Against this backdrop, the history of machine development, which Reuleaux inserted as a compact chapter into his Theoretische Kinematik and later dispersed over the second volume of the Kinematik, which appeared in 1900, amounts to a history of the progressive elimination of “cosmic” freedom.45 “We have recognized and examined in certain pairs of kinematic elements the property of force-closure, by which a certain amount of kosmic freedom is left in the machinal system, and seen that it has been for thousands of years the aim of invention to limit or destroy this freedom.”46 Reuleaux’s Ur-machine is a single cylinder: the fire drill, a pointed stick twirled by hands on a wooden cavity with the purpose of igniting the wood itself or fibers placed around it. So long as human hands twirl the stick, there is pair-closure only between the recess and the point of the stick. The next step consists in replacing the hands by a rope, which does not alter the nature of the closure but speeds up the rotation. Then a stone or a fitted piece of wood is placed on top of the rotating stick in such a way that all motion except rotation is eliminated. Now the twirling stick is part of a pair-closed chain that produces fire in a fully predictable manner.
A more contemporary but perhaps not equally felicitous example is the steam locomotive. It replaced the horse-carriage, which had been improved upon in various ways, for example in shock absorption and in the development of steering gear, but which was still beset by the potential disturbance of cosmic forces, such as uneven roads or drunken coachmen.
Force-closure still remained, if nowhere else at least in the preservation of the direction of motion, which still demanded accustomed animals and an intelligent driver. Men naturally attempted to replace this force-closure by pair-closure. In the Railway the rails are paired with the wheels,—force-closure is used only to neutralize vertical disturbing forces. The step thus made in the direction of machinal completeness . . . was in reality no other than the uniting of the carriage and the road into a machine. The rail forms a part of this machine, it is the fixed element of the kinematic chain of which the mechanism really exists. . . . In opposition to this we have the problem of steam locomotion on common roads, which has been so feverishly taken up again within the last few years, but the solutions of which seem doomed to eternal incompleteness, for they are self-contradictory. It is desired to make something which shall be a machine, but in which at the same time the special characteristic of the machine—the pairing of elements—may be disregarded.47
To be sure, the pair-closure between the locomotive and the rail is only approximate: it is achieved by the weight of the engine (and in fact often breaks when the train has to climb a steep incline). What Reuleaux means by the inner contradictoriness of the automobile is that the wheels of the car cannot form a pair-closure with the road if the automobile is defined as a vehicle that can go anywhere by itself; he mentions the recent discovery of wheels made of “India-rubber,” which try to emulate rails insofar as “vulcanized India-rubber, externally flattened upon the road, serves as a smooth uniform surface for the rigid tread to run upon, thus corresponding generally to the rail of the railway”;48 kinematically speaking, however, the automobile is a failure because the pair-closure of its engine (the slider-crank-linkage) is stunted by the weak force-closure of its contact to the road. The further development of rubber wheels and the improvement of roads by means of another cylindrical machine, the steamroller, will alleviate this weakness, but every instance when a car spins its wheels or swerves off the road or just out of its lane is a testimony to the justness of Reuleaux’s observation.
Although in the use of his terminology Reuleaux seemed to emulate Kant’s critical philosophy, his view on the history of machines was Hegelian. Very much in the tradition of Hegel, Reuleaux tried to understand the history of machines and mechanisms as a slow but logically driven and often dialectical process toward maximum efficiency. His ideal was a machine, consisting of absolutely rigid elements connected by cylindrical pair-closures, that would capture and convert the energy flowing through the cosmos with as little noise and as little loss as possible. But this historical dialectic was the limit of his Hegelian leanings; in cosmological terms Reuleaux was thoroughly modern. Like Poinsot, like Auguste Comte, and like the foremost physicists of his time, he conceived of the cosmos, not as a living being (as Hegel still did), but as a vast machine driven by heat, in which the planets were the remnants of a linked planar mechanism. Perfecting transmissions, from this perspective, meant combating entropy in the only arena possible, namely by slowing down the dissipation of energy in fully linked, “pair-closed” machines.
Reuleaux also paid attention to the devaluation of human work. Like most engineers and scientists in the latter half of the nineteenth century, he was keenly aware of the destructive and dehumanizing potential of industrial modes of production and sought to confront the “burning question of our time, the question of the worker,” with proposals of his own.49 Characteristically, he saw the problem in the motor end of the machine: it is the logic of capital, he argued, that requires ever more powerful motors, which in turn lead to larger factories and more alienated labor. His own solution proposed smaller, yet kinematically efficient machines that would need fewer, perhaps even just one worker to attend them—automobiles, as it were, that did not move. We will see in chapter 5 how Karl Marx, unconcerned with the kinematic implications of factory work, shifted the discussion almost exclusively to the tool end of the machine.
Far more startling than the faith Reuleaux placed in the desmodromic progress of mechanization is the fact that he did not reflect on the shape that dominated every level of his investigation: the cylinder. We have seen that on the abstract level of phoronomy he conceived of relative motion as cylindrical rolling; on the elemental level of kinematic pairs he identified the cylindrical screw and its extremes as irreducible connectors; on the level of mechanical assemblies he developed a grammar of cylinder chains; and on the grand historical scale he began with an Ur-cylinder (the fire drill) and then described mechanical progress as the replacement of contiguous by cylindrical closures. Yet nowhere did Reuleaux look beyond the confines of kinematics and identify other cylindrical structures, such as rolling mills, the pneumatic tube delivery, or the tin can; nor did he ask why this shape, rather than any other, so dominated the machines and, as we will see, the culture of his epoch. This oversight is partly due to the natural myopia of the immersed witness and practitioner, but partly to the effort it takes to see that motions, and the shapes through which they are transmitted, are historically and culturally identifiable phenomena. Our view is traditionally trained on the motor or on the tool, not on shape-dependent transmission. The following chapter will begin to right this oversight by adding historical depth to shapes and motions.
The kinematic epoch that began so neatly in 1800 with the expiration of Watt’s patent for parallel motion came to an end somewhere between the large-scale use of electrical motors, the discovery of radio transmission and X-rays toward the end of the nineteenth century, and the conflagrations of World War I. It was based on the visible, “analog” contact between moving parts and, more particularly, on the taming and conversion of rotation and translation. All of this was possible because with the emergence of the steam engine the kinematic problem of forcing and converting motion could be detached from concerns over the generation of power. The early French theorists of kinematics held out the possibility of devising a meaningful geometry of machine motion that would allow the construction of machines entirely on the drawing board. The experience of British machine builders showed that everywhere in the development of machines empirical factors would trump theoretical insight, in particular when the demands of the market and necessities of exploiting natural resources came into in play. Reuleaux, finally, sought to integrate practical and pedagogical concerns, but he also hoped that a grammar of forcing motion could be constructed that would allow the generation, the “synthesis,” of transmissions, and with it the construction of machines for any purpose whatsoever. The unthought element in this entire development was the cylinder.
CHAPTER 3