENGINES AND THE FACTORY SYSTEM
Summary
The project inaugurated by Charles Babbage in London in the 1820s to design calculating engines helps us explore some important themes in the discourse o f intelligent technical systems. This project connected the gathering o f intelligence about the British factory system with the attribution o f intelligence to the engines Babbage designed.
(a) The factory survey shows how a systematic vision, so influential in recent history o f technology, was originally constructed. By neglecting or subordinating the intelligence o f the factory workforce, commentators on the new economic order could display this order as rational, intelligent and designed. So Babbage and his allies helped produce the system they purported to describe.
(b) The calculating engine project helps us see how machines could be judged to be intelligent. By neglecting or subordinating the role o f machinists and engineers, it could be claimed that these machines were really performing the actions o f mind.
(c) Recent studies o f artificial intelligence suggest that the attribution o f intelligence to machines often relies on occluding the w ork which surrounds them. In both the factory system and the calculating engines, Babbage subordinated skill to management and defined intelligence as the combination o f managerial foresight and vigilant memory. Because intelligence was defined this way, it was possible to argue that engines could think and that factories were sites o f wise and systematic planning.
BABBAGES INTELLIGENZ: DIE RECHENMASCHINE UND DAS FABRIKSYSTEM
Zusammenfassung
Der Aufsatz untersucht das "Projekt von Charles Babbage" im London der 1820er Jahre zum Bau einer Rechenmaschine und geht einigen wichtigen Themen im Diskurs über "intelligente technische Systeme" nach. In Babbages Projekt wird die Beschaffung von "intelligence" über das britische Fabriksystem verbunden mit der Zuweisung von Intelligenz an die Maschinen, die Babbage entwarf.
(a) Die Untersuchung des Fabriksystems läßt erkennen, wie die systematische Vision, die in der neueren Entwicklungsgeschichte der Technik so einflußreich werden sollte, ursprünglich konstruiert wurde. Durch die Vernachlässigung oder Unterordnung der Intelligenz der
Fabrikarbeiterschaft konnten Beobachter der heraufkommenden neuen ökonomischen Ordnung diese Ordnung als rational, intelligent und planmäßig entworfen darstellen. In diesem Sinn halfen Babbage und seine Verbündeten dabei mit, das System zu produzieren, das sie zu beschreiben Vorgaben.
(b) Das Projekt Rechenmaschine läßt erkennen, 'wie Maschinen als intelligent beurteilt werden konnten. Durch die Vernachlässigung oder Unterordnung der Rolle von Maschinisten und Ingenieuren konnte der Anspruch etabliert, diese Maschinen würden tatsächlich geistige Aktivitäten ausfiihren.
( c ) Neuere Untersuchungen zur künstlichen Intelligenz legen nahe, daß die Zuschreibung von
Intelligenz an Maschinen weitgehend au f einer Ausblendung der Arbeit basiert, in die Maschinen eingebettet sind. Im Fabriksystem wie bei den Rechenmaschinen hat Babbage Managementfertigkeiten systematisch praktischen Fertigkeiten übergeordnet und Intelligenz als eine Kombination von organisatorischer Voraussicht und wachsamen Gedächtnis definiert.
Weil Intelligenz au f diese Art definiert wurde, konnte die Vorstellung durchgesetzt werden, Maschinen könnten denken und Fabriken seien Orte einer klugen und systematischen Planung.
Simon Schaffers Aufsatz "Babbage's Intelligence: Calculating Engines and the Factory System"
geht auf einen Festvortrag anläßlich der Jahrestagung der "Gesellschaft für Wissenschafts- und Technikforschung" im Dezember 1993 am WZB zurück. Schaffer präsentiert hier die Figur Babbage als Ingenieur und Ingenieurwissenschaftler, als Technologen, als Erfinder und Industriellen und vieles mehr. Es wird nicht nur ein Portrait von W erk und Leben dieses Mannes skizziert; es wird vor allem der "Babbage'sche Moment" herausgearbeitet, ein
ungemein folgenreicher Moment in der Geschichte der Industrialisierung und des Projekts der Ingenieurwissenschaften gleichermaßen.
Der Wissenschafts- und Technikhistoriker Simon Schaffer hat von der Universität Cambridge aus vor allem an zwei Verschiebungen in der Wissenschafts- und Technikforschung listig mitgewirkt: erstens an einer Verschiebung der Aufmerksamkeit von kognitiven Aspekten, und entsprechend von schriftlichen Texten, in der Wissenschaft auf praktisches Können und körperliche Fertigkeiten; zweitens an einer Verschiebung der Aufmerksamkeit von historischen zu räumlichen Aspekten der Wissenschaftsentwicklung.
Auch
im
Babbage-Artikel zeichnet Schaffer eine Wissenschaftslandkarte, nicht einen Wissenschaftskalender: das viktorianische London als Wissenschaftsmetropole des 19.Jahrhunderts. Es wird gezeigt, daß die Macht der modernen Ingenieurwissenschaften, wie sie Babbage verkörperte, weniger mit einem historisch-kumulativen, nach vorne und oben gerichteten Fortschritt der Wissenschaft zu tan hatte, als mit dem Prozeß einer energisch vorangetriebenen Vervielfältigung der Orte und Stellen, an denen Ingenieurwissenschaft überall effektiv eingesetzt werden konnte.
Bemward Joerges
BABBAGE’S INTELLIGENCE:
CALCULATING ENGINES AND THE FACTORY SYSTEM
In summer 1823 the new and controversial Astronomical Society o f London decided to award its gold medal to one o f its own founder members, the equally controversial Cambridge- trained mathematician Charles Babbage. The award formed part o f an energetic campaign to launch the construction o f a Difference Engine, a machine to calculate navigatipnal and astro
nomical tables. In his address to the Society in early 1824, its president, the financier, mathe
matician and orientalist Henry Colebrooke, summed up the significance o f Babbage's planned device. "In other cases, mechanical devices have substituted machines for simpler tools or for bodily labour....But the invention to which I am adverting....substitutes mechanical perform
ance for an intellectual process". In other words, "Mr Babbage's invention puts an engine in place o f the computer". 1 This may seem a paradoxical comment on the man who is now lauded as the computer's inventor. But as with terms such as "typewriter", the word
"computer" referred here to a human being, in this case the hireling employed to perform the exhausting reckoning which every astronomical operation required. Babbage himself applied for the post o f computer at the Royal Observatory, Greenwich, iii summer 1814, until dis
suaded from the thankless task. The labour o f verifying "the calculations o f the computers"
required in compiling astronomical tables soon prompted a characteristic expostulation: "I wish to God these calculations had been executed by steam !" Hence developed the plans for the Difference Engine. 2
Through his gesture at the urgent issues o f technological redundancy and the subordi
nation o f the labour process, Colebrooke's remark provides the theme o f my story o f the con
nexion which Babbage helped forge between the development o f machinofacture and the design o f intelligent machines. A key to this link is the term "intelligence". The word refers both to signals received from without and to the capacity to register and interpret these sig
nals. In early nineteenth century Britain the w ord "intelligence" simultaneously embodied the growing system o f social surveillance and the emerging mechanisation o f natural philosophies o f mind. 3 In what follows, I explore the co-production o f ideologically freighted accounts o f
Thanks to Billy Ashworth, Bob Brain, W illiam Ginn, Iwan Morus, Otto Sibum and Richard Staley for their generous help, and to the librarians at the Cambridge University Library, the British Library and the Royal Society for help with manuscripts in their possession.
lH enry Colebrooke, "Address on presenting the Gold Medal o f the Astronomical Society to Charles Babbage", Memoirs o f the Astronomical Society 1 (1825), 509-12, pp. 509-10; Babbage to Herschel, 27 June 1823, Royal Society HS 2.184.
