SPOTTISWOODE, William. (William Spottiswoode, 1825-1883, an English mathematician and physicist, president of the Royal Society from 1878 to 1883, and of the British (Science) Association in 1878 as well.) “British Association”, address on the state of the British Association by the president, in Nature, vol 18, no. 459, occupying most of the weekly issue, pp 403-425 in the issue of pp 401-428. Detached from larger bound volume, but offered with the original wrappers (including 11 pages of advertising, some of which is fantastic). Good/VG condition. $300.00
There's a lot of interest in this review and state of affairs of the sciences and technology, including sections on Mathematics, Literature and Art, Physics Measurements, Manifold Space, Imaginaries, a full page on Non-Euclidean Geometry, and more.
Of particular interest to me is the half-column entry for “Mechanical Methods” (on page 413), which turns out to be “mechanical appliances”, or calculating machines/engines. It starts with an unusual assertion:
“Mr Babbage, when speaking of the difficulty of insuring accuracy in the long numerical calculations of theoretical astronomy, remarked that that “most accurate science” had become “inaccurate and uncertain in some of its results”.
Spottiswoode continues with an explanation and a dig: “It is doubtless, some such consideration as this, coupled with his dislike of employing skilled labour when unskilled labour would suffice, which led him to his invention o the calculating machine”.
The author then makes another—again, to my experience—unusual observation, referring to the replacement of human thinking capacity by a machine:
“The idea of substituting mechanized for intellectual power has not lain dormant...”
It is a very short comment, but I think makes a strong if understated point.
The author then moves onto the “recent” machine of James Thomson (“by its aid it seems an unskilled laborer may, in a given time, perform the work of ten skilled arithmeticians...reduced to the simple process of turning a handle”.
Spottiswoode finishes with a flourish, though it is easy to read through. In telling the story of Michael Faraday, who after muscling through some concept and determining that the next step wopuld be to hammer it all out mathematically, would “irreverently “ say “hand it over to the calculators”, which at that point was a team of human calculators, arithmeticians.
And the finish:
“But truth is stranger than fiction; and if he had lived until our day, he might with perfect propriety have said, 'Hand it over to the machine' ”.
It is a small statement with a lot of possibility. Even though this comes seven years after Babbage gave up the ghost in Marleybone, it still seems remarkably early to be talking about this sort of major impact in the conduct of the sciences, lending part of the process over to machines. The Industrial Revolution is well into it second century by this point, and human effort in all manner of manufacturing has been replaced by machines—except here the active part of the human experience in the creation of ideas is the thing that is becoming “machinized”.