The Cylinder

FLASHPOINTS

The series solicits books that consider literature beyond strictly national and disciplinary frameworks, distinguished both by their historical grounding and their theoretical and conceptual strength. We seek studies that engage theory without losing touch with history and work historically without falling into uncritical positivism. FlashPoints aims for a broad audience within the humanities and the social sciences concerned with moments of cultural emergence and transformation. In a Benjaminian mode, Flash-Points is interested in how literature contributes to forming new constellations of culture and history and in how such formations function critically and politically in the present. Available online at http://repositories.cdlib.org/ucpress.

Series Editors

Ali Behdad (Comparative Literature and English, UCLA)

Judith Butler (Rhetoric and Comparative Literature, UC Berkeley), Founding Editor

Edward Dimendberg (Film & Media Studies, UC Irvine), Coordinator

Catherine Gallagher (English, UC Berkeley), Founding Editor

Jody Greene (Literature, UC Santa Cruz)

Susan Gillman (Literature, UC Santa Cruz)

Richard Terdiman (Literature, UC Santa Cruz)

1. On Pain of Speech: Fantasies of the First Order and the Literary Rant, by Dina Al-Kassim

2. Moses and Multiculturalism, by Barbara Johnson, with a foreword by Barbara Rietveld

3. The Cosmic Time of Empire: Modern Britain and World Literature, by Adam Barrows

4. Poetry in Pieces: César Vallejo and Lyric Modernity, by Michelle Clayton

5. Disarming Words: Empire and the Seductions of Translation in Egypt, by Shaden M. Tageldin

6. Wings for Our Courage: Gender, Erudition, and Republican Thought, by Stephanie H. Jed

7. The Cultural Return, by Susan Hegeman

8. Reading Delhi: The Politics of Language and Literary Production in India, by Rashmi Sadana

9. The Cylinder: Kinematics of the Nineteenth Century, by Helmut Müller-Sievers

The Cylinder

Kinematics of the Nineteenth Century

Helmut Müller-Sievers

University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu.

University of California Press

Berkeley and Los Angeles, California

University of California Press, Ltd.

London, England

© 2012 by The Regents of the University of California

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Müller-Sievers, Helmut.

  The cylinder : kinematics of the nineteenth century / Helmut Müller-Sievers.

         p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-520-27077-0 (pbk. : acid-free paper)

  1. Literature, Modern—19th century—Themes, motives. 2. Machinery in literature. 3. Mechanics in literature. 4. Science in popular culture.

5. Cylinders. I. Title.

PN56.M2M85 2012

     809’.915 23

2011033138

Manufactured in the United States of America

21  20  19  18  17  16  15  14  13  12

10  9  8  7  6  5  4  3  2  1

In keeping with a commitment to support environmentally responsible and sustainable printing practices, UC Press has printed this book on 50-pound Enterprise, a 30% post-consumer-waste, recycled, deinked fiber that is processed chlorine-free. It is acid-free and meets all ANSI/NISO (z 39.48) requirements.

For J and s,

. . . ardorem cupiens dissimulare meum.

Contents

Acknowledgments

PART ONE: THE PREHISTORY AND METAPHYSICS OF THE CYLINDER

1. Introduction

2. The Rise of Kinematics

3. The Valuation of Motions

PART TWO: CYLINDERS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

4. The Cylinder as Motor

5. The Cylinder as Tool

6. Kinematics of Narration I: Dickens and the Motion of Serialization

7. The Cylinder as Enclosure

8. Kinematics of Narration II: Balzac and the Cylindrical Shape of the Plot

9. Gears and Screws

10. Kinematics of Narration III: Henry James and the Turn of the Screw

Epilogue

Notes

Works Cited

Index

Acknowledgments

This book originated as a presentation in the fabled colloquium of Hans-Joerg Rheinberger’s Abteilung II at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin in 2003. It was revived for a fellowship at the Institut für Kulturforschung in Vienna in 2006, where the director, Hans Belting, was a champion of the project and Ed Dimendberg first proposed to include it in the FlashPoints series. Most of the research was completed during a fellowship at the Getty Research Center 2007–8 with the help of its magnificent library staff. Correspondence, and finally a meeting in March 2009, with Francis Moon, the spiritus rector of KMODDL, the kinematics research group at Cornell, and the best expert of Franz Reuleaux’s work, pushed the project toward completion. A Kayden Grant from the University of Colorado at Boulder helped defray the cost of image rights.

