printing of Charles Dickensâs A Christmas Carol , deemed âan immediate success with the public,â sold 6,000 copies.)
Babbage opens his book with a paean that played directly into the growing British self-satisfaction with their industrial triumphs:
There exists, perhaps, no single circumstance that distinguishes our country more remarkably from all others, than the vast extent and perfection to which we have carried the contrivance of tools and machines for forming those conveniences of which so large a quantity is consumed by almost every class of the community. . . . If we look around at the rooms we inhabit, or through those storehouses of every convenience, of every luxury that man can desire, which deck the crowded streets of our larger cities, we shall find . . . in the art of making even the most insignificant of them, processes calculated to excite our imagination by their simplicity, or to rivet our attention by their unlooked-for results.
The book positioned him as a thought leader in achieving a new synthesis of traditional culture and manufacturing. Instead of merely lamenting Blakeâs âdark Satanic mills,â thinkers like Carlyle extolled the coming of an âorganic societyâ that integrated the âDynamicalâ and âMechanicalâ aspects of human nature. 39 Babbage plays directly to that sentiment, emphasizing the utilitarian beauty of machines and the elegant objects of artâthe machined rosettes, lithographs, and engravingsâthat they can produce, or reproduce, for the masses.
Great Britainâs mid-century Crystal Palace Exhibition (see Chapter 7) was organized on much the same principle: it celebrated not only the nationâs technical preeminence but also the new intellectual order it signified. The exhibitionâs royal patron, Prince Albert, organized a yearlong lecture series to explore precisely that theme: that industrial capitalism was allowing âman to approach a more complete fulfillment of that great and sacred mission which he has to perform in this world.â (There can be no doubt that by âmanâ he meant Anglo-Saxons.) The inaugural lecture was
delivered by the master of Trinity College, William Whewell, who eulogized âthe Machinery mighty as the thunderbolt to rend the oak, or light as the breath of air that carries the flower-dust to its appointed place.â 40
Self-satisfaction is a dangerous sentiment for any competitor but may be understandable in the British case, since with Napoleon vanquished, there were no obvious threats on the horizon. Yet the countryâs industrial revolution was advanced enough that both proprietors and workers were deeply invested in established methods. Scar tissue still remained from the fierce Luddite attacks against textile mills in the first years of the century, and the severely repressive response of the government. With the production machinery seemingly working well enough, it was seductively easy to ignore British industrial rigidities and concentrate instead on attractive challenges, like pushing out the boundaries of precision or defining a new aesthetic for an industrial age.
The Americans had no such inclinations, and since they were starting over, they faced almost no entrenched interests. Ironically, what became an American specialty, the extension of the textile-mill model of mechanized mass production to almost every major industry, was also pioneered in Great Britain, but the innovation was stillborn. The story requires winding the camera back to a critical juncture in the Napoleonic wars.
The Portsmouth Block-Making Factory
The prototype for all plants engaged in mass production of heavy industrial goods by self-acting machinery is the famous British ship-block factory at Portsmouth. It was the creation of the young Henry Maudslay and two other extraordinary men, Samuel Bentham and Marc Isambard Brunel, and was in full operation the
Babbage opens his book with a paean that played directly into the growing British self-satisfaction with their industrial triumphs:
There exists, perhaps, no single circumstance that distinguishes our country more remarkably from all others, than the vast extent and perfection to which we have carried the contrivance of tools and machines for forming those conveniences of which so large a quantity is consumed by almost every class of the community. . . . If we look around at the rooms we inhabit, or through those storehouses of every convenience, of every luxury that man can desire, which deck the crowded streets of our larger cities, we shall find . . . in the art of making even the most insignificant of them, processes calculated to excite our imagination by their simplicity, or to rivet our attention by their unlooked-for results.
The book positioned him as a thought leader in achieving a new synthesis of traditional culture and manufacturing. Instead of merely lamenting Blakeâs âdark Satanic mills,â thinkers like Carlyle extolled the coming of an âorganic societyâ that integrated the âDynamicalâ and âMechanicalâ aspects of human nature. 39 Babbage plays directly to that sentiment, emphasizing the utilitarian beauty of machines and the elegant objects of artâthe machined rosettes, lithographs, and engravingsâthat they can produce, or reproduce, for the masses.
Great Britainâs mid-century Crystal Palace Exhibition (see Chapter 7) was organized on much the same principle: it celebrated not only the nationâs technical preeminence but also the new intellectual order it signified. The exhibitionâs royal patron, Prince Albert, organized a yearlong lecture series to explore precisely that theme: that industrial capitalism was allowing âman to approach a more complete fulfillment of that great and sacred mission which he has to perform in this world.â (There can be no doubt that by âmanâ he meant Anglo-Saxons.) The inaugural lecture was
delivered by the master of Trinity College, William Whewell, who eulogized âthe Machinery mighty as the thunderbolt to rend the oak, or light as the breath of air that carries the flower-dust to its appointed place.â 40
Self-satisfaction is a dangerous sentiment for any competitor but may be understandable in the British case, since with Napoleon vanquished, there were no obvious threats on the horizon. Yet the countryâs industrial revolution was advanced enough that both proprietors and workers were deeply invested in established methods. Scar tissue still remained from the fierce Luddite attacks against textile mills in the first years of the century, and the severely repressive response of the government. With the production machinery seemingly working well enough, it was seductively easy to ignore British industrial rigidities and concentrate instead on attractive challenges, like pushing out the boundaries of precision or defining a new aesthetic for an industrial age.
The Americans had no such inclinations, and since they were starting over, they faced almost no entrenched interests. Ironically, what became an American specialty, the extension of the textile-mill model of mechanized mass production to almost every major industry, was also pioneered in Great Britain, but the innovation was stillborn. The story requires winding the camera back to a critical juncture in the Napoleonic wars.
The Portsmouth Block-Making Factory
The prototype for all plants engaged in mass production of heavy industrial goods by self-acting machinery is the famous British ship-block factory at Portsmouth. It was the creation of the young Henry Maudslay and two other extraordinary men, Samuel Bentham and Marc Isambard Brunel, and was in full operation the
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