and more alienated labor. His own solution proposed smaller, yet kinematically efficient machines that would need fewer, perhaps even just one worker to attend them—automobiles, as it were, that did not move. We will see in chapter 5 how Karl Marx, unconcerned with the kinematic implications of factory work, shifted the discussion almost exclusively to the tool end of the machine.
Far more startling than the faith Reuleaux placed in the desmodromic progress of mechanization is the fact that he did not reflect on the shape that dominated every level of his investigation: the cylinder. We have seen that on the abstract level of phoronomy he conceived of relative motion as cylindrical rolling; on the elemental level of kinematic pairs he identified the cylindrical screw and its extremes as irreducible connectors; on the level of mechanical assemblies he developed a grammar of cylinder chains; and on the grand historical scale he began with an Ur-cylinder (the fire drill) and then described mechanical progress as the replacement of contiguous by cylindrical closures. Yet nowhere did Reuleaux look beyond the confines of kinematics and identify other cylindrical structures, such as rolling mills, the pneumatic tube delivery, or the tin can; nor did he ask why this shape, rather than any other, so dominated the machines and, as we will see, the culture of his epoch. This oversight is partly due to the natural myopia of the immersed witness and practitioner, but partly to the effort it takes to see that motions, and the shapes through which they are transmitted, are historically and culturally identifiable phenomena. Our view is traditionally trained on the motor or on the tool, not on shape-dependent transmission. The following chapter will begin to right this oversight by adding historical depth to shapes and motions.
The kinematic epoch that began so neatly in 1800 with the expiration of Watt’s patent for parallel motion came to an end somewhere between the large-scale use of electrical motors, the discovery of radio transmission and X-rays toward the end of the nineteenth century, and the conflagrations of World War I. It was based on the visible, “analog” contact between moving parts and, more particularly, on the taming and conversion of rotation and translation. All of this was possible because with the emergence of the steam engine the kinematic problem of forcing and converting motion could be detached from concerns over the generation of power. The early French theorists of kinematics held out the possibility of devising a meaningful geometry of machine motion that would allow the construction of machines entirely on the drawing board. The experience of British machine builders showed that everywhere in the development of machines empirical factors would trump theoretical insight, in particular when the demands of the market and necessities of exploiting natural resources came into in play. Reuleaux, finally, sought to integrate practical and pedagogical concerns, but he also hoped that a grammar of forcing motion could be constructed that would allow the generation, the “synthesis,” of transmissions, and with it the construction of machines for any purpose whatsoever. The unthought element in this entire development was the cylinder.
CHAPTER 3
The Valuation of Motions
The ubiquity of the cylinder in the machines and products of the nineteenth century is due to its kinematic properties—its ability to force, transmit, and apply (to use a ethically paradoxical term) single-freedom motion. This insight translates the traditional triad of motor, transmission, and tool into the kinematic triad of forcing, translating, and applying motion. Kinematics, as Reuleaux’s work shows, affords a view of machines from the inside out; much like the allegorical readings of old, which focus on intra- and intertextual relations, kinematics focus not only on the design and the necessities of individual devices but also on their interrelation, sometimes across several generations and avatars.1 These relations are visible in the transmissions proper—for example, in Watt’s parallel motion, in the driving gear of a locomotive, or in the mechanism of a front loader—while they also connect the kinematics of the motor (the cylinder of the steam engine), the new motions of the tools (the rolling of steel mills), and finally the objects these machines produce (the tin can, the pipe). Kinematics provides a standpoint from which to recognize in hitherto unrelated phenomena their underlying embodiment of motion. For example, it has often been argued that the nineteenth century, through its ability to machine and lubricate journal bearings, reinvented the wheel; but half-journal bearings were also used to allow the Galerie des Machines, an iconic iron and glass structure that spanned the largest interior space in the world in 1889, to expand and contract.2 Just as we can think kinematically of the Galerie as a minimally moving wheel, we can think of the film camera as a lathe that carves light onto film, or of the fountain pen and the gasholder as the scalar extremes of a cylinder-piston assembly. Even the bridges of the nineteenth century, subject to so much debate, experimentation, and failure, conserve in the curvature of their arches and straightness of their carriageways the motion with which their parts were produced and with which they were launched from bank to bank—they, too, are frozen transmissions.3 The Jena Romantics had the idea of breaking up the reification of the world by romanticizing it; kinematicizing the world of the nineteenth century similarly dissolves its massive structures, but it does so without introducing alien interpretive categories. Rather, we learn to see what Walter Benjamin has called the disfigured similarities (entstellte Ähnlichkeiten) that make up the coherence of the epoch.4
Yet kinematics discloses not only synchronic similarities across the epoch but also the profound historical and metaphysical conflict leading up to the forcing of rotational and translational motion in nineteenth-century cylinders. This conflict, the barest outlines of which are the subject of the following pages, has commanded little attention because techno-historical scholarship of the epoch has concentrated on kinematics’ invisible other, the discovery and implementation of induction electricity—produced, to be sure, by the rotation of a magnet around a cylindrical coil, and hailed as a prime instance of convertibility. Electricity led to technologies and media that are no longer analog but, like an electrical spark, jump a gap. Telegraphy was its first successful application, and it is not hard to understand why it garners such attention—the difference between positive and negative, long and short, on and off, 0 and 1, seems to indicate a minimum of meaning amid the randomness of thermodynamic processes and thus to furnish the kind of interface between physical and intellectual realms that has long been the goal of modern natural science.5 Of course, such processes, and their implementation in various media, are critically important, in particular for the archaeology of our own digital present; but scholarship rarely treats them as what they literally are, dei ex machina. Telegraphy, for example, depends entirely on cylindrical objects and processes—on the rolling of wires and cables, on the railway lines along which wires were strung, on the steamships from which they were laid across the ocean, and finally on the rotating drums in telegraphic transmitters and receivers. Similar kinematics underlie the development of the film camera.
The tactile and epistemological difference between analog kinematics and digital electricity is nicely captured in the reaction to the transition from gas to electrical lighting in private households around 1880. Early users of electricity remarked how uncanny it was to switch on the light, thus turning darkness to light (almost) instantaneously, rather than to open the tap and light the gradually emerging gas.6 Both the unfathomable speed and the invisibility of electrical transmission raised concerns about the very fabric of the world. The growing popularity of all sorts of communications with invisible figures in séances is further testimony to the emergence of paradigms of invisible contact. Oswald Spengler, decrying the decline of the West at the beginning of the twentieth century, lamented that through electricity the bodies of machines “become ever more spiritual, ever more taciturn. The wheels, cylinders, and levers no longer talk. All that is important withdraws into the interior.” Walter Benjamin, reading Charles Baudelaire’s Flowers of Evil (1857), equated the disappearance of visible causation with the loss of meaningful experience, to be replaced by the (essentially meaningless) electrical sensation of repetitive shock.7
The disappearance of the machine from the visible, auditory, and tactile world imposes the question: If the electrical and digital age constitutes the far end of the epoch of the cylinder,
