Collected Stories Of Arthur C. Clarke (188 page)

This crude initial concept was later greatly refined. Although – as we shall see – the Reverend Cabbage was never able to complete the final version of his ‘Word Loom,’ he clearly envisaged a machine which would operate not only upon individual paragraphs but single lines of text. (The next stage – words and letters – he never attempted, though he mentions the possibility in his correspondence with Faraday, and recognised it as an ultimate objective.)

Once he had conceived the Word Loom, the inventive cleric immediately set out to build it. His unusual (some would say deplorable) mechanical ability had already been amply demonstrated through the ingenious mantraps which protected his vast estates, and which had eliminated at least two other claimants to the family fortune.

At this point, the Reverend Cabbage made a mistake which may well have changed the course of technology – if not history. With the advantage of hindsight, it now seems obvious to us that his problems could only have been solved by the use of electricity. The Wheatstone telegraph had already been operating for years, and he was in correspondence with the genius who had discovered the basic laws of electromagnetism. How strange that he ignored the answer that was staring him in the face!

We must remember, however, that the gentle Faraday was now entering the decade of senility preceding his death in 1867. Much of the surviving correspondence concerns his eccentric faith (the now extinct religion of ‘Sandemanism’) with which Cabbage could have had little patience.

Moreover, the vicar was in daily (or at least weekly) contact with a very advanced technology with over a thousand years of development behind it. The Far Tottering church was blessed with an excellent 21-stop organ manufactured by the same Henry Willis whose 1875 masterpiece at North London’s Alexandra Palace was proclaimed by Marcel Dupre as the finest concert-organ in Europe.
²
Cabbage was himself no mean performer on this instrument, and had a complete understanding of its intricate mechanism. He was convinced that an assembly of pneumatic tubes, valves and pumps could control all the operations of his projected Word Loom.

It was an understandable but fatal mistake. Cabbage had overlooked the fact that the sluggish velocity of sound – a miserable 330 metres a second – would reduce the machine’s operating speed to a completely impracticable level. At best, the final version might have attained an information-handling rate of 0.1 Baud – so that the preparation of a single sermon would have required about ten weeks!

It was some years before the Reverend Cabbage realised this fundamental limitation: at first he believed that by merely increasing the available power he could speed up his machine indefinitely. The final version absorbed the entire output of a large steam-driven threshing machine – the clumsy ancestor of today’s farm tractors and combine harvesters.

At this point, it may be as well to summarise what little is known about the actual mechanics of the Word Loom. For this, we must rely on garbled accounts in the
Far Tottering Gazette
(no complete runs of which exist for the essential years 1860–80) and occasional notes and sketches in the Reverend Cabbage’s surviving correspondence. Ironically, considerable portions of the final machine were in existence as late as 1942. They were destroyed when one of the Luftwaffe’s stray incendiary bombs reduced the ancestral home of Tottering Towers to a pile of ashes.
³

The machine’s ‘memory’ was based – indeed, there was no practical alternative at the time – on the punched cards of a modified Jacquard Loom: Cabbage was fond of saying that he would weave thoughts as Jacquard wove tapestries. Each line of output consisted of 20 (later 30) characters, displayed to the operator by letter wheels rotating behind small windows.

The principles of the machine’s COS (Card Operating System) have not come down to us, and it appears – not surprisingly – that Cabbage’s greatest problem involved the location, removal, and updating of the individual cards. Once text had been finalised, it was cast in type-metal; the amazing clergyman had built a primitive Linotype at least a decade before Mergenthaler’s 1886 patent!

Before the machine could be used, Cabbage was faced with the laborious task of punching not only the Bible but the whole of Cruden’s Concordance on to Jacquard cards. He arranged for this to be done, at negligible expense, by the aged ladies of the Far Tottering Home for Relicts of Decayed Gentlefolk – now the local Disco and Breakdancing Club. This was another astonishing First, anticipating by a dozen years Hollerith’s famed mechanisation of the 1890 US Census.

But at this point, disaster struck. Hearing, yet again, strange rumours from the Parish of Far Tottering, no less a personage than the Archbishop of Canterbury descended upon the now obsessed vicar. Understandably appalled by discovering that the church organ had been unable to perform its original function for at least five years, Cantuar issued an ultimatum. Either the Word Loom must go – or the Reverend Cabbage must resign. (Preferably both: there were also hints of exorcism and re-consecration.)

This dilemma seems to have produced an emotional crisis in the already unbalanced clergyman. He attempted one final test of his enormous and unwieldy machine, which now occupied the entire western transept of St Simian’s. Over the protests of the local farmers (for it was now harvest time) the huge steam engine, its brassware gleaming, was trundled up to the church, and the belt-drive connected (the stained-glass windows having long ago been removed to make this possible).

