The Technologists

The Technologists by Matthew Pearl

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Authors: Matthew Pearl
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the one that had led the nation into war.
    “Man is nothing without steam, nothing more than animals, anyway. Steam has given us the power of machines; now we must give machines the power of free force and movement. The iron men will be joined by iron oxen and iron horses to plow all arable land so no child will ever again starve and no man live in poverty. Carlyle says, our era, if we must give it a name, is not the Heroical but the Mechanical Age!” Hammie intoned portentously at the conclusion of his presentation, standing in front of his diagrams in the large hall. From that point on, Hammie was an oddity, at best, and would never regain a favorite, or even comfortable, status among his peers. When his idea was somehow discovered publicly, the Institute was written about in newspapers as far away as London, warning about their secret plans to diminish humankind with artificial beings, starting with the worry, of all things, that the ugly steam men would be put in hotels in the place of comely chambermaids. The steam man was held up in religious sermons to preach against the dangers of science, and used in magazine fiction to entertain juvenile readers.
    If Edwin could work out his new theory about heat and molecule vibration, he thought he could beat Hammie by a hair—although he reminded himself that it did not matter one brass farthing who was at the head of the class. He was not at Tech to
win
anything or to prove himself to others, but to be a scientist. He had started his college career at Harvard, enrolling in the science curriculum overseen by the celebrated Professor Agassiz. When the bashful freshman quietly chafed about learning chemistry through memorization of theories from books, rather than in a laboratory, Agassiz scoffed and noted that Harvard was not a place of “practical education” and would not tolerate a desire for “industrial science.”
    “You are totally uneducated, Mr. Haight! Yet you presume to question my methods?” When Edwin later expressed sympathywith theories held by Charles Darwin, and the idea that science, just like the species, would have to change and advance to survive, Agassiz asked him pointedly if he believed in God.
    “Professor. I have carried a pocket Bible since I was twelve. But didn’t God make the world a workshop for us to discover all His earthly machinery?” Edwin asked earnestly.
    There was nothing personal in Agassiz’s exclamations and outbursts—he would often forget a student’s name or substitute one pupil’s name for the other as he did with “Haight” for “Hoyt.” Yet Edwin found himself, as some kind of punishment, locked in a room filled with turtle shells, with no teacher, where he was expected to classify the markings on each and, in doing so, recognize some higher truth. Edwin grew certain during that first year that what he sought existed only at the new Institute of Technology he had read about. Of course, Agassiz would be furious at the defection. He and Rogers had had six public debates on Darwinian evolution at the Society of Natural History several years before. Even those who sympathized with Agassiz’s position admitted that Rogers won these contests. He had remained calm and collected, methodically presenting scientific fact, while Agassiz was quick with his temper and insults, thrown into an absolute fury when he was speaking and Rogers shook his head in silent disapproval. Patient and irresistibly tranquil, Rogers seemed almost to trick Agassiz into admitting several errors key to his whole argument. He used his own guns against him.
    After being examined by President Rogers, Edwin was permitted to skip freshman status and left Harvard to be placed with the Technology Class of 1868.
    The only part of the sublime Tech schedule Edwin dreaded as a sophomore was Military Drill Day, which the Institute was required to conduct for freshmen and sophomores as the price for receiving a federal grant for their plot of land. After the

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