![]() In his second chapter, "The Machine Ensemble," Schivelbusch explores the ways the development of the railways was experienced as "denaturalization and densensualization." With cuttings, embankments, and tunnels"the railroad was constructed straight across the terrain, as if drawn with a ruler." Now "the traveler perceived the landscape as it was filtered through the machine ensemble."Īnd what is the machine ensemble? "heel and rail, railroad and carriage, expanded into a unified railway system. Schivelbusch's is a wondrously powerful insight. Most histories of the computer's binary-digital logic that I am familiar with focus on English mathematician George Boole's An Investigation into the Laws of Thought (1854)- the concept of binary logic. Watch a demonstration of a piston (in this example, powered by an electric motor): t did not transfer an existing form but forced a new form of power out of combustible matter." Moreover, "the piston's up-and-down movement was no longer the analogue of any form of movement found in nature but possessed a binary-digital logic all its own." In his new 2014 preface, however, Schivelbusch writes: "It took me forty years and the Digital Revolution to realize that I had missed the more important point of the invention preceding it." In other words, the technological Crossing of the Rubicon, as it were, was "placing a piston in a cylinder and applying the pressure of steam. The "decisive step" for the development of the steam engine- and ultimately the railroads- was the introduction of rotary motion, "a kind of mechanization of the mill race." In other words, transforming the up-and-down movement of the steam-driven piston to the driving wheel. In the steam engine, the prime mover of industry, these two combined to produce energy in theoretically unlimited amounts." ![]() ![]() Iron became the new industrial building material, coal the new combustible. The Industrial Revolution, generally seem as having begun in the the last third of the eighteenth century, was a complex process of denaturalization. "Next to wood, water and wind power were the main energy sources of pre-industrial economic life. In The Railway Journey, Schivelbusch opens with a detailed discussion of the history of the steam engine. My sense of this is a compression of time and a curious elasticity of space of oftentimes disquieting and othertimes most welcome transparency and that constant pull to the little screens that, so it would seem, we all feel these days, whenever, wherever. There are indeed many parallels, however, to start with, the literature on Far West Texas is exponentially greater and- more to the point- since the time I was traveling in Baja California, the experience of traveling itself has been radically transformed by the Digital Revolution. In recent weeks, this question of machine evolution, to my surprise, has begun to interest me intensely.Īt first I had thought of this book I am writing about Far West Texas as a doppelg änger to my 2002 memoir of Mexico's Baja California peninsula, Miraculous Air, for the ecosystems and early exploration and mission histories of these two regions have many parallels. "Could it be that the railway, the accelerator of the Industrial Revolution, and the computer occupy different points along / on the same trajectory of machine evolution?" Originally published as Geschichte der Eisenbahnreise, the English translation came out in 1979 I read the 2014 edition with a new preface, "World Machines: The Steam Engine, the Railway, and the Computer," in which Schivelbusch asks, [> CONTINUE READING THIS POST AT Of late: The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the Nineteenth Century by Wolfgang Schivelbusch, a German historian and scholar of cultural studies. All of which is to say, railroads are an inescapable part of Far West Texas scenery and history, and so, for my book in-progress on that region, I have been doing my homework. Travel for a spell and you'll pass or, if at a crossing, be passed by a freight train, always an impressive experience. ![]() Mayo "Systems analysis must become cultural analysis, and in this historians may be helpful."- Lynn White, Jr.ĭrive into Far West Texas and before you can say "pass the Snickers" you'll spy the railroad tracks, which more often than not run, seemingly infinite sinuous ribbons, parallel to the highway.
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