The Technologists (4 page)

He nodded in their direction—that rugged face with the soft smile. Bob tapped a spring on a box. After about fifteen or twenty seconds, the lampposts lining Boylston Street flickered, then lit up simultaneously in a long procession of softly glowing orbs. At the pop of the lanterns, there was a collective gasp and a palpable excitement.

Rogers waited out the applause before he explained that Boston had five thousand streetlamps and spent over $42,000 each year on employing men to light them, not counting the wasted gas in the first lamps each night that had to be lighted earlier than necessary so the men could complete their rounds by nightfall. The Institute’s invention, developed through the collective effort of students and faculty in four years of engineering studies, used wires connected through a circuit—a course that allowed the electricity to flow from one body to another, the professor said—from a box at each gaslight to a central location, where they could be activated at one time. Marcus opened the central box. Inside, a notched wheel powered by electricity was connected to a series of coils.

“This is what we call a ‘circuit breaker,’ ” Rogers said. “When the spring is tapped, as Mr. Richards, one of our seniors, has shown us, it revolves around halfway, closing the valve for electricity, to turn off the wheel and extinguish the lamps—or ‘break’ the electric flow. When tapped once more, it revolves again, this time opening the valve and lighting our streets at night. Even as we gather right now, this system is being installed across the city.”

People moved in for better views, marveling at the notion of machinery illuminating the streets all at once. The machine rattled as something hard struck it. It was a rock. A second one grazed Rogers’s shoulder and another cracked the glass of the lantern above them, pitching them
into darkness. Marcus felt the glass shards rain down on his hat and shoulder.

Three men emerged from a cluster of trees. Now they launched a volley of rotten tomatoes.

“Technology will bring God’s wrath!” yelled a man dressed smartly in a crisp dark-blue Union army tunic, light-blue trousers, and kid-leather gloves. “Last month, a girl’s scalp was torn off when her hair was caught in a factory machine she was operating in Lowell. Torn off! What was it that befell the ships at the docks last week? Ask them to explain that in their classrooms, if they dare!”

Marcus guided President Rogers away from the falling glass.

“I’ll send for a policeman at once, President Rogers,” said Albert excitedly. He had ducked behind a group of faculty members at the outbreak of the commotion.

“No, Mr. Hall,” Rogers said. “Do not molest them. They’re from the trade unions.”

“Hall’s right, President Rogers! It’s a scrubby thing to do!” Bob protested. “Nothing burns me like anti-machine mania. This will make their own labors easier and safer.”

“Mr. Richards,” Rogers said calmly, “some lamplighters will lose their positions once our invention has been fully installed. Consider that before consulting your anger.”

“Get inside the carriage. Please, Professor! Quickly!” the chambermaid urged him, leading him briskly to the street.

“Mr. Mansfield,” Rogers said, beckoning to Marcus. “We do not want further trouble.”

He followed Rogers’s eyes and saw that Hammie was stomping toward the reformers.

Hammie had unleashed his wrath before Marcus could reach him. “Take your rocks and rioting elsewhere, you ruffians! All the scum of the trades with all their bluster won’t frighten a Tech man.” He turned to Marcus, who put himself between the magnate’s son and the agitators. “Move away, will you, Mansfield? I have the situation in hand!”

“Hammie, let’s mind our place.”

“Don’t tell me about my place! They shoot out windows, or put explosives
in a foreman’s desk from time to time at the locomotive works. But they are all brag, Mansfield. Especially Rapler here—he may act like a workingman but his true occupation is to collect fees from poor souls who know no better.”

One of the other agitators lunged at Hammie, who stumbled and nearly fell over. Marcus steadied him, but Hammie pulled away from him, dizzy and humiliated.

“Hands off, Mansfield, I’ll—Officer, Officer! Assault!” Hammie cried out to a policeman who was approaching from Berkeley Street. The policeman stopped but did nothing.

“You should know that officer’s brother is in the bricklayers’ union,” explained Rapler, the uniformed man, who, now that he was not shouting, spoke with an impressively urbane tone. He was missing what would have been his two front teeth. “We’ve asked him here to ensure our safety from easily excitable young men like you.”

“You have all had your say,” Marcus said politely. “Look around. You see? People are leaving. Please follow their example.”

Rapler studied him with interest. “What do
you
want? All of Boston’s jobs lost to machines, perhaps.”

“We want nothing at our Institute except to find the truth,” said Marcus. “You might have heard President Rogers say that if you weren’t throwing your rocks.”

“And how powerful must you become through it, laddie? Has not man already overstepped his maker, if he does not know where his power ends?”

