The System of the World (61 page)

It did at least have an organ—or so the visitors thought at first. The largest single object in the room was a box, the size of a Vagabond-shack but much more finely wrought, of oak planks cleverly joined together, and caulked at the corners with tar and oakum. To one side of it was a row of four large bellows, with a wooden rail
mounted a few feet above them. Two women were gripping the rail. Each of them divided her weight between a pair of bellows, one under each foot; these had been rigged in such a way that as one foot descended, expelling air into the great wind-chest, the other inhaled and rose up. The women seemed to be scaling an endless stair. They were a matched set of great busty hippy frazzle-haired wenches with apple-red cheeks, getting riper and shinier by the moment, and they seemed to find this great fun. While gazing with open curiosity at the visitors, they kept an eye on a glass U-tube filled with mercury, which started one way whenever one of them took her weight off of a foot, and jerked back as she shifted it to the other. A level had been marked on one side of the tube by tying a red ribbon around it. None of the visitors needed to have it explained that the goal of the exercise was to make the mercury climb until it reached the height of that ribbon.

To the other side of the wind-chest was a console looking somewhat like the keyboard of a pipe-organ. But it had only thirty-two keys, with no sharps or flats, and a few of them were stuck down. The organist was a young woman with long cinnamon hair put up in a loose bun. Like every other woman in Bridewell she wore a dress that appeared to have been plucked by a blind man from a parish poor-box; but it was clean and she had obviously devoted many an hour to patching it and taking it in to respect the general shape of her body. As Daniel approached with his guests in train, she sat up straight, reached out, and pulled on an ivory knob. A sigh came from the works and the stuck keys all came unstuck at once.

“Your grace,” Daniel said, turning to Eliza, “I present Miss Hannah Spates. Miss Spates, this is the lady I told you about.”

Hannah Spates rose, and made a pass at a curtsey.

“I am pleased to make your acquaintance,” said Eliza, having instantly donned a sincere but distant affect commonly seen among high-born philanthropists obliged to visit hospitals, orphanages, poor-houses, &c. “Pray, what is this instrument? Are we to hear a performance?”

Hannah was wrong-footed by the words “instrument” and “performance” but soon enough decrypted the question without any aid from Daniel. “It is the card-punching machine, your grace,” she answered, “it cuts the bits out, as I’m to show you.”

“We shall balance the books first,” Daniel announced, and led his guests onwards to a back corner of the room, where a semblance of a
banca
had been established. There was a large desk, manned by a clerk. Standing behind him was a gentleman of about fifty, who now stepped forward to be introduced. “Mr. William Ham,” Daniel identified
him, “my nephew, and the money-goldsmith who tends to our affairs in the City.”

Pleasantries were exchanged; Eliza allowed as how she had heard of Mr. Ham from friends of hers who were pleased to have done business with him, and William Ham made it known how honored he was by this. He seemed startled and pleased to have been recognized at all, as he was a quiet, well-dressed, but indifferent-looking sort, typical of the newish breed who had taken over the
banca
trade from the menagerie of chandelier-swinging adventurers, intoxicated poltroons, and pathological liars who’d launched it when Daniel had been a young man.

To business: Daniel handed the little box of gold cards to William Ham, who carried them over to a standing-desk by the window and weighed them on a scale. He called out numbers to the clerk, who repeated them aloud and pricked them down in a book. The cards were then placed in a strong-box that squatted on the floor-boards next to the
banca
. All, that is, save for one of them, which was handed to a third man: an aproned overseer, struck from the same mould as the ones down in the hemp-pounding shop, save that he was not brandishing a cane. With the care and pomp of a priest bearing the consecrated host across a chancel, he took this to the organ-like device, and set it down, for the nonce, on the music stand above the keyboard. Then he gripped a pair of heavy black wrought-iron handles that projected from the machine’s front panel, just above the keyboard, and gave them a mighty jerk. A slab of iron emerged from the machine like a tongue being thrust out. It was flat and smooth as if it had been extruded from a rolling-mill, and for the most part it was devoid of markings or features of any kind. But at the back of it was a shallow square depression perforated by a dense grid of holes, so that it looked like a grille or screen. The overseer plucked the gold card from the music-stand and laid it into the depression, where it fit perfectly and covered up all of the holes with a margin to spare around the edges. Then he put the heels of his hands against the two iron handles and rammed the slab, along with its golden burden, back into the bowels of the machine. As it boomed into place, the discriminating listener could hear a metallic snap, as though some latches had engaged to hold it all in place.

He stepped back. Miss Spates now took up her perch on the bench before the keyboard, and smoothed out her patched skirt. Her first act was to bend forward and peer into a prism mounted on the top of the console. Evidently she did not like what she saw, and so she reached up with both hands and began to turn a pair of iron cranks this way and that, making some adjustment to the position of
the pallet. When she was satisfied, she folded her hands demurely in her lap, and looked at Daniel’s knees.

“Here is where I am suffered to play a small rôle,” Daniel remarked, reaching into his breast-pocket and drawing out a card of stiff paper that had been the object of several hours’ or days’ attention from a fine quill-pen. Its edge was decorated with strings of digits and its interior mostly filled with writing in a cramped hand: blocks of text in LATIN and
English,
runes in the Real Character, and brief outbursts of digits. This he handed, with a suggestion of a bow, to Hannah, who rotated it and set it in place on the music-stand.

“She can read!?” Johann said incredulously.

“Actually,
she
can—thanks to her doting father—
but this is unusual, and not strictly necessary,” Daniel answered. “All they need to be able to do, is to distinguish between a one and a zero—as you may see for yourself by inspecting the card.”