For anyone searching for an infallible means of testing who your real friends are, I recommend subjecting them, with no end in sight, to incessant talk of cylinders, rotation, and kinematics. Those who years later will still speak to you either have great patience or great powers of feigning interest, both excellent character traits in one’s friends.

Among those who survived the ordeal and who supported the project in its various stages I want to mention in particular Marshall Brown, Robert Buch, Ruediger Campe, Tom Cummins, Heinrich Detering, Eric Downing, Peter Galison, Michael Gamper, Peter Geimer, Eva Geulen, Anthony Grafton, Sepp Gumbrecht, Michael Hagner, Deborah Hodges Maschietto, Michael Hutter, Albrecht Koschorke, Karen Lang, Elmer Lewis, David Maisel, Ethel Matala de Mazza, Charlotte Metcalf, Gloria Meynen, Bob Pippin, Lois Renner, Simon Schaffer, Henning Schmidgen, Anette Schwarz, Mark Seltzer, Bernhard Siegert, Davide Stimilli, Ralph Ubl, Joseph Vogl, David Wellbery, Christopher Wild, Carsten Zelle.

Moving to the University of Colorado at Boulder not only has placed me in a physical environment in which one of the key concepts of this book, torque, can be experienced on rides up Lefthand Canyon but also has given me new friends, colleagues, and interlocutors: Adam Bradley, Chris Braider, Jeff Cox, Jill Heydt-Stevenson, Anne Schmiesing, John Stevenson, Davide Stimilli, and Paul Youngquist. My assistant at the Center for Humanities and the Arts, Paula Anderson, has helped greatly with the last versions of the manuscript (and assorted emergencies). Ed Dimendberg has accompanied this project with unfailing kindness, professionalism, and intellectual guidance.

PART ONE

The Prehistory and Metaphysics of the Cylinder

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

The nineteenth century abounds in cylinders. Locomotives and paper machines, gasholders and Yale locks, sanitation pipes and wires, rotary printing presses and steam rollers, silos and conveyor belts, kymographs and phonographs, panoramas and carousels, tin cans and top hats—each of these objects is based on the cylindrical form, and each could be—and some have been—the starting point for a comprehensive interpretation of the epoch’s culture. To state it in the form of a necessary condition, without the cylinder the Industrial Revolution, and the culture it brought forth, would be unthinkable.

How can we account sufficiently for this proliferation of cylindrical objects and processes? The answers given in the following pages are at the same time obvious and recondite, factual and metaphysical, technical and historical. In their most basic form, they amount to the proposition that cylinders allow the isolation, transmission, conversion, and application of rotational and translational (straight-line) motion in machines. The displacement of translational motion is necessary to do work; but since machines and mechanisms are (like their makers) finite, this motion has to be returned. Translational motion has to be forced into reciprocating and rotational motion, while rotational motion has to be forced and anchored by straight guides and frames. The cylinder embodies both translational motion along its axis and rotational motion around its wall. Because every point on the cylinder’s wall is equidistant from its central axis, the wall’s surface is intrinsically flat and thus can impart the all-important motion of rolling.

On these bare kinetic explanations rests a vast edifice of historical and metaphysical dimensions. Philosophical speculation in the West begins with the dispute about the reality of motion as the elemental distinction between being and nonbeing. The genealogy of the cylinder reveals the opposition of rotational and translational motion as one of the starkest conceptual oppositions in Western metaphysics, one that until the Scientific Revolution and beyond was tantamount to the distinction between divine and human, perfect and imperfect, rational and irrational qualities.

