The Philosophical Breakfast Club (52 page)

In the fall of 1850, Babbage visited his friend William Parsons, the third Earl of Rosse, at his home in Ireland. The two men spent a night peering through the “Leviathan of Parsonstown,” Lord Rosse’s seventy-two-inch telescope, which would remain the largest telescope in the world until the twentieth century. With it, Rosse would go on to discover the spiral shape of many nebulae, which we now know to be spiral galaxies. The telescope was mounted for use by February of 1845, and it could easily have been used to discover Neptune before Galle saw the planet—if only Airy had sent Adams’s prediction to him.
³⁹
Rosse showed Babbage how clearly Neptune could be seen in the Leviathan, as Babbage excitedly reported in a letter to Ada Lovelace.
⁴⁰

Rosse was fascinated by Babbage’s engines, and must have listened with great interest as Babbage described his newest one. Rosse was at that time president of the Royal Society. He told Babbage that, since the conservative government of Peel had been out of office for some years, Babbage should give the British establishment another chance to build one of his engines. Rosse asked Babbage whether he would give the plans and drawings of this new machine to the government if they would commit to building it. Babbage agreed to these terms, and Rosse wrote to Lord Derby, then prime minister, enclosing a letter from Babbage and recommendations from Herschel, Adams, and James Nasmyth, one of the leading engineering manufacturers of the time. Nasmyth had come to fame as the inventor of the steam hammer, which he had devised in response to difficulties faced in forging the paddle shaft of the huge SS
Great Britain
(the ship’s design was later altered to run by propellers rather than paddles). Nasmyth’s hammer enabled the engineer to control the force
of each blow with such precision that with one blow an egg in a wineglass could be broken without shattering the crystal, while the next blow could not only crush the glass but also cause the whole building to shake.
⁴¹
In his letter to Lord Derby, Nasmyth pointed out that the money spent on the still uncompleted Difference Engine Number 1 had not been wasted, because the work on the machine had led to advances in machine equipment and manufacturing techniques worth many times more than the money expended for it. Derby referred the matter to his chancellor of the exchequer, Benjamin Disraeli, who nixed it on the grounds that “the projects of Mr. Babbage [have been] so indefinitely expensive, the ultimate success so problematical, and the expenditure certainly so large, and so utterly incapable of being calculated.”
⁴²
(No one, it seems, could resist the punning urge when confronted with Mr. Babbage and his engines.)

Rosse exhorted Babbage to take the matter up before Parliament, but Babbage refused, feeling that he had already suffered enough from the effects of throwing “pearls before swine.”
⁴³
He later more bitterly commented, “Propose to an Englishman any … instrument, however admirable, and you will observe that the whole effort of the English mind is directed to find a difficulty, defect, or an impossibility in it. If you speak to him of a machine for peeling a potato, he will pronounce it impossible; if you peel a potato with it before his eyes, he will declare it useless, because it will not slice a pineapple.”
⁴⁴

A
S EVEN
B
ABBAGE
acknowledged, the British exhibited a very different attitude toward machinery and ingenious inventions at their landmark celebration of technology and manufacturing: the Great Exhibition of the Industry of All Nations, as it was modestly called. On May 1, 1851, Victoria’s husband, Prince Albert, welcomed a huge crowd to the opening of the Great Exhibition; his speech was followed by a choir singing the “Hallelujah Chorus” from Handel’s
Messiah
. As the queen later reported to her uncle Leopold, king of Belgium, it was “astonishing, a fairy scene. Many cried, and all felt touched and impressed with devotional feelings.” In her diary she wrote of the “tremendous cheering, the joy expressed in every face,” and praised her husband for organizing the “Peace Festival,” which was “uniting the industry & art of all nations of the earth.”
⁴⁵