2 Herschel to Babbage, 25 October 1814, Royal Society HS 2.31; H.W.Buxton, M emoir o f the Life and Labours o f the Late Charles Babbage, ed. R.A.Hyman ([1880] Cambridge, MA.: M.I.T. Press,
1988), p. 46.
3 For the uses o f intelligence see Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979), pp. 195-228; Ian Hacking, The Taming o f Chance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
intelligence and o f politically charged systems o f machinery. To make machines look intelligent it was necessary that the sources o f their power, the labour force which surrounded and ran them, be rendered invisible. This is why Siegfried Giedion's brilliant study o f automation is subtitled "a contribution to anonymous history". Like him, I am concerned with the mundane places o f intelligence. London in the 1820s and 1830s was a fractured world. South o f the river, in Lambeth, were the workshops o f the machinists whose labours drove the production o f automatic tools and accurate design. In the fashionable milieu o f the West End, genteel Londoners could witness shows o f the triumphs o f these new machine systems in public lec
tures and carefully orchestrated museums. Here, too, were the wardens o f scientific reason, the Astronomical Society, the Royal Society, the Royal Institution. Northwards again,
in
the fashionable houses o f Marylebone, lived men such as Charles Babbage and Charles Darwin, ambitious reformers who sought to rethink human nature in the name o f a reconstructed scientific and social order. And in the northeast were the huge working-class districts, areas where Babbage sought to run for parliamentary office and where his socialist critics debated with him on the hustings about machinery's effects. This is the geography o f Babbage's intelli
gence, the world where his systematic vision was forged.4
Systems are socially constructed and so, as We are increasingly reminded, are the pro
ductive and unproductive bodies which inhabit them. This is why Babbage's most penetrating London reader, Karl Marx, famously reckoned that it would be easier to write "a critical his
tory o f technology,....a history o f the productive organs o f man in society" than to produce Charles Darwin's "history o f natural technology". Babbage's moment was decisive for the con
struction o f sociotechnical systems, for the productive bodies o f the workforce, and for the perception that their world was ordered systematically. These processes o f construction and perception should not be separated. There is a whole history to be written o f the counter-claim that they can be teased apart, that the point o f view from which the systematic character o f the sociotechnical world can be detected is independent o f that world. Early Victorian society pro
vided major resources for this claim and it must be studied in detail to show how this position was developed. The philosophers o f manufacture, such as Babbage, carefully constructed a place from which they could make out the lineaments o f the factory system. Critics o f this phi
losophy, such as Marx, pointed out the political implications o f this construction. The issue o f the science embodied in the machinery o f the automatic system and the fate o f the worker's body was debated amongst the London Chartists in 1856, where Marx announced that "all our invention and progress seem to result in endowing material forces with intellectual life, and in
1990) pp. 55-64; Adrian Desmond, The Politics o f Evolution (Chicago; Chicago University Press, 1989), pp. 114-117.
4 Siegfried Giedion, Mechanization takes command: a contribution to anonymous history (Norton: New York, 1969), p. 3: "history writing is ever tied to the fragment". For London's geography see Iwan
Moms, Jim Secord and Simon Schaffer, "Scientific London", in Celina Fox, ed., London-World City 1800-1840 (Yale: New Haven, 1992 / Kulturstiftung Ruhr, Essen), pp. 129-42.
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stultifying human life into a material force", and in his notebooks o f 1857-8, where he ob
served that "it is the machine which possess skill and strength in place o f the worker, is itself the virtuoso, with a soul o f its own in the mechanical laws acting through it". Within the
"system o f machinery", as Marx defined it in early 1858, "the automatic one is merely its most complete, most adequate form, and alone transforms machinery into a system". What follows is not a "critical history o f technology" but it is an attempt to show where the systematic vision came from, the geography o f its development, and some o f the political and technical effects it had.5
Intelligence in M arylebone
Babbage's designs for intelligent machines dominated his career from the moment he reached Marylebone as a wealthy and ambitious analyst in the 1810s. His Difference Engine was based on the mathematical principle that the successive differences o f values o f polyno
mials were ultimately constants, so tables o f these values could be computed by addition and subtraction o f predetermined constants. The device was launched in London in summer 1822 and after many vicissitudes, including its nationalisation in early 1830, it collapsed forever amidst recriminations between Babbage and his master-engineer Joseph Clement in summer 1834. Then in the mid-1830s Babbage began negotiating a new contract with Clement's former draftsman, C.G. Jarvis, to plan an Analytical Engine, an unprecedented technical system with huge memory, a store, an input-output device using number and variable cards and a control system o f operation cards. The crucial aspects o f the new Analytical Engine, its capacity for memory and anticipation, were profound resources for Babbage's metaphysics and his political economy.
Babbage organised a series o f remarkable publicity compaigns for his engines, both in Britain and elsewhere, in Berlin, Paris and Turin. The terms o f this propaganda revealed the politics o f his campaign for the mechanisation o f intelligence. In 1838 he confessed that "in substituting mechanism for the performance o f operations hitherto executed by intellectual labour.... the analogy between these acts and the operations o f the mind almost forced upon me the figurative employment o f the same terms". He was committed to phrases such as "the engine knows" to describe its predetermined move from one calculation to the next. Babbage's new science o f operations, an algebra o f machine analysis designed to describe the engines' work, was proposed as a discipline o f complete generality both within the surveillance o f
5 Karl M arx, Capital Volume One ([1 86 7 ] Penguin: Harmondsworth, 1976), p. 493 n.4 ; "Speech at the Anniversary o f the People's Paper" [April 14 1856] in Selected W orks, ed. V.Adoratsky , 2 vols.
(London: Lawrence and W ishart, 1942), 2: 428 ; Grundrisse, Notebook 6 [February 1858], ed. M artin Nicolaus (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973), pp. 692-3. For M arx as a systems theorist see Thomas P.
Hughes, "The Order o f the Technological World", History o f Technology 5 (1980), 1-16, pp. 5-7 and Raniero Panzieri, "The Capitalist Use o f Machinery", in Phil Slater, ed., Outlines o f a Critique o f Tech
nology (London: Ink Links, 1980), 44-68.
mental labour and in the manufacture o f exact values.6 Initially designed to "see at a glance what every moving piece in the machinery was doing at each instant o f time", this panoptic notation was proffered as a technology o f universal management. Babbage stressed the advan
tages o f machine semiotics because "of all our senses that o f sight conveys intelligence most rapidly to the mind". The industrial journalist Dionysius Lardner reported that the working o f the human body and o f the factory system could both be represented and managed this way.