Johann, Eliza, and Caroline crowded in behind Miss Spates to peer over her shoulders at the specimen on the music-stand. It bore many styles of numbers and characters; but she had oriented it so that she could read a long string of digits printed along the edge. Every one of those digits was either a 1 or a 0. As the others had been talking, she had been sliding a finger along the keyboard, shoving down some keys but not others. Whenever a key was depressed, snicking and clunking noises would sound from some system of rods and levers back inside the mechanism, and the key would stay where she had put it. It was plain to see that the pattern she was making of those keys was the same as the pattern of ones and zeroes written on the edge of the card: wherever she saw a 1, she depressed the corresponding key, and wherever she saw a 0, she skipped over it.

The minute and exacting toil of Miss Spates was accompanied by loud, sweaty, vigorous labor from the bellows-pumping wenches, who had put on a crescendo, trying to stomp the mercury up to the red ribbon. “By your leave, sir,” one of them gasped, “sometimes we sing a song, as sailors do when they heave on a hawser.”

“Pray carry on!” Daniel returned, to the dismay of the overseer who had just opened his mouth to ban it.

At the final beat, the quicksilver in the tube finally shot up to kiss the ribbon. Hannah Spates hauled back on an ivory knob that she had been gripping in sweaty expectation. The machine hissed, not from one place but from many, like fragments of a burst cannon raining into the sea.

Mounted to the top of the wind-box was a row of what had at first appeared to be organ-pipes. Each was several inches in diameter and a yard long. They were arranged in a segment of an arc whose center was a dense complex of rods and levers atop the console, and whose radius was a couple of yards. The pipes were joined to the console by brass levers that fanned out from the center like rays of the sun. Some of these, but not others, suddenly went into motion.

It now became obvious that pistons were concealed within those cylinders, and some of them were being pressed up by air from the wind-chest. As they moved they elevated the ends of the brass levers. Each lever pivoted around an oiled fulcrum that was far from the piston, and close to the central mechanism, giving it a large mechanical advantage at the latter end. The rapid upward thrust of each piston caused the opposite end of its lever to press downward slowly, but with great force; and each of those lever-ends bore down upon a slim vertical rod. The rods were thirty-two in number, arranged in a regular picket-line; each of them resisted movement for a few heart-beats and then gave way, as if some barrier had been breached. This sudden yielding enabled the piston at the opposite end to fly up until it tripped a lever affixed to a vertical pushrod on the outside of its pipe. The pushrod transmitted force down to some
air-gate at the base of the pipe, which sprang open, allowing the piston to fall down to its starting-place. It was all over in a few moments. Miss Spates pulled the knob that caused all the keys to pop up to the zero position.

The
coda
to the performance was a faint skirling noise that emanated from the works for a few seconds. Then a little golden spume jetted from a cavity on the front of the console, and was caught by a porcelain bowl beneath. Daniel snatched this and showed it to the visitors. It contained several tiny disks of gold, like færy-coins, some of which were still spinning and buzzing round on their rims. “These bits,” Daniel said, “are all of a common weight, which means that to
weigh
them is to
count
them; the count is then tallied.”

“Tallied in what way?” Johann asked.

“The clerk examines the card,” Daniel said, indicating the snarled document Miss Spates had been reading from, “and checks the sum of each number, to know how many bits ought to have been punched out; if this agrees not with the number of bits in the bowl, the card is in error, and is sent back to be re-melted. A rare occurrence, for
Miss Spates
does not make
Mis-takes
!”

Indeed Miss Spates had already reached up to grip a brass lever, and hauled back on it once; this had ratcheted the iron pallet a short distance deeper into the machine, as she verified by a glance into the prism. The bellows-wenches were singing again, and Miss Spates had found a new number on the card, and was registering it upon the keys. In a few moments came another climax of singing, hissing, and clunking; another convulsion of many levers and another rill of golden bits. After several more repetitions, Hannah Spates rose and got out of the way; the bellows-wenches climbed down and headed off in the direction of a beer-bucket; and the overseer stepped in to haul the iron pallet backwards out of the machine. He retrieved the golden card, which had been Swiss-cheesed by scores of neat round holes. Each of these was situated at an intersection of the Grid of Monsieur Descartes; but not all of the intersections had been punched. The result was a curious admixture of order and randomness, perhaps akin to what one would observe in a neatly printed message that was, however, written in some inscrutable cypher.

“My understanding of Clerkenwell Court has been much advanced,” was Eliza’s verdict, “and yet there remains much that is mysterious. I see, for example, why you have recruited organ-makers. But not the man who makes lightning.”

“We bought a stock of parts from a Dutch organ-maker who was returning to his home country, and so this machine was fabricated using the tricks of that trade,” Daniel allowed. “A toy-maker, a horologist,
or
electrical
enthusiast might have reached the same destination, via a different route.”

“But this is not, as I gather, the machine that does the thinking?”

“The Logic Mill will be a different machine entirely,” Daniel said.

“
Will be?
And so it does not exist yet?”

“The punching of the cards will take a great deal of time, even if we build many more machines like this one, and put all of Bridewell to work,” Daniel said. “Moreover, the Logic Mill cannot be designed, built, or tested, until we have some samples of cards to give it. And so in our work to date we have borne down very hard on the card-punching problem. As you have seen, that problem is solved. Additional machines like this one are now being made; but most of our efforts may now be devoted to the Logic Mill.” Daniel cleared his throat delicately. “A significant infusion of Capital would be most welcome.”

“I should say so!” Johann exclaimed. “Why are you making the cards out of
gold
?”