This opposition—and the fact of its forced reconciliation in the cylinder—arises from an absence that for all its simplicity still is stunning: nothing on earth rotates.¹ Nothing in our life-world turns continuously around its own axis, least of all parts of our own bodies. That is why rotational motion is always forced, technical motion, and that is why the question of technics on its most fundamental level equals the question of whether and how to force continuous rotation. It is the epochal achievement of nineteenth-century machines and their cylindrical components to have made rotation universally available, and at the same time to have brought to light the limits of technics: it begins where the body ends. The machines born in the nineteenth century are not sufficiently understood as tools, they are not monstrous projections of human organs into the world. Rather, they disrupt the imaginary continuity of nature and human being and introduce with their motions a literally inhuman element into the world. The negotiation of the limits between human and inhuman motion is going to be the subtext of most of the object descriptions that follow.

Before exemplifying these propositions and looking more closely at the various cylinders that populate the nineteenth century we may do well to probe into the relations between rotation and translation, freedom and force, inhumanity and technics at the outset of the age of machines, and to set them in a historical frame that encompasses their theological, philosophical, and aesthetic dimensions. A singular and visionary text written at the inception of the cylinder’s epoch will be our guide.

. . .

In 1810, Heinrich von Kleist published an essay entitled Über das Marionettentheater.² It recounts an accidental conversation between the narrator and the primo ballerino of the local opera house, Herr C. When the narrator finds him watching the performance of a puppet theater in the public gardens, C. professes to be fascinated by the puppets’ movements, and in the course of the conversation he outlines his idea that only a fully mechanized, unconscious body could be truly graceful. Both interlocutors go on to relate examples of the interference of consciousness with the grace of human motion, but it is Herr C. who most passionately advocates the elimination of all subjectivity from dance, going so far as to liken the goal of full mechanization with the return to paradise.

The text appeared, in four installments, in Kleist’s own Berliner Abendblätter, one of the early daily newspapers in Germany still printed on hand-operated presses that could perform only translational up-and-down movements and on paper produced sheet by rectangular sheet. While the slowness of this process was the reason for the slight volume of the paper—not more than six to eight pages per edition—the Prussian censors made sure that the content consisted mainly of trivial police reports, epigrams, and Kleist’s seemingly innocuous anecdotes.³ There was to be no news that could foster unrest among the citizens, no opinion piece that would directly address the oppressed state of city and country. After the collapse of the Holy Roman Empire in 1806 and the subsequent trauma of French occupation, the governor of Berlin had justified strict censorship of the press with perhaps the most famous order in the German language: Ruhe ist die erste Bürgerpflicht (Rest is every citizen’s first duty).⁴

Über das Marionettentheater is uniquely concerned with the state of unrest. It seeks to articulate in deliberately provocative ways the relationship between motion, subjectivity, and redemption. To propose an exhaustive account of motion without any regard to subjectivity and theology had of course been the goal of Newton’s science of rational mechanics since the late seventeenth century; and a century later, Pierre Simon Laplace (for a brief time Napoleon’s minister of the interior) had succeeded in purging Newton’s theory of its last metaphysical remainders, such as the apparent irregularities of planetary orbits that required God’s redressing hand.⁵ Newtonian mechanics described a world in which all causes of motion were external to bodies and in which every motion, every change in motion, could be expressed in mathematical equations. Translated back into the realm of human history and community, the key concepts of rational mechanics—inertia, resistance, mass, collision, equation, revolution—could take on disturbing political overtones. The cult of reason before and during the French Revolution had all but deified Newton and had made ample, cross-cultural references to his achievements. After all, the emblematic mechanism of the terreur, the guillotine, harnessed gravity to do rationally what had hitherto been reserved for the extravagant demonstration of a sovereign’s wrath.⁶

It was not the least motivation of Friedrich Schiller’s project of aesthetic education—conceived shortly after the guillotine’s bloody reign—to exorcise the specter of such mechanical politics.⁷ Societies are composed of human bodies, Schiller insisted, and like all animal bodies they contain the principle of motion within themselves. What is more, human motion expresses a moral sense—sympathy—that mediates between the constrained mechanics of skeletomuscular motion and the unbounded freedom of the mind; it escapes all mathematical notations.⁸ The aesthetic effect of this moral mediation is gracefulness—the ineffable quality of human motion that represents in the world of moving bodies what beauty is for stationary objects.⁹ To move gracefully means to be in harmony with oneself, which in the gendered terms of Weimar Classicism meant to be a woman, or a man educated and graced by a woman. The outward representation of such harmony is dance. For Schiller, the remedy for a fractured and revolutionary society of colliding straight-line forces is the invitation to a dance in which individual and collective motions revolve around one another in a harmonious whole.