The analogy o f machine, body and workshop was developed at once: "not only the mechanical connection o f the solid members o f the bodies o f men" but also, "in the form o f a connected map or plan, the organization o f an extensive factory, o r any great public institution, in which a vast number o f individuals are employed, and their duties regulated (as they generally are or ought to be) by a consistent and well-digested system". It is for this reason that the term "sys
tem" requires further historical analysis. The panoptic gaze which revealed the order o f the factory system and the mechanism o f the body also rendered the workforce and its resistance rather hard to see. 7
According to Babbage's leading Italian disciple, the military engineer and future Pied
mont premier L.F.Menabrea, Babbage's "engine may be considered as a real manufactory o f numbers". As historians such as Maxine Berg have demonstrated, these engines for manufac
turing numbers and mechanising intelligence were developed alongside the discourse o f Ricardian political economy. The "philosophy o f manufactures" provided Babbage with an ac
count o f what he called the "domestic economy o f the factory" and also with an analysis o f the skilled labour embodied in machinery. Babbage's publications on the economy o f the factory culminated in his masterly book o f 1832, On the Economy o f Machinery and Manufactures, a w ork based on intelligence gathered throughout the factories o f Britain, soon translated into every major European language. As the Analytical Engine was a "manufactory o f figures", so Babbage had to outline his definition o f a "manufactory". "A considerable difference exists be
tween the terms making and manufacturing", he explained in his economics text. The differ
ence lay in the economical regulation o f the domestic system o f the factory. This led to Bab
bage's reinterpretation o f Adam Smith's notion o f the division o f labour, and, as he empha
sised, the fundamental principle o f that division which allowed the sensitive analytical regula
tion o f the process o f manufacture. The "Babbage principle", as it came to be known, applied equally to the regulation o f the factory and o f the calculating engines:
6 Buxton, Memoir o f Babbage, p. 216 n.8.
7 Babbage, "On a Method o f Expressing by Signs the Action o f Machinery", Philsoophical Trans
actions 116 (1826), 250-65 and draft in Cambridge University Library M SS ADD 8705.21 ; [Lardner},
"Babbage's Calculating Engine", pp. 318-319. For Lardner's collaboration on mechanical notation with Babbage, and its publicity in Paris and Berlin, see Babbage to Dupin, 20 December 1833 and Babbage to Humboldt, December 1833, British Library M SS ADD 37188 ff. 117, 123.
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"That th e master manufacturer by dividing the w ork to be executed into different processes, each requiring different degrees o f skill or o f force, can purchase exactly that precise quantity o f both which is necessary for each process; whereas if the whole w ork were executed by one workman, that person must possess sufficient skill to perform the most difficult and sufficient strength to execute the most labori
ous o f the operations into which the art is divided" . 8
As Babbage and his allies among the political economists showed, the disaggregation o f the production process into its simplest components allowed a series o f economies and practices o f surveillance. Mechanized production required strict discipline. The same was true o f the Analytical Engine. Parcelling the processes o f Lagrangean algebra into specific components allowed the increase in speed o f the machine, the transformation o f infinities o f space into manageable durations o f time, the most economical recompense to each component in terms o f consumed pow er (if mechanical) or consumed wages (if human). "The whole history o f the invention has been a struggle against time", Babbage w rote in 1837. The replacement o f indi
vidual human intelligence by machine intelligence was as apparent in the workshop as in the engines. This task was both politically and economically necessary. "One great advantage which we derive from machinery is the check which it affords against the inattention, idleness or the dishonesty o f human agents". Such failings could produce erroneous results. This was why Babbage was always fascinated by French Republican attempts o f the 1790s to compute new logarithm tables by an ingenious division o f the labour o f teams o f subordinate calcula
tors. The French reported that their least intelligent computers, when subject to the right man
agement, were the most reliable. Unreliable agents could also form trade union combinations, which, Babbage held, were always "injurious" to the workforce itself. His aim here was to contest the influence o f "designing persons" and show the working classes that "the prosperity and success o f the master manufacturer is essential to the welfare o f the workman", even though "this connexion is in many cases too remote to be understood by the latter" . 9
8 Ada Lovelace, "Sketch o f the Analytical Engine by L.F.Menabrea", Taylor's Scientific Memoirs 3 (1843), 666-731, p. 690; Maxine Berg, The Machinery Question and the Making o f Political Economy 1815-1848 (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 1980), pp. 182-89; Babbage, On the Economy o f Machinery and M anufactures 4th ed. (London: Charles Knight, 1835), pp. 120, 175. See Richard M.
Romano, "The Economic Ideas o f Charles Babbage", History o f Political Economy 14 (1982), 385- 405, p. 391. For M arx's response to the Babbage principle see Karl M arx, Capital: Volume One (H ar- mondsworth: Penguin, 1976), p.469: "the collective worker now possesses ah the qualities necessary for production in an equal degree o f excel lence, and expends them in the most economical way".
9 Babbage, Economy o f Machinery, pp. 54, 250-1; Buxton, Memoir o f Babbage, p. 194. The first reference to the French project is in Babbage to Davy, 3 July 1822, published as A Letter to Humphry Davy (London: Booth, 1822), p.8. Babbage got a copy o f these tables in Paris in 1819: see Cambridge University Library M SS ADD 8705.37. For other responses to the French work see [Dionysius Lardner], "Babbage's Calculating Engines", Edinburgh Review 59 (1834), 263-327, p. 275.
Babbage's political strategies o f the strife-ridden decade o f the 1830s outlined a crucial role for the analytic manager. The machinery o f the factory and the calculating engines pre
cisely embodied the intelligence o f theory and abrogated the individual intelligence o f the worker. Only the superior combination and correlation o f each component guaranteed effi
cient, economical, planned and therefore intelligent performance. This abstract, lawlike behav
iour was only visible to the overseer, men such as Babbage. N o doubt his own status as a gentlemanly specialist helped. He inherited £100,000 from his banker father in 1827, while the state spent more than £17,000 on his engines within the next decade. "The efforts for the improvement o f its manufactures which any country can make with the greatest probability o f success", he argued in his text on machinery, "must arise from the combined exertions o f all those most skilled in the theory, as well as in the practice o f the arts; each labouring in that department for which his natural capacity and acquired habits rendered him most fit". Such declarations made the new class o f managerial analysts the supreme economic managers and legislators o f social welfare. In good Bonapartist style Babbage thought they should be rewarded with newfangled life peerages and political power. 10 The science o f calculation became the supreme legislative discipline, just as the calculating engines provided both legisla
tive and executive co-ordination. This political and managerial language was not merely an elegant reformist metaphor hatched in wealthy London drawing rooms. The calculating engines were themselves products o f the system o f automatic manufacture which Babbage sought to model. They were some o f that system's most famous and most visible accomplish
ments.
