Romantic Engines

Invited Paper: “What is an engine and what is an engineer? William Hazlitt described Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France as ‘a dangerous engine in the hands of power’. Jon Klancher writes that Wordsworth could ‘imagine the reading of a poem as a personal exchange of “power” between writer and reader’. The notion of writing being an engine, a machine that produces ‘a physical effect’ (OED), that could convert ‘power into motion’, moving people to action, was current in the Romantic period both literally and figuratively. It was during this period that most mechanical advances were made. Keith Gilbert writes that, in ‘1775 the machine tools at the disposal of industry had scarcely advanced beyond those available in the Middle Ages: by 1850 the majority of modern machine-tools had been invented’ (The History of Technology). Nevertheless, there has been little critical engagement between Romanticism and engineering cultures—despite prominent literary figures, such as Thomas Love Peacock and Percy Shelley, being engaged in building steamships. There is a gap between how embedded engines and industry were in cultures of the period and how alien that notion now seems. For Gilbert Simondon, that distance arises from not understanding technology: ‘the most powerful cause of alienation in the contemporary world resides in this misunderstanding of the machine, which is not an alienation caused by the machine, but by the non-knowledge of its nature and essence’ (On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects). In this talk I will examine the notion of what an engineer is. I will discuss engines and in particular the lead-screw lathe (1798), the first machine capable of self-replication. I will also assess the relationship between machines and craft in pursuit of flatness and greater accuracy.”