The thrust of Kleist’s text against this fusion of motion, subjectivity, and grace—against the core convictions of Weimar Classicism—must have been easily detectable for readers in 1810. Herr C.’s argument that inhuman marionettes exhibit more grace in their motions than human dancers, that, in fact, every instant of reflection prevents gracefulness, aims straight at the center of Schiller’s (and Goethe’s) attempt to bridge the chasm between body and mind, to install aesthetics above mechanics. At the same time, however, Herr C.’s quest for grace in motion reintroduces into natural philosophy the very theological parameters that Newton and the Newtonians had sought to eliminate. When the two interlocutors equate the loss of grace with the expulsion from paradise, they shift the attention from the moral to the anagogical sense of the concept. In its theological context, grace in motion—Grazie or Anmut—is the sign of paradisiacal wholeness, an embodied reminder of the innocence that was shattered irrevocably by the desire for knowledge. Weimar Classicism, cheerfully proclaiming its own paganism, held that paradise was just a mythological name for a historical formation, namely ancient Greece, that its loss was the result not of sin but of a history of decadence decisively shaped by the Christian Church, and that regaining paradise was, at least in principle, possible through a reawakening of the aesthetic sensibilities of antiquity, such as the moral feeling expressed in graceful motion. The notion of Bildung, so often evoked in the context of nineteenth-century German pedagogy, expressed this hope for an individual and secular recuperation of grace.¹⁰ Kleist’s Herr C. explores a radically different avenue to the restitution of grace: rather than promoting aesthetic education, he speculates that the return to grace will come as the result of a complete dehumanization and mechanization of motion.

This hope in the redemptive power of mechanical motion, then, was a broadside against Weimar Classicism, which, championed by Wilhelm von Humboldt and his Bildungs-reforms, had arrived in the Prussian capital just when Kleist published his short text. But the essay does more than polemicize, and what it does in addition is what makes it so interesting for our understanding of the future of mechanisms and their relations to culture and aesthetics in the nineteenth century—a future that is embodied in the cylinder and its kinematic properties. For unlike Romantic writers like E. T. A. Hoffmann or Mary Shelley, Kleist does not focus on the origin of motion or life in the puppets, nor does he marvel at their mimetic and illusory power. He does not mention the automata that delighted the eighteenth century before they began to haunt early nineteenth-century literature with their imitation of human consciousness and affectivity: he is solely interested in the spectacle of their motion.¹¹ In the terms of nineteenth-century engineering, he focuses on marionettes neither as motors nor as tools but as transmissions. Discovering generalities in the transmission of motion is the purpose of nineteenth-century kinematics, a discipline as obscured by the awe of motors and the anxiety over mechanized tools as is the understanding of Kleist’s text by the biography of its author and the speculations about its programmatic aim.¹² The genealogy of kinematics as an independent discipline is the subject of the next chapter.