Shows in the West End, Skills in Lambeth
The first automaton which Babbage ever saw, when a very young visitor to the back- stage workshop o f a London exhibitor, was a danseuse, a model one foot high, "her eyes full o f imagination and irresistible". Thirty years later he bought the danseuse at an auction sale o f a bankrupt mechanical show and, after restoring its gears, displayed it at his Marylebone house-patties alongside his calculating machines. H The anecdote illuminates the social site which the calculating engines occupied as competitors for polite attention with the vast array o f automata and mechanisms on display in the London showrooms. In early 1834 two models o f the Difference Engine itself were made by the instrument designer Francis Watkins, who plied his trade as electrician and showman at the Adelaide Gallery, the leading London show
case for new engineering. When the Engine had been abandoned Babbage insisted "it should
10 Babbage, Economy o f Machinery, pp. 379, 388; Anthony Hyman, Charles Babbage: Pioneer o f the Computer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), p.86; Buxton, Memoir o f Babbage, pp. 215, 111.
For Babbage on honours see The Exposition o f 1851, 2nd ed. (London: John M urray, 1851), pp.220-49 and for the Bonapartist connexion see Reflections on the Decline o f Science in England (London:
Fellowes, 1830), pp. 25-27.
11 Babbage, Passages from the Life o f a Philosopher, (London: Longmans, 1864), pp. 17-18, 365-7, 425-7. See Hyman, Babbage, p. 175.
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be placed where the public can see it". It was put on display in the museum o f King's College London. Next door, at the Admiralty Museum in Somerset House, visitors could view Henry Maudslay's celebrated block-making machinery designed for the Portsmouth naval dockyards.
These technical systems were on show as the highest achievements o f the early Victorian machine-tool industry. 12
Two salient features o f these displays mattered for Babbage's own project. Firstly, the systematisation o f machine-tool production was highly charged politically. Secondly, this process demanded the reorganisation o f the productive body and o f the visible space in which it performed. The pre-eminent example w as provided at Portsmouth, the very earliest site at which the automatic machine-tool system was implemented. Between 1795 and 1807 the entire system o f production o f pulley-blocks for the Royal Navy was overhauled. Traditionally this production had relied on specialised crafts in woodworking and milling highly resistant to line management and control. In the face o f mass protests, military force was used. As histo
rians Carolyn Cooper and Peter Linebaugh have explained, the new production-line system destroyed and reorganised every feature o f this pattern. Pulley-blocks were standardised and marked to prevent what was now called "theft". Standardised machinists replaced specialist craftsmen. W ood was replaced by steam-driven all-metal machinery and separate artisan tasks embodied in purpose-built lathes and clamps. The protagonists o f this reorganisation were also the protagonists o f much wider social change. The system was developed by Samuel Bentham, the inspector o f naval works, who in collaboration with his brother Jeremy had already intro
duced an identical system o f surveillance in Russian wordworking schemes in the early 1780s, a scheme soon to be known as the Panopticon. The engineering works were laid out by M arc Brunel and implemented by his close ally Maudslay. These were th e men who introduced Clement to Babbage, and the men who made this system o f inspection, regulation and line- production a visible exemplar o f rational management. 13
Samuel Bentham and his colleagues made Portsmouth dockyard a site o f "incessant work" and then turned it into a tourist attraction. The Portsmouth team argued that public visibility could be an invaluable aspect o f their industrial reformation. Bentham "considered it highly conducive to the hastening o f the introduction o f a general System o f machinery that public opinion should be obtained in its favour, and that this was likely to be more surely effected by a display o f well arranged machines". So from the 1810s the block machinery became a common resort for interested visitors. The new system o f technological repression can be taken as exemplary o f the emergence o f the wage form and o f the productive labourer.
12 Hyman, Babbage, p. 192; Carolyn Cooper, "The Portsmouth System o f M anufacture", Technology and Culture 25 (1984), 182-225, p. 213. For W atkins' models see W atkins to Babbage, 15 January
1834, British Library M SS Add 37188 f. 160.
13 Cooper, "Portsmouth System"; Peter Linebaugh, "Technological Repression and the Origin o f the Wage", The London Hanged (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991), chapter 11.
A guidebook to the dockyard commented that "on entering the block mill, the spectator is struck with the multiplicity o f its movements and the rapidity o f its operations". 14 The imper
sonal pronouns in this account are eloquent. To see the automatic world as a system, it was important not to see the workforce's culture.
The London machine shows o f the Difference Engine and the Portsmouth lathes were designed to win income and teach important lessons to a wide range o f publics. This was not an audience which knew exactly what it wanted and certainly not an audience that obviously wanted exactitude. Babbage reckoned that automatic systems should yield specific truths about the relation between intelligence, work and mechanism. These truths were by no means self-evident nor uncontroversial, especially during the machine-breaking protests which raged during the struggle for Reform. Babbage's lessons hinged on the proper ownership o f machin
ery and thus, in the jargon o f his favourite science, the source o f productive value. The rights o f the workers to the whole value o f their labour informed much o f the radical protest o f these key years. Who should "own" these machines? W hose labour did they embody? Reformist journalists were persistently struck by "the systematic way in which the people proceeded", while the "people" themselves protested against the campaigns "to make u s tools" or "ma
chines". These issues made urgent the problem o f the source and ownership o f the skills em
bodied in machines confessedly designed to perform mental work. 15
Working class interests appealed to traditional custom, in which skill was recognized as a property inherent in the persons o f the workers themselves. Skill was reckoned to be scarcely communicable outside carefully controlled milieux which were designed to remain opaque to the surveillance o f managers and inspectors. Thus attempts by observers such as Babbage to gather intelligence about machines and the workforce were politically controversial. In con
trast to the traditional model, philosophers o f machinery promoted an account o f rational valu
ation, attempting to render the labour process transparent and skills rather easily measurable in the marketplace o f wage labour. These are the early nineteenth century English conflicts which, following E.P. Thompson, we now typically associate with political economic cam
paigns against the Com Laws and the customary moral economy o f the grain rioters, where economic rationality fought with traditional förms
of
exchange, or, following Michel Foucault, with Benthamite strategies for the surveillance o f the body in the illuminated spaces o f the Panopticon. Babbage's campaigns for machine intelligence take their place alongside these more familiar strategies for the reconfiguration o f the productive body. 1614 Cooper, "Portsmouth System", pp. 213-14; Linebaugh, London Hanged, pp. 399-401.
15 E.P.Thompson, The Making o f the English Working Class (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968), pp.
889, 915; John Rule, The Labouring Classes in Early Industrial England (London: Longman, 1986), pp. 357-63.
16 E.P.Thompson, "The M oral Economy o f the English Crowd", Past and Present 38 (1967) and Customs in Common ((London: Merlin, 1991), chapters 4 and 5; Foucault, Discipline and Punish, part 3 and "The Eye o f Power", in Colin Gordon, ed., Michel Foucault: Power / Knowledge (Brighton:
9
In this context, the faculties o f memory and foresight with which Babbage sought to endow the Analytical Engine also characterize his self-presentation as the unique author o f the machine. They embodied his control over the engine and disembodied the skills, and camou
flaged the workforce, on which it depended.
