Du 4/1979 [antikvár]

Tracks, Bogies, Concourses The Aesthetics of Machinery in Victorian England In the year 1776, as the colonies in America were making their Déclaration of Indepen-dence, James Watt's first successful steam engine began to run. And so, at the very moment of losing her first Empire, Britain was set on the path to her second and much greater one, not by the steam engine, which had long been invented, but by the separate condenser, which was Watt's trae invention, made as he walked across Glasgow Green to the Golf House. If we now leap forward a hundred years and look at the steam-pumping engine installed by the locomotive makers, Kitsons of Leeds, in the town of Derby in 1870, we find, in the words of a distinguished engineer: "There was something beyond utility required in those days. In a Gothic house stood a Gothic engine; the spirit was in every detail from the fillets and ribs on bedplate and entablature to the pointed ends of connecting rods and motion work, and the tali cast-iron standards that carried the cylinders were finely pierced with traceried and ogival openings. But polish and décoration were a small part of the achieve-ment. From the unseen piston to the invisible bücket and the clack of strength which meant long life and unremitting service." Were this to happen today, one would suspect that some ostentatious egocentric person was indulging his own whims, but it was not so then. The engineers and middle classes of Victorian England were not, in general, intellectu-als but they were powerfully intelligent crea-tures of the spirit of their times. The easiest way to understand that spirit, in the context of the machine, is to see them as inhabiting a much more Platonic mental world than we do today: trath, beauty and goodness were in some sense feit all to be one, and to this had been added, by men from Sir Isaac Newton down to the meanest of the new class of engineer-mechan-ics, a strong - rather Pythagorean - sense of the beauty and significance of geometrical proportions, now illustrated on every hand by the tri-umph of the machine rather than by the works of Vitravius or Palladio. It was a deep aesthetic response, more uncon-scious than conscious, but it was almost universal. It was widespread for a good reason, namely that it was in harmony with Victorian England's vision of the future of the world. In that vision of the future, machines (made in Britain) would carry enlightenment, trae religion and free trade (they all seemed part of the same thing) to every part of the world, and even nearby Europe, old in sin, would at last acknowledge the obvious superiority of the British system. For machines would free man from his age-old servitude of toil. The machine would sow, the machine would reap, the machine would clothe, and above ali the machine would eliminate distance, allowing trade and knowledge, as well as trath and moral beauty to flow to the most benighted savage. Here we have the reason why a pump-ing station, raising clean and healthy water, should look like a church. Here also we have du The Art Magazine 4/1979 A Selective Summary of the Contents the reason for the symbolic pre-eminence of the railway in this vision. For the British Empire, seen of course quite innocently as an instrument of enlightenment and not of exploitation, would be held together above all by rail, which for practical purposes preceded the steamships by about twenty years, and made a much more symbolic impact. So much for the visionary element in what seems to us today to be an oddly innocent outlook. If we now wish to examine the mechani-cal tradition upon which the English drew in order to realize their idea of the machine both useful and beautiful, we must go back at least to the 17th Century, to the reign of Charles II, which saw the establishment of the Royal Society and the first public - as opposed to esoterie - récognition of the qualities involved in making beautiful instruments and machines. The best symbol of this early tradition is the clockmaker Thomas Tompion. In no other country at that date would such a man have been honoured at his death (1713) with burial in the nation's shrine at Westminster Abbey. This particular tradition of fine instruments reached its apogee in John Harrison, the builder of the first accurate naval chronometers. These, stili in working order at the Royal Maritime Museum, Greenwich, are arguably the finest hand-made machines in the world. Such was the magnificent tradition eventually inher-ited by the makers of the early machine tools, pre-eminent among whom was Henry Mauds-iay whose exquisitely proportioned screw-cut-ting lathes and similar machines are instinct with the highest artistry which he passed on to his famous pupils - Nasmyth, Roberts, Clement, and Whitworth. Such were the men that created the background to the beautiful form of the larger machines of the day, pre-eminently pumping machines, locomotives, and ships. It is stili easy to study at first hand the aesthetic qualities of the early pumping machines, the direct descendants of Boulton and Watt's beam engines, since many of these have been pre-served and one, erected at Kew Bridge, London in the Eighteen-Forties, is stili working. In such machines one can see very clearly an aesthetic treatment derived from architecture. Large-scale mechanical engineering and architecture obviously have much in common, even sharing certain technical terms | the word "entablature" is a good example - but the Vic-torians carried the analogy much farther than mere words.