It is true that the focus on kinematics in Kleist’s text is hidden behind what seem to be traditional hermeneutic and moral concerns. When asked whether making marionettes dance requires artistry on the part of the puppeteer, Herr C. claims that there is a center of gravity in every motion and that the line traced by this center is identical with the way of the soul of the dancer.¹³ To perfect the dance, then, the puppeteer—Kleist calls him the machinist—must place himself in the gravitational center of the marionette. This hermeneutic imperative of empathy is draped in mathematical language: the lines of motion, C. says, are either straight or of computable curvature, and the fingers of the puppeteer and the motion of the puppets are related rather like numbers to their logarithms or the asymptote to the hyperbola.¹⁴ But this second-order grace is achieved by a sleight of hand. As Kleist—who once divided people into those who understand metaphors and those who understand formulas—knew very well, mathematical metaphors, conjoining algebraic precision and the vagueness of the rather like (etwa wie), are inherently contradictory. As failed metaphors—catachreses—such figures of speech at the same time open and attempt to cover over a conceptual gap.¹⁵ In Herr C.’s case, this gap appears earlier in his statement that every motion has a gravitational center. Within the basic parameters of Newtonian physics, only individual bodies, not motions, have a center of gravity: it is the imaginary, non-extended point in which, for the purpose of calculation, all of a body’s mass is concentrated.¹⁶ The mathematization of motion in Newton’s rational mechanics—and with it the possibility of attributing grace to unforced motion—is based on the assumption that bodies can at the same time be treated as nonextended points that trace out curves in the Cartesian coordinate system and as massive atoms that are subject to the law of inertia. This latter law—Newton’s first law of motion—guarantees the continuity of motion; the geometrical inscription, on the other hand, allows for the calculation of its form. Gravitational center of motion, then, is the catachresis that reopens what historians of science call Newton’s great synthesis—his ability to treat discrete, massive bodies like continuous geometric shapes.¹⁷ In its attempt to cover up, the phrase brings attention to the abyss underneath the signal achievement of rational mechanics, the law of universal gravitation, by means of which the motion of physical entities is inscribed into the reversible and predictable grid of geometry.

Any endeavor to attack Newton’s mechanics frontally would be quixotic, given its explanatory success and its consolidation and empirical verification throughout the eighteenth and the early nineteenth centuries. But the bulk of that success—for example, the prediction of the return of Halley’s comet in 1758—was based on the motion of bodies so distant in a space so vast that indeed they could be treated as imaginary point masses. But what explanatory and predictive power do the laws of motion have for bodies moving close at hand—for bodies that can exhibit grace to human eyes? There is, of course, the anecdote of the falling apple at Woolsthorpe that the Newtonians kept reciting to underscore the universality of gravitation; but aside from ballistics experts, who would routinely experience the free fall of objects, let only find their translational motion graceful? What can Newton’s laws say about objects that do not simply fall but move nonetheless, such as wagon wheels, water pumps, pendulum clocks?¹⁸

This is the point of Herr C.’s fascination with, and critique of, marionettes. In a double sense he interprets them as pendulums: first, because the puppet follows the hand of the machinist with the lag of a string pendulum such that the straight-line motion of the hand is translated into the lagging curve of the logarithmic or hyperbolic function; second, because the limbs of each individual puppet, which are only pendulums, are not tied to myriads of strings and therefore follow the gravitational center of the motion in the puppet with a hesitation that inevitably results in curves. For marionettes as pendulums, the law of gravity is literally suspended—they are antigrav, as Kleist says—but the law of inertial motion persists. That persistence, and the lag that results from it, is precisely the reason for the marionette’s imperfection: it grants an abode for the last fraction of human volition—later in the essay it is called affectation (Ziererei)—that threatens to interrupt the grace of motion. The only way to overcome this danger is to eliminate the effects of inertia as well, and that is exactly what Herr C. hopes for: Yet he did believe this last fraction of human volition could be removed from the marionettes and their dance transferred entirely to the realm of mechanical forces, even produced . . . by turning a crank. The instantaneous transmission of motion by a crank suspends the effects of gravitational and inertial forces; it is the—often overlooked—ideal in Kleist’s anecdote. Herr C. believes that perfect grace can be embodied, not in marionettes, but in crank-driven mechanisms.¹⁹