He
explained his view o f the property o f skill involved in the calculating engines in ah appeal to the Duke o f Wellington about their future in late 1834. "My right to dispose, as I will, o f such inventions cannot be contested; it is more sacred in its nature than any hereditary o r acquired property, for they are the absolute creations o f my own mind". 17 This remarkable declaration followed a decade o f strife with Clem
ent, the brilliant (but here characteristically unnamed) engineer on whose w ork so much o f the engine's development depended. When the project was inaugurated Babbage had to work out whether the design was in "such a form that its execution [might be] within the reach o f a skilful workman". In turn, this prompted his immediate examination "in detail o f machinery o f every kind". Fights were endemic about Babbage's claims that the workforce should submit to, and only needed slavishly to follow, his detailed recipe for the calculating engines and that any results o f this labour would belong to Babbage himself. 18
Babbage's specifications placed unprecedented demands on the capacities o f the machine tool workshops and soon turned those workshops into revolutionary sites o f innova
tion and training. An 1829 Royal Society report on the engine plans conceded that "in all those parts o f the machine where the nicest precision is required, the wheelwork only brings them by a first approximation (though a very nice one) to their destined places, and they are then settled into an accurate adjustment by peculiar contrivances which admit o f no shake or lati
tude o f any kind". 19 The troublesome terms in these bland remarks by the gentlemen o f sci
ence were the references to nice precision, accurate adjustment and shake or latitude. What might seem to a savant matters o f irrational judgment were the key aspects o f the customary culture o f the workshop. What might seem to the Royal Society and the Treasury to be worthless or exorbitant demands from the workshop staff would appear within the machine shop
as
legitimate and self-evident expectations o f machinists' status. The fights between Clement and Babbage which raged between 1822 and 1834 testified to the fury and significance o f these issues o f control.
Two critical problems haunted the w ork on the calculating engines. Firstly, the place o f skill and the social and cognitive distance between designers, machinists and draughtsmen were vital for the project's conduct. When Babbage set out on a European tour in 1828 he left
Harvester, 1980), chapter 8. For customary skill see John Rule, "The Properly o f Skill in the Period o f Manufacture", in Patrick Joyce, ed., The Historical Meanings o f W ork (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer
sity Press, 1987), 99-118.
17 Babbage to Wellington, 23 December 1834, British Library MSS ADD 40611 f. 181.
18 Babbage, "The science o f number reduced to mechanism" (1822) in Buxton, Memoir o f Babbage, p.
65.
19 Buxton, Memoir o f Babbage, p.86.
Clement what he reckoned were "sufficient drawings to enable his agents to proceed with the construction o f the Difference Engine during his absence", Such written recipes soon proved hopelessly inadequate. Two years later, on his return, Babbage demanded that the engine construction site be moved from Clement's works in Lambeth to Babbage's own house in Marylebone. Clement demanded huge compensation, did not get it, and sacked his men. Jarvis, Clement's ex-draughtsman and future co-designer o f the Analytical Engine, explained to Bab
bage why it was important that work proceed "under your immediate inspection": "you might be at once appealed to whenever it was found very difficult to produce nearly [the desired]
effect - which is a very common case in machinery". The lesson is a familiar one. The produc
tion and reproduction o f skills and material technology requires intense and immediate interac
tion in spaces specifically designed for the purpose. Such designs violated the conventions by which the machinists plied their trade.20
A second decisive problem for the engine project was therefore the issue o f ownership and public knowledge. The costs o f the work were traditionally in the hands o f the engineer, while his tools, in this case the lathes, planes and vices, were always his own property. Thus the question o f whether the Difference Engine was itself a tool became moot. From 1829 Bab
bage and Clement were in dispute about property and prices. Clement at once appealed to the customs o f his craft: all the tools, especially the new self-acting lathes, belonged exclusively to him and he insisted on his right to make more calculating engines without Babbage’s permis
sion. Once again, Jarvis explained the point to the infuriated mathematician:
"It should be borne in mind that the inventor o f a machine and the maker o f it have two distinct ends to obtain. The object o f the first is to make the machine as complete as possible. The object o f the second - and we have no right to expect he will be influenced by any other feeling - is to gain as much as possible by making the machine, and it is in his interest to make it as complicated as possi
b le " ^ !
Babbage's characteristic solution was to propose the nationalisation o f the engine, the tools and the designs.
He
was pursuing what he reckoned was the practical logic o f much o f the20 Buxton, Memoir o f Babbage, pp. 81-2, 97; Hyman, Babbage, pp. 125, 130-2; James Nasmyth, Autobiography, (London: John Murray, 1883), p.130. For the move to Marylebone, see Babbage to Clement, 18 M ay 1832, British Library MSS Add 37186 f.400. For the machine tool culture see K.R.Gilbert, "Machine Tools", in C.Singer et al., eds. History o f Technology: Volume 4 (Oxford:
Clarendon, 1958), 417-41; A.E.Musson, "Joseph W hitworth and the Growth o f M ass production Engineering", Business History 17 (1985), 109-49.
21 Hyman, Babbage, pp. 124, 128 and Jarvis to Babbage, February 1831, British Library MSS ADD 37185 f.419. The best discussion o f the fight with Clement is William Ginn, Philosophers and Artisans:
the relationship between men o f science and instrument makers in London 1820-1860 (PhD thesis, Kent, 1991), pp. 157-69.
11
machine-tool industry. Outstanding initiatives, such as the development o f precision tools at Greenwich Observatory and the installation the Portsmouth blockmaking system were state- funded projects, part o f the activity o f what has been labelled the "fiscal-military state", involv
ing large-scale military investment, a major financial bureaucracy and commitment to the accumulation o f quantitative information about civil society. Babbage's machine intelligence was designed to appeal to, and reinforce, these rather fragile interests.22 in the Lambeth machine shops personal skill and thus individual property was at stake in every "improved"
design and workshop layout. Once the engine had been nationalised and shifted to Babbage's own workshop, it was proposed that Jarvis w ork there but remain under Clement's manage
ment. Clement refused the deal because "my plan may be followed without my being in any way a gainer", and Jarvis refused because he would not become "party to my own degrada
tion". Babbage and his Royal Society allies judged this as rätiöna} management, while the engineers often saw it as a challenge to their rights and skills.23
Babbage's early projects collapsed under the force o f these challenges. But his cam
paign for machine intelligence and the automatic system successfully captured the interests o f the engineering managers and their new system.. The intelligence gathered for his w ork on manufacture offered important lessons about wage rates and skill patterns. First, the engineers were prepared to value the calculating engine project by raising the wages o f workmen who had been involved in the scheme and, second, they were committed to the design o f increas
ingly automated systems which would break down craft divisions and allow the employment o f increasingly cheap hands and increasingly subordinate labour processes. In a telling annotation to his correspondence with Wellington, Babbage remarked that "I have been informed by men who are now scattered about in our manufacturing districts, that they all get higher wages than their fellow workmen in consequence o f having worked at that machine". Babbage's informant was Richard Wright, first employed as Babbage's valet, then based in Lambeth near Maudslay, who toured the northern factories for Babbage's book and ended up in Manchester working for Joseph Whitworth, who had just left the Difference Engine project. "There is much talk about the [calculating] Machine here", Wright told Babbage, "so much so that a man who has worked at it has a greater chance o f the best w ork and I am proud to say that I am getting more wages than any other workman in the Factory". Wright offered himself to Babbage as a possible master-engineer. He became a Smilesian paragon who reckoned that rational man
agement and the careful surveillance o f the division o f labour provided the key to success in making the calculating engines. Wright explained to Babbage how the new system should work:
22 For state standardisation, see Julian Hoppit, "Reforming Britain's Weights and Measures", English Historical Review (1993), 82-104; for the fiscal-military state see John Brewer, The Sinews o f Power:
W ar, Money and the English State (London: Unwin Hyman, 1989).