Prince Albert had been the guiding force behind the Great Exhibition.
Inspired by the French Industrial Exposition of 1844, the prince’s idea for what would later be called the first world’s fair was that it would showcase the industrial, militaristic, and economic superiority of Great Britain. Displays from other countries would invite the comparison of Britain with “less civilized” nations, and would lead visitors to leave with an enhanced sense of the power of the Empire. Objects on view came from throughout Europe, Russia, the United States, and thirty-two British colonies and dependencies from Antigua, the Bahamas, and Barbados to Trinidad, Van Diemen’s Land, and Western Africa.
⁴⁶
Although many of the exhibits from these other countries were well received, the Great Exhibition mainly succeeded in showing off Britain as “the emporium of the commercial, and mistress of the entire world,” as the under-sheriff of London put it.
⁴⁷

More ambitiously, the Great Exhibition was meant to highlight the natural theology and Baconian philosophy that the prince had learned from his reading of the works of Herschel, Whewell, and others. He encapsulated this philosophy in the speech he gave announcing the upcoming exhibition: “Man is approaching a more complete fulfillment of that great and sacred mission which he has to perform in this world. His reason being created after the image of God, he has to use it to discover the laws by which the Almighty governs His creation, and, by making these laws his standard of action, to conquer nature to his use—himself a divine instrument.”
⁴⁸

Part of man’s purpose on this earth was to use his divinely given reason to understand God’s Book of Nature; he was also to use this knowledge to “conquer nature,” to provide practical benefit for mankind through science, manufacturing, and the arts. The Great Exhibition would give mankind the opportunity to see how far it had come in fulfilling God’s (and Bacon’s) mandate.

The Great Exhibition took place in Joseph Paxton’s huge Crystal Palace, a greenhouse-type structure made of iron frames holding over 900,000 square feet of glass panes. Paxton had designed the building in just ten days, with the help of the structural engineer Charles Fox. The chief engineer of the Great Western Railway, Isambard Kingdom Brunel, the son of Babbage’s friend Marc Isambard Brunel, was on the committee that oversaw the construction. The building was three times the length of St. Paul’s Cathedral, at 1,848 feet long by 454 feet wide, and tall enough to enclose a group of beloved great elms in its Hyde Park location. Once
designed, it went up quickly, taking less than eight months to build the iron frame and then delicately maneuver the nearly 300,000 panes of glass into place.
⁴⁹
As Babbage, full of admiration for the structure and its speed of construction, crowed, the structure “arose as if by magic.”
⁵⁰
The satirical magazine
Punch
designated it derogatorily “the Crystal Palace,” and the name stuck.
⁵¹

In many ways the building was a sign of its times. The Industrial Revolution had enabled the cost-efficient manufacturing of cast-iron girders, columns, and sash bars that were interchangeable and so could be produced on a large scale. And Ricardo’s principle of free trade had recently led to the removal of an excise tax on glass, which allowed a huge, mostly glass structure to be constructed without crippling tax duties.
⁵²

It was the first time such a huge iron and glass building was constructed. Critics warned that so much glass would be prone to crack and break during a storm, such as the tremendous hailstorm in the summer of 1846, which had shattered windows throughout London, including at Buckingham Palace.
⁵³
Others worried that the building would collapse under the weight of the spectators. Experiments were run during the construction phase: one of the galleries was installed a few feet above ground level, and the workmen were instructed to jump up and down, but nothing happened. Then a detachment of soldiers was paraded over it; still, nothing happened. Finally, numerous boxes containing thirty-six loose sixty-eight-pound cannonballs were rolled around the floor and still the building stood firm. Two days before the opening of the exhibition, another ferocious hailstorm struck. Not a single pane of glass was broken.
⁵⁴

The Great Exhibition hosted more than seventeen thousand exhibitors, showcasing more than 100,000 objects, divided into five classes: raw materials, machinery, manufactures, fine arts, and the always intriguing “miscellaneous.”
⁵⁵
Over the five months of the event, more people gathered together than were ever found in one place in London. Six million visitors were recorded, more than one third of the whole population of Britain. Many arrived by railway, often taking their first train ride. Thomas Cook, who had started organizing train tours throughout England in 1841, planned special excursions to the Hyde Park site of the Great Exhibition that were extremely successful; of the six million visitors, 150,000 had arrived on a Cook tour.
⁵⁶