From the pendulum to the crank: it is hard to exaggerate the significance of this transition. Both are material objects built for a specific use, but both are also, in Hans-Joerg Rheinberger’s felicitous terminology, epistemic things: they embody ways of knowing and doing that exceed their functionality and historical employment.²⁰ Residing below the threshold of fully articulated theories, they can serve—as Herr C. shows with the pendulous marionette—as their material critique and challenge. The pendulum, beginning at the latest with Galileo’s (mistaken) assumption that its period is isochronous and can therefore be used to translate space into time, has both spurred and defied the development of modern physics and mechanics.²¹ Cranks, from an epistemic point of view, are the answer to the weaknesses of the pendulum: they seek to overcome the inertial lag inherent in pendulums through direct, continuous contact.²² This means that their motions are defined, no longer by the forces governing Newtonian mechanics, but by their own shape. In the following pages we will see that the rudimentary shape governing the construction of all motion transmission, including the crank, is the cylinder. The pendulum is a passive instrument, but the crank drives a transmission. Hoping for a transition from one to the other, as Herr C. does, and discovering grace in fully contiguous motion, signals the advent of a new understanding and appreciation of machines.

Yet it is not only from the theoretical heights of such concepts as epistemic things that the transition from pendulums to cranks gains relevance. To the contrary, at the time of Kleist’s writing this transition had become the crucial factor in the very real process of industrialization that was beginning to take hold in England. As we will see in greater detail in the next chapter, James Watt’s decisive innovation in the design of steam engines concerned the manner in which the steam cylinder was connected to the working beam. Before his patent for the ingenious parallel-motion transmission, this connection consisted of chains or ropes—steam engines were, in essence, gigantic pendulums and were therefore limited to do lifting and pumping work.²³ Watt’s transmission, which used the connecting rod as a crank, freed steam engines from this limitation and thereby turned them into the universal engine of industrialization. These new mechanisms, and with them the new era of motion control, would have been all the more desirable for someone living in Berlin in 1810: with his imposition of the Continental System in 1806, Napoleon had cut off the Continent from British imports and technical knowledge. The expression of a desire for a crank-driven mechanism also carried a distinct—and in Kleist’s case certainly not unwelcome—whiff of anti-Napoleonic polemics.

Another dimension to Kleist’s anecdote further connects the motion of the marionettes to the motion of machines and to the massive metaphysical and cultural shift they will bring about. While Herr C. concentrates on the two dimensions in which the puppets transform the linear impulse of inertial motion into the pendular curves of the limbs, the narrator notes that part of the naturalness in the puppets’ dance stems from the way they dance a round dance (die Ronde).A group of four peasants doing a round dance to a rapid beat could not have been more prettily painted by Teniers.²⁴ The ronde—the Reigen, whose motion Arthur Schnitzler would famously use as a narrative figure in his eponymous novella—is a dance that represents not so much curvilinear as rotational motion. Facing and holding each other’s hands, the dancers rotate around a common center; they experience, and by the grip of their hands counter, the centrifugal forces that Newton identified as real indicators of the immutability and absoluteness of space.²⁵ The rich cultural significance of this type of dancing can be gleaned from the scene in Goethe’s Werther where the protagonist falls in love with Lotte while waltzing with her—the waltz, like the ronde, consists in a rotational figure the axis of which intersects the gaze of the dancers while their bodies form a virtual cylindrical space around them. We will encounter multiple avatars of this motion in nineteenth-century artifacts; what is important at the moment is the difference between circular or curvilinear motion—which Newton’s mathematical success in calculating the orbits of planets and comets had explained as the sum of two compounding translational motions—and rotation, which is a genuine motion without translational displacement. This difference, as chapter 3 will show, is at the heart of Western valuations of motion, in which rotation has traditionally been associated with transcendence and divinity. The difference between a pendulum arrangement—like Newton’s bucket, like the marionette—and a rigid linkage like a crank to induce rotation will become crucially important in nineteenth-century machines (one of the favorite apparatuses of the time, the chairoplane, uses both).

It is not simply a deconstructive metaphor to claim that Kleist’s text itself resembles a machine that provokes and produces its own interpretations. Its composition, its logical and performative contradictions, even its mode of publication generate so much friction that attentive readers, like attentive engineers, try to supply argumentative lubrication to make the text and its arguments run more smoothly. The present account of the techno-historical subtext of the