“It ends when mankind no longer needs the protections technology provides.”

Rapler motioned to the men around him. “The men and women who join our cause are not anti-science. We simply see a science today set to run away with man. The machines you gentlemen—and one errant lady, as I understand it—at the Institute create will become so complicated that they will control us instead of our mastering them. Imagine a future when, with a single malfunction of your machines, man will live in the dark without memory of how to light a candle. He will be stranded without ability to transport himself with feet rather than steel rails. The machine is inanimate and heartless. Our unions respect the intelligence
of man to act, to make decisions
only
man is capable of. Otherwise, we become merely tools of our tools. How will you protect us from that?” The speaker seemed satisfied when Marcus decided not to prolong the confrontation. “Fall in!”

Rapler locked arms with the other union men. They sang as they marched away.

“At least they’re gone,” Bob said a few moments later. “And they couldn’t stop us from demonstrating the circuit!” he crowed.

“But the people who came will remember only that they broke our lamp,” Marcus said, “not that the lights went on.”

W
HEN ONE ENTERED
,
one’s senses came under attack. An amalgam of odors hung in the air, fresh fumes mixing with old ones that never dissipated. A film of dust clouded the eyes—not from a lack of tidiness (though the place was wonderfully untidy), but from the shut-in quarters and microscopic particles, some crystalline, others incandescent, floating in the air.

Touch a surface at one’s peril; it was likely to be burning hot or morbidly cold without warning. Four furnaces made of clay, brick, and stone sat in different locations, evidence of each one’s different purpose in the residue of its ash pan; tongs hung near each, ready to remove or adjust the smoldering contents.

A congealed substance had melted over one portion of the floor and now sparkled like gold. On the wall behind it, the bricks had been charred black from an accidental explosion in the not distant past. A table in the center of the main room stood within a glass enclosure; on it sat a copper box filled with sand. A pipe entered the box from a burner, and nearby were the glass crucibles, blowpipes, vessels, and other apparatus used to manipulate gases.

Gasometers, gauges, air pumps, and troughs of water and of galvanic fluid filled the rest of the chamber, their uses well beyond the comprehension of any visitor. Indeed, it seemed the whole world could be made, or remade, or undone in this room, with all these gangly and imposing tools, in a single day.

On a standing desk, a thick ledger was opened to a page near the middle that listed weights and measurements, seemingly the only volume a visitor might notice among the clutter of equipment along the
tables, shelves, and cabinets. The endeavors under way here had not been published in a book, and never would be.

Of course, there would be no visitors. Nothing in this place was for public view. The hand that now neatly wrote in the ledger was suddenly stilled by temptation. That temptation? The nearby window, and specifically the delicious view beyond its thick shutters. The glass pane squared the harbor in the distance, where ships with cranes and machines continued repairs on the piers in the early dawn: Boston shaken by a hint of true disaster.

But even with almost a week passing, the meaning of that hint had not yet been comprehended by this sluggish city of intellectual giants. The sublime satisfaction at the sight of the crippled wharves was only a first step. This morning would bring true progress. The wet tip of the pen methodically added a fresh record in the ledger to mark the occasion.

T
HE DAY THAT
had brought Marcus the first inkling that he could ever aspire to college came a little more than four and a half years ago. He was working at the Hammond Locomotive Works when he noticed a stranger passing through. Six feet tall and upright, his weathered, noble face framed by long silver hair, he was a philosopher in a place with no philosophy. All of the machinists and apprentices bent diligently to their work while he inspected the floor.

“Who is that?” Marcus nudged Frank Brewer, the machinist posted with him on the drill bench.

“
Someone
,” Frank answered, perfectly capturing the tension of the others on the floor. The whole length of Frank’s body vibrated as he completed the revolution of the drill. He had bushy black hair and eyebrows and a face that was more manly than handsome. Although his limbs were sinewy, his tall, lean frame was so angular that he appeared to be just bones beneath clothing. While Marcus was in control of his machine, Frank in his skeletal way seemed almost to blend with the complex equipment he operated, its fleshy extension.

Even after their exhausting twelve-hour days at the machine shop, Frank would still find time to carve miniature sculptures in his boardinghouse bedroom—just as he had in the midst of infinitely harsher circumstances where he and Marcus had met. It was that patience and meticulous attention when no one else was watching, that, to Marcus, was Frank Brewer in a nutshell. His favorite piece of Frank’s was a bronze statuette of the Headless Horseman from “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.” Once, he’d suggested Frank sculpt Ichabod Crane to match it. It was only later that Marcus discovered, to his dismay, that
Frank was teased for sharing the gawky features “loosely hung together” of the famous literary character.