Tickets to the exhibition were not inexpensive, at least not for the
working poor who came to see it in droves. The first two days the charge was a hefty £1, thereafter five shillings a day until the May 24 (Queen Victoria’s birthday), after which laborers were admitted at one shilling (still a day’s wages for some of them). A season’s ticket could be had for three guineas. The profits of the exhibition and the eventual sale of the Crystal Palace came to £200,000. Intent on using the Great Exhibition funds to continue the education of the British public, Prince Albert purchased the eighty-acre Kensington Gore estate, on which he built a precinct of culture: the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Royal Albert Hall, and the British Museum. This zone became known as “Albertropolis.”
⁵⁷

Across London, souvenirs galore were available memorializing the exhibition: papier-mâché blotters, letter openers, and cigar boxes emblazoned with the image of the Crystal Palace; handkerchiefs printed with caricatures of the main participants, especially Prince Albert; there were even gloves with maps printed on them so that non-English-speaking visitors could have their route to the Crystal Palace traced out for them in the palms of their hands.
⁵⁸

Visitors would enter the central axis of the Crystal Palace, called the “nave,” as in a church. Walking through it, the crowd passed the huge crystal fountain, made by Osler of Birmingham. Twenty-seven feet high, with four tons of pale pink glass faceted and carved, the fountain jetted water high into the air. It was hot inside the Crystal Palace—it was a greenhouse, after all—for it was a particularly warm summer. Visitors could quench their thirst with tea, lemonade, mineral water, ices, or the free water fountain. But they could not buy alcohol—the commissioners had decided that selling it would not be prudent, given the large numbers of working poor who were expected to visit the exhibition.
⁵⁹

British technological might was visible everywhere: Talbot’s photographic process; the electric telegraph system, entire railway engines and rolling stock; the eight-cylinder printing press used by the
Times;
calico-printing machines run by one man and a boy, which produced four-color prints in the same time it used to take two hundred men; the first prototype of a facsimile machine. Nasmyth’s steam hammer was there, as was a Bramah lock. First made in 1784, Joseph Bramah’s locks were the first commercially produced cylinder locks to offer good security against picking. For fifty years the company had a “challenge lock” in their shop window, offering two hundred guineas to the first person to open it without a key. A. C. Hobbs, an American locksmith, claimed
the prize at the Great Exhibition, a feat that took fifty hours spread over sixteen days.

The Americans sent a McCormick reaping machine and Samuel Colt’s “revolving gun,” with its interchangeable parts, as well as a sewing machine, an artificial leg, a bed that could be carried in a suitcase, and a coffin designed to enable a funeral to be postponed until distant relatives could arrive.
⁶⁰
Queen Victoria was said to be most taken by a bed that ejected its occupant at a set time in the morning, thus rousing even the most determined late-sleeper.
⁶¹

Charlotte Brontë, who had published her novel
Shirley
two years earlier (and the more popular
Jane Eyre
two years before that), described one of her five visits to the Great Exhibition:

Punch
, originally so dismissive of the whole enterprise, now raved that it was “the greatest and most cheerful, the brightest and most splendid show that eyes had ever looked on since the creation of the world.”
⁶³

B
ABBAGE
, H
ERSCHEL
, Jones, and Whewell were drawn to the Crystal Palace, as they inevitably would be. Jones’s work on the Tithe Commission had finished up, and he was back in Haileybury full time. At age sixty-one, suffering from numerous maladies, Jones was too ill during the summer of 1851 to make it back to London for the Great Exhibition until the end of its run; indeed, in August Herschel wrote his wife (prematurely, as it
turned out) that Jones’s death was expected imminently. Yet on the day of the closing ceremony on October 15, Jones was visiting Herschel in his rented rooms in Harley Street, and the two men attended together. (Herschel told Margaret that night that she should not regret missing the event, as it was “
very
stupid.”)
⁶⁴