23 Babbage to Wellington, July 1834, in Buxton, Memoir o f Babbage, p. 104; Jarvis and Clement to Babbage, in Hyman, Babbage, pp. 131-2.
"The man you select for the workshop ought to be a good general workman both at Vice and Lathe for such a man can see by the way a man begins a job whether he will finish it in a workmanlike manner or not. Perhaps you are not quite aware that at M r Clement's and most other Factories the w ork is divided into the branches Vice and Lathe, and in most cases the man who works at the one is nearly ignorant o f the other....He ought above all to have studied the dispositions o f workmen so as to keep the workshop free from contention and disorder and the causes o f the repeated failures o f so much new Machinery for I am sure there is more failures through waste o f labour and bad management than there is through bad schemes or any other cause".24
Wright's was the anonymous voice recorded in the pages o f Babbage’s Economy o f Machinery and which this text helped make representative o f the automatic system. In the philosophy o f manufacture much was made o f the highly personal skills embodied in the master-engineers. In his travel notes for the engine survey, Babbage recorded that "causes o f failure" should be found by consulting a "mah o f science on the principle" and "a practical engineer on mechani
cal difficulties". It was acknowledged, and celebrated, that manual dexterity remained a central attribute o f "the skilled workman". Babbage reckoned that "the first necessity" for his Differ
ence Engine was "to preserve the life o f M r Clement...it would be extremely difficult if not impossible to find any other person o f equal talent both as a draftsman and as a mechanician".
Engine masters became heroes. But, crucially, these virtues were to be increasingly vested in the standardised tool-kit o f the machine shops. No doubt this was why the authoritative scales and tools in use were so often fetishised. Maudslay's benchtop scale was "humourously called....The Lord Chancellor", while his colleagues boasted o f "the progeny o f legitimate descendants" which they had produced.25
In industrialising Britain the systems these men helped forge were the sites o f a new managerial and technical network, dependent as much on strenuous regulation o f the labour process as on the development o f new automatic machinery. In the process, craft customs were subverted and standardised, accurate production secured.26 The managers o f the most advanced workshops eventually became Babbage's closest allies and sources o f intelligence and support. In his Economy o f Machinery Babbage made much o f the means through which the lathe would guarantee "identity" and "accuracy", and then accounted accuracy as an econ-
24 W right to Babbage, 18 June 1834 and 13 January 1839, British Library MSS ADD 37188 f.390 and 37191 ff. 99-100; compare Hyman, Babbage, pp. 66, 107.
25 Babbage, "Notes for Economy o f Manufacture", University Library Cambridge MSS Add 8705.25 p. 10; Babbage, "Report on the Calculating Machine", 1830, British Library MSS ADD 37185 f. 264;
Nasmyth, Autobiography, pp. 148-9, 179. Compare Ginn, Philosophers and Artisans, p. 167, on the uniqueness o f artisan skill.
26 John Foster, Class Struggle and the Industrial Revolution (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1974), pp. 224-5; Ian Inkster, Science and Technology in History (London: Macmillan, 1991), pp. 82-83.
13
omy o f time, since "it would be possible for a very skilful workman, with files and polishing substances", to produce a perfect surface. So artisan skill could be transmuted into its wage equivalent. Babbage's friend the dissenting mathematician Augustus de M organ brilliantly sum
marised the relation between the lathe, emblem o f automatic skill, and Babbage, master o f mechanical analysis, in a cartoon showing him at the lathe armed only with a series o f loga
rithmic functions. On this showing mechanical analysis was just like the w ork o f automated tools, but it also provided the key resource for managing the development o f the new factory system. 27
From London to Manchester: Touring the Factory System
The factory system was first represented in a powerful series o f journalistic reports produced in the 1830s and 1840s, o f which Friedrich Engels' Condition o f the Working Class in England (1845) is only the most notorious though certainly one o f the more perceptive.
Babbage's work on political economy and on machine intelligence took its place in this genre o f works which were both products o f well-publicised tours o f the workshops and also pro
ducers o f intelligence about the factory system. Maxine Berg emphasises that "the factory sys
tem itself was a term which frequently concealed more than it revealed".28 Babbage's tours were no exception. His was one o f the handbooks with which factory tourists were supplied.
O ther representative texts included The Philosophy o f Manufactures produced from the same publisher as Babbage's work in 1835 by the Scottish consulting chemist Andrew Ure, and re
ports on the Lancashire factories produced in the 1840s by the Irish journalist William Cooke Taylor. In their well-märketed texts, the factory guides emphasised that inside the automatic system tourists would see those "admirable adaptations o f human skill and intelligence" by which "we are giving to the present age its peculiar and wonderful characteristic, namely the triumph o f mind over matter" 29 This triumph was at once a claim about the machine tool sys
tem, and thus the control o f matter by human intelligence, and a claim about labour discipline, and thus the control o f the workforce by its masters. Ure stressed the relation between "the automatic plan" and "the equalization o f labour". "The grand object therefore o f the m odem
27 Babbage, Economy o f Machinery, p. 67 ; Charles Hotzapffel, Turning and Mechanical M anipula
tion, 5 vols. (London, 1843-1884), 2: 984-91; Nasmyth to Babbage, 22 June 1855 and Babbage to W hitworth, July 1855, British Library M SS ADD ff. 249, 366. The cartoon is in de Morgan to Bab
bage, 21 October 1839, British Library M SS A D D 37191 f. 256.
28 M axine Berg, The Age o f M anufactures 1700-1820 (London. Fontana, 1985), p. 229. For factory tourism see Stephen Marcus, Engels. Manchester and the Working Class (New York: Norton, 1985), pp. 30-66 ; Francis Klingender, A rt and the Industrial Revolution (Frogmore: Paladin, 1972), pp. 109-
117.
