Today, a 19th-century intellectual struggles with
20th-century technology. 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.
Our second president, John
Adams, sired a dynasty. His son John Quincy was
also president of the United States. His grandson
Charles was a congressman and ambassador to England
during the Civil War. But we're interested in John
Adams's great-grandson Henry Adams. In his
autobiography, The Education of Henry
Adams, he measures himself against his
extraordinary army of forebears and finds himself
wanting -- even though he himself was a writer, a
congressman, and a noted historian.
Toward the end of his autobiography Adams portrays
himself as a sort of everyman facing the juggernaut
of 20th-century science and technology. His chapter
"The Dynamo and the Virgin" takes us through the
great Paris Exhibition of 1900. Adams was one of 40
million people who visited 80,000 exhibits there.
And he was drawn back day after day, trying to
understand it all.
Adams's most important work of history had been his
study of two medieval edifices -- the abbey at Mont
St Michael and Chartres Cathedral. They'd led Adams
to see the remarkable social impact of medieval
Christianity -- with its focus on the Virgin Mary.
Now he gazed at a whole new technology that had
sprung into being in just a few years' time --
dynamos, telephones, automobiles -- invisible new
forces of radiation and electric fields. He saw
that the dynamo would shake Western civilization
just as surely as the Virgin had changed it 800
years before. His historical hindsight made him
comfortable with the 12th century -- but this was
more than he could digest.
His guide through much of the Exhibition was the
aeronautical pioneer Samuel Pierpoint Langley.
Langley was a down-to-earth physicist, willing to
explain things in functional terms. But Adams was
too intelligent to take "this is how it works" for
understanding.
"[I found myself] lying in the Gallery of
Machines," he tells us, " -- my historical neck
broken by the sudden irruption of forces totally
new."
Adams doesn't mention two ideas that completed the
intellectual devastation before his autobiography
was published -- quantum mechanics and relativity
theory. But he knew, on a visceral level, that they
were thundering down the road at him -- that the
exhibit represented a great unraveling of
19th-century understanding. In the end, he laments
the blind spot of the 20th century -- our denial of
mystery. The Virgin was the mystery that drove the
medieval technological revolution. The Dynamo --
and modern science -- were ultimately being shaped
by forces no less mysterious.
And he was right. 19th-century science and
technology came out of the exhibition hall changed
beyond recognition.
I'm John Lienhard, at the University of Houston,
where we're interested in the way inventive minds
work.
(Theme music)
Four
generations of the Adams family