Today, a metaphor dies. The University of Houston's
College of Engineering presents this series about
the machines that make our civilization run, and
the people whose ingenuity created them.
If you saw the movie
Shakespeare in Love, you'll remember the
nasty little boy who constantly played with mice.
He was John Webster, who would grow up to be a
seventeenth-century playwright. In 1612, Webster
wrote this:
The lives of princes should like dyals move,
Whose regular example is so strong,
They make the times by them go right or wrong.
Mechanical clocks had become a metaphor for all the
ordering principles of the universe -- princes, the
heavens, God himself. Webster's use of the image is
so heavy-handed that he leaves me thinking about
Mickey Mouse watches. I've said a lot about clock
imagery in this series. Now historian Otto Mayr
looks more closely at the way people thought about
clocks.
By 1612, when Webster wrote his lines, the clock
had been burrowing its way into people's minds for
three centuries. We were just reaching the age of
the telescope, the microscope, all the new
precision instruments of embryonic modern science;
and clock imagery was stretching to the point of
obsession. Two years before Webster wrote those
lines, John Donne had written a funeral poem,
But must we say she's dead? may't not be
said,
That like a sundered clock is piecemeal laid,
Not to be lost, but by the maker's hand,
Repolished, without error then to stand.
But even John Donne was about to back away from
this kind of hyperbole. For England was growing
leery of the great European clock-makers. She was
beginning to object to casting God as a cosmic
clock-maker. English authors, realizing how crude
the clocks around them could be, were unwilling to
take them as shadows of God's perfection. In a
cynical line about love, Shakespeare himself
disparagingly speaks of "A woman that is like a
German clock."
To understand England's rather sudden disaffection
with the clock metaphor we have to remember that
the clock represented preordained regularity and
order. It was powerfully expressive of the
authoritarian mind, and in England the seeds of
revolution were sown early. Commoners like Newcomen
and Watt were about to take over the technological
means for creating their own physical well-being.
A century later that revolution would overturn the
clockwork authority that had tried to control every
aspect of European life. And the clock would no
longer be summoned up as a mystic talisman.
Sometime before 1625, an English nonconformist
religious writer named John Robinson wrote this
about clocks:
... The artisan leaves his worke being once
framed to it selfe; but God by continuall influx
preserves, and orders both the being, and motions
of all Creatures.
God, in other words, did not just wind us up and
walk away. We were indeed much better than a great
big clock. And so was God.
Small wonder that England was finally democratized
by nonconforming Protestants like Robinson. They
saw that it was time to leave clock metaphors
behind and create a new world based on checks and
balances -- one based on both human and Godly
intervention.
I'm John Lienhard, at the University of Houston,
where we're interested in the way inventive minds
work.
(Theme music)
Mayr, O., Authority, Liberty & Automatic
Machinery in Early Modern Europe. Baltimore, MD:
The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986. (These
issues are to be found throughout the book, but see
especially, Chapter 2.)
Several previous episodes deal with the mechanical
clock and its metaphorical importance. See, for
example, Episodes 72,
99, 1294, 881, 1307, 1383,
The escapement mechanism in a replica of an
early seventeenth century foliot-and-verge
clock,
which was generously provided by Mike Helfrich
The Engines of Our Ingenuity is
Copyright © 1988-1999 by John H.
Lienhard.