29 M anchester as it is (Manchester: Love and Barton, 1839), pp. 201-2, 214-17, 210. For Manchester and machine tools see A.E.Musson, "Joseph W hitworth and the Growth o f Mass-production Engineer
ing", p. 113. For Chartist demonstrations in Manchester see Dorothy Thompson, The Chartists (Aldershot: Wildwood House, 1984), ch.3 and Nasmyth, Autobiography, pp. 222-228. Ure's personal connexion with Babbage is revealed in Evans to Babbage, 16 February 1835, British Library M SS ADD 37189 f. 17, where Ure asks to see the Difference Engine in person.
manufacturer is, through the union o f capital and science, to reduce the task o f his w ork
people to the exercise o f vigilance and dexterity". It was precisely for this reason that in his tours Ure judged the factory as a form o f laboratory, a potentially utopian site devoid o f strife and replete with scientific truth. "The science o f the factory" was at once a means o f disciplin
ing labour and an object-lesson in thermal physics, "better studied in a week's residence in Lancashire than in a session o f any university in Europe". A Manchester guidebook explained that the self-acting principle applied to slide control in machine lathes "is that which enables a child or the machine itself to operate on masses o f metal and to cut shavings o ff iron as if it was deprived o f all hardness and so mathematically correct than even Euclid himself might be the workman !" The tour guides agreed that accuracy was both demanded by, and a corrective to, labour resistance. "The frequent and insufferable annoyances which engineers have experi
enced from trades unions" produced "those admirable contrivances which are enabling mecha
nicians to perform such wonders in overcoming the resistance o f the material world".30 In their accounts o f this resistance, a characteristic series o f themes were developed in the litera
ture o f factory tourism. The apparently overwhelming power o f the works should rightly be understood as labour discipline within a system o f division and co-ordination, producing geo
metrical precision out o f mere manual skill in despite
of
proletarian resistance.Even if the factory were the consequence o f the adoption o f the automatic system, it was still necessary but difficult to represent the inmates o f the factory as themselves possessed o f intelligence. The puzzle o f the thinking machine was the very stuff o f this debate. N o doubt this was why the images o f the modem Prometheus and o f Athena springing fully-clad from the mind o f Zeus were so common in tourists' analyses. Had not Mary Shelley, in 1818, sub
titled her Frankenstein the "modem Prometheus" ?3 1 Defining the site o f intelligence was a key political task. Critics reiterated their suspicion that automatic machinery and factory dis
cipline mechanized the proletariat. Cooke Taylor addressed the puzzle directly. "I am willing to confess that the mechanical processes which require a continuous and unvarying repetition o f the same operation...have a tendency to degrade the workman into an automaton". He con
ceded that "there is a tendency in the use o f machinery to materialize the thoughts". But in drawing a picture o f the balance between the necessary division o f labour and the combination o f tasks required within the factory system, he urged that "such combination requires no small
30 Andrew Ure, The Philosophy o f Manufactures (London: Charles Knight, 1835), pp. 20-21, 25;
M anchester as it is, pp. 217, 32-33. Further evidence is available in Maxine Berg, ed., Technology and Toil in Nineteenth Century Britain (London: CSE Books, 1979), esp. p. 159.
31 For this debate see Tine Bruland, "Industrial conflict as a source o f technical innovation: the devel
opment o f the automatic spinning mule", Economy and Society 11 (1982), 91-121; W illiam Lazonick,
"Industrial Relations and Technical Change: the case o f the self-acting mule”, Cambridge Journal o f Economics 3 (1979), 231-62. For the Promethean and Athenan images, see Ure, Philosophy o f M anu
factures, p.367.
15
exercise o f mind and no conceivable adaptation o f w ood and iron will produce a machine that can think".32
There was thus an unresolved contradiction between stress on the subordination, and thus mechanization, o f workers' intelligence, and on the co-ordination, and thus cerebration, o f their labour. A notorious example appeared in Ure's attempts to define the term "factory". On the very same page o f his Philosophy o f Manufactures he defined the factory both as "a vast automaton composed o f various mechanical and intellectual organs.... all o f them being subor
dinated to a self-regulated moving force", and also as "the combined operation o f many orders o f work-people...in tending with assiduous skill a system o f productive machines". M arx immediately picked up this striking contradiction between automatism and skill and associated it closely with Babbage's account o f the division o f labour in the machine system. "These two descriptions [by Ure] are far from being identical. In one, the combined collective w orker appears as the dominant subject, and the mechanical automaton as the object; in the other, the automaton itself is the subject, and the workers are merely conscious organs". The "automatic workshop" posed in an unprecedentedly acute form the challenge o f situating its intellectual and thus governing principle: within the skilful workforce, as Cooke Taylor hinted, within the managerial regime, as managers themselves so often claimed, or within the machines, as Ure and Babbage boasted. 33
This problem o f the geography o f intelligence depended op the fetishization o f the machines and the reification o f the labour power exerted around them. Under the new ortho
doxies o f political economy, the surplus value extracted from the machines was the product o f the intelligence o f capital made real in the force o f steam-driven engines. On this showing,
"intelligence" itself was easily identified with just those qualities displayed by manufacturing capital and the subordinate "servants o f the machine", notably foresight and vigilance. As we have seen, these were also the virtues which Babbage reckoned made his engines think. The aim o f this polemic was to make the identity o f intelligence and capitalist machine management self-evident. Socialist, radical and plebeian critics sought, in contrast, to make it nonsensical or disastrous. This made the problem o f workers’ intelligence vital in political debate. The perva
siveness o f the language o f machine intelligence was most marked in the more sophisticated socialist analyses, for in these texts claims for the liberation o f the proletariat from the subor
dination o f factory discipline simultaneously used, and assumed, the image o f the human body as "living machinery". Engels reckoned that in Manchester the process which mechanized the
32 William Cooke Taylor, Tour in the Manufacturing Districts o f Lancashire 2nd ed. (London: Duncan and Malcolm, 1842), pp. 140, 126, 139 and Factories and the Factory System (London: Jeremiah How,
1844), p.3.
33 Andrew Ure, Dictionary o f Arts, in Manchester as it is, p.207; Ure, Philosophy o f Manufactures, p.13; Marx, Capital, p.544: he had already discussed this passage from Ure in Poverty o f Philosophy ([1847] Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1978), p.138 and Grundrisse ([1858] Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1973), p. 690, where it is linked with Babbage's Economy o f M achinery.
very bodies and minds o f the workforce would also radicalize their politics despite the capital
ists' power. Machine systems helped divide the body into specialised, monstrous capacities.
"No activity...claims the operative's thinking powers". He straightforwardly rejected the meliorist claims o f Cooke Taylor, Ure and their colleagues that machine superintendence was a form o f leisure. It was rather a form o f tedium. "The operative is condemned to let his physical and mental powers decay", Engels added; "if the operatives have nevertheless not only rescued their intelligence but cultivated and sharpened it more than other workingmen, they have found this possible only in rebellion against their fate and the bourgeoisie".34
Such remarks indicate the need to legitimate the discourse on the factory system pro
duced in the 1830s and 1840s and its polemical vocabulary o f machine intelligence. The pro
cesses o f automation and co-ordination which had spawned the factory system had made the problem o f the plaice o f intelligence urgent. Proponents o f machinofacture reckoned that the factory system was evidently a consequence o f intelligent reason and thus providential and virtuous. They situated this intelligence in the complex relation between the fixed capital o f the steam-driven engines and the mental capital o f the millowners. The workforce itself was only judged a producer o f value to the extent that it matched precisely the capacities o f the machines. The qualities attributed to this intelligence were just those required from this form
of
superintendence - anticipation and meticulous scrutiny. This was the definition o f intelligence which Babbage embodied in his machines and the sense o f intelligence which he reck
oned those machines displayed. He even claimed that these were the virtues o f divinity.
From London to Paradise: The Apotheosis o f M achine Intelligence
It was, perhaps, inevitable that Babbage should ultimately teach the supreme value o f machines possessed o f foresight and memory by attributing these powers to the Deity. Natural theology was the indispensable medium through which early Victorian savants broadcast their messages. The dominant texts o f this genre were the eight Bridgewater Treatises produced in the early 1830s by eminent divines and natural philosophers under the management o f the Royal Society. The treatise produced by William Whewell, then mathematics tutor at Trinity College Cambridge, was among the most successful
of
these works and included a claim about the relation between mathematics, automatism and atheism which Babbage decided he had to answer. His machine philosophy was here assailed from a perspective in complete contrast to that o f the radical artisans. Whewell maintained a consistent hostility to the implications o f mechanised analysis: "we may thus deny to the mechanical philosophers and mathematicians o f34 Engels, The Condition o f the Working Class in England, ed. Eric Hobsbawm (London: Granada, 1982) pp. 169, 204. For the connexion with intensification o f labour see Raphael Samuel, "The W ork
shop o f the World: Steam Power and Hand Technology in mid-Victorian Britain", History Workshop Journal 3 (1977), 6-72, p.40 and the connexion with socialist analysis o f skill in Peter Linebaugh,
"Labour History without die Labour Process", Social History 7 (1982).
17
recent times any authority with regard to their views o f the administration o f the Universe".
Worse was to follow. Whewell brutally denied that mechanised analytical calculation was proper to the formation o f the acädemic and clerical elite. In classical geometry "we tread the ground ourselves at every step feeling ourselves firrti" but in machine analysis "we are carried along as in a railroad carriage, entering it at one station and coming out o f it at another.... it is plain that the latter is not a mode o f exercising our own locomotive powers...It may be the best way for men o f business to travel but it cannot fitly be made a part o f the gymnastics o f education". 3 5
These remarks were direct blows to Babbage's programme. He called the reply to Whewell he produced in 1837 the Ninth Bridgewater Treatise and labelled it "a fragment". It amounted to a confession o f his faith that the established intellectual order was incompetent, dangerous and innumerate. Babbage had shown that memory and foresight were the two fea
tures o f intelligence represented in his machines. He now showed that these features o f machine intelligence were all that was needed to understand and model the rule o f God, whether based on the miraculous work o f the Supreme Intelligence o r on His promise o f an afterlife. "Foresight" could be shown to be responsible for all apparently miraculous and spe
cially providential events in nature. Throughout the 1830s Babbage regaled his guests with a portentous party trick. He could set the machine to print a series o f integers from unity to one million. Any observer o f the machine's output would assume that this series would continue indefinitely. But the initial setting o f the machine could be adjusted so that at a certain point the machine would then advance in steps o f ten thousand. An indefinite number o f different rules might be programmed this way. To the observer, each discontinuity would seem to be a
"tniracle", an event unpredictable from the apparent law-like course o f the machine. Yet in fact the manager o f the system would have given it foresight. His onlookers, Charles Darwin among them, were almost always impressed. Visitors "went to see the thinking machine (for such it seems)" and were treated to Babbage's miraculous show o f apparently sudden breaks in its output. "There was a sublimity in the views thus opened o f the ultimate results o f intellec
tual power", one onlooker reported. A few streets away, Darwin learnt his lesson and set out to use Babbage's system as an analogue for the origin o f species by natural law without divine intervention. Here, then, was the natural equivalent o f the systematic gaze. In answer to Whewell's boast that only induction might reveal the divine plan o f the world, and that machine analysis could never do so, Babbage countered that the world could be represented as an automatic array only visible as a system from the point o f view o f its manager. The world-sys-
35 W illiam Whewell, Astronomy and General Physics Considered with reference to Natural Theology (London: Pickering, 1834), p. 334 and O f a Liberal Education in General (London: Pickering, 1845), pp. 40-41. See Richard Yeo, "William Whewell, N atural Theology and the Philosophy o f Science in mid-nineteenth-century Britain", Annals o f Science 36 (1979), 493-516; W alter F. Cannon, "The Problem o f Miracles inthe 1830s", Victorian Studies 4 (1960), 5-32.
tern was a macroscopic version o f a factory, the philosophy o f machinery the true path to faith, and the calculating engines' power o f "volition and thought" demonstrated to all.36
Babbage was not content with making mechanizable foresight responsible for all appar
ently miraculous and specially providential events. Mechanizable memory was to be associated with the doctrine o f a future state o f rewards and punishments. "We must possess the memory o f what we did during our existence in order to give them those characteristics. In feet, mem
ory seems to be the only faculty which must o f necessity be preserved in order to render a future state possible". With this model Babbage managed to show that just those features o f intelligence displayed ifl his machine w ere also required for rational religion. Without memory, there could be no heaven nor hell, and without foresight, no providence. 3 7 The apotheosis o f the intelligent machine was an integral part o f Babbage's ambitious programme. This pro
gramme has been used here to illuminate the complex character o f systematic vision in the Industrial Revolution. In the Ninth Bridgewater Treatise, the system was coextensive with the universe, and Babbage explained that its order and logic would only be visible from a privi
leged point o f view. In his surveys o f the factories and workshops, Babbage set out to reveal the systematic character o f the machine economy by pointing out the rationale o f the produc
tion, distribution and deployment o f power in the workshops o f industrial Britain. In his pro
ject to build intelligent calculating engines, he attempted to represent himself as the intellectual manager o f the complex labour relations o f the machine-tool industry, initially disastrously, and then as part o f his overall vision o f a newly rational system o f automatic precision engi
neering. In the setting o f early Victorian society, the connexions between these worlds cannot be seen as merely metaphorical. These techniques helped make a new social order and a new form o f knowledge. The systematic gaze was designed to produce the rational order it pur
ported to discover. This is to place Babbage's project alongside those o f Bentham, whose panoptic schemes have been associated with the production o f the docile body, and o f Samuel Smiles, whose hagiographies cleverly connected the self-fashioning o f the Victorian engineers with the transformations they wrought on the material w orld.38 Under Babbage's productive gaze, the powers o f the body were simultaneously rendered mechanical and thus profitable, or wastefiil and thus consigned to oblivion.
36 Charles Babbage, Ninth Bridgewater Treatise, 2nd ed. (London: John Murray, 1838), pp. 32-43;
Lady Byron to King, 21 June 1833, in Doris Langley Moore, Ada Countess o f Lovelace (London: John Murray, 1977), p.44. Darwin's use o f Babbage's argument is discussed in Adrian Desmond and James Moore, Darwin (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991), chapter 15.
37 Babbage, Ninth Bridgewater Treatise, pp. 108-19 and Passages, p.405.
38 Foucault, "The Eye o f Power"; for Smiles on self-foshioning and system building see Thomas Parke Hughes, "Introduction", in Smiles, Selections from Lives o f the Engineers (Cambridge, MA.:
M .I.T.Press, 1966), pp. 9-25. For a brilliant analysis o f the politics o f the productive body see Catherine Gallagher, "The Body versus fee Social Body in Malfeus and Mayhew", in C.Gallagher and Thomas Laqueur, eds., The Making o f fee M odem Body (Los Angeles: California University Press, 1987), 83-106.