The reverend took his seat at the now unrecognisable console (I cannot forbear wondering if he booted the system with a foot pedal) and started to type. The letterwheels rotated before his eyes as the sentences were slowly spelled out, one line at a time. In the vestry, the crucibles of molten lead awaited the commands that would be laboriously brought to them on puffs of air …

‘Faster, faster!’ called the impatient vicar, as the workmen shovelled coal into the smoke-belching monster in the churchyard. The long belt, snaking through the narrow window, flapped furiously up and down, pumping horse-power into the straining mechanism of the Loom.

The result was inevitable. Somewhere, in the depths of the immense apparatus, something broke. Within seconds, the ill-fated machine tore itself into fragments. The vicar, according to eyewitnesses, was very lucky to escape with his life.

The next development was both abrupt and totally unexpected. Abandoning Church, wife and thirteen children, the Reverend Cabbage eloped to Australia with his chief assistant, the village blacksmith.

To the class-conscious Victorians, such an association with a mere workman was beyond excuse (even an under-footman would have been more acceptable!).
⁴
The very name of Charles Cabbage was banished from polite society, and his ultimate fate is unknown, though there are reports that he later became chaplain of Botany Bay. The legend that he died in the Outback when a sheep-shearing machine he had invented ran amok is surely apocryphal.

Afterword

The Rare Book section of the British Museum possesses the only known copy of the Reverend Cabbage’s
Sermons in Steam
, long claimed by the family to have been manufactured by the Word Loom. Unfortunately, even a casual inspection reveals that this is not the case; with the exception of the last page (223–4), the volume was clearly printed on a normal flat-bed press.

Page 223–4, however, is an obvious insert. The impression is very uneven and the text is replete with spelling mistakes and typographical errors.

Is this indeed the only surviving production of perhaps the most remarkable – and misguided – technological effort of the Victorian Age? Or is it a deliberate fake, created to give the impression that the Word Loom actually operated at least once – however poorly?

We shall never know the truth, but as an Englishman I am proud of the fact that one of today’s most important inventions was first conceived in the British Isles. Had matters turned out slightly differently, Charles Cabbage might now have been as famous as James Watt, George Stevenson – or even Isambard Kingdom Brunel.

¹
Ealing Studios deny the very plausible rumour that Alec Guiness’s ‘Kind Hearts and Coronets’ was inspired by these events. It is known, however, that at one time Peter Cushing was being considered for the role of the Reverend Cabbage.

²
Since the 1970s my indefatigable brother Fred Clarke, with the help of such distinguished musicians as Sir Yehudi Menuhin (who has already conducted three performances of Handel’s
Messiah
for this purpose) has spearheaded a campaign for the restoration of this magnificent instrument.

³
A small portion – two or three gearwheels and what appears to be a pneumatic valve – are still in the possession of the local Historical Society. These pathetic relics reminded me irresistibly of another great technological might-have-been, the famous Anticythera Computer (see Derek de Solla Price,
Scientific American
, July 1959) which I last saw in 1965, ignominiously relegated to a cigar box in the basement of the Athens Museum. My suggestion that it was the Museum’s most important exhibit was not well received.

⁴
How D. H. Lawrence ever heard of this affair is still a mystery. As is now well known, he had originally planned to make the protagonist of his most famous novel not Lady Chatterley but her husband; however, discretion prevailed, and the Cabbage Connection was revealed only when Lawrence foolishly mentioned it, in confidence, to Frank Harris, who promptly published it in the
Saturday Review
. Lawrence never spoke to Harris again; but then, no one ever did.

On Golden Seas

First published in
Newsletter
, Pentagon Defense Science Board, August 1986

Collected in
Tales from Planet Earth

This was my first response to President Reagan’s so called Star Wars initiative. I’ve since been involved with almost all the people concerned, including the writer of his famous speech, and the Pentagon General who cheerfully goes under the nickname ‘Darth Vader’. I am happy to say that I am on good terms with all of them, even if we don’t agree on what could, and should, be done in this controversial area.

Contrary to the opinion of many so-called experts, it is now quite certain that President Kennedy’s controversial Budget Defense Initiative was entirely her own idea, and her famous ‘Cross of Gold’ speech was as big a surprise to the OMB and the secretary of the Treasury as to everyone else. Presidential Science Adviser Dr George Keystone (‘Cops’ to his friends) was the first to hear about it.

Ms Kennedy, a great reader of historical fiction – past or future – had chanced upon an obscure novel about the fifth Centennial, which mentioned that seawater contains appreciable quantities of gold. With feminine intuition (so her enemies later charged) the President instantly saw the solution to one of her administration’s most pressing problems.

She was the latest of a long line of chief executives who had been appalled by the remorselessly increasing budget deficit, and two recent items of news had exacerbated her concern. The first was the announcement that by the year 2010 every citizen of the United States would be born a million dollars in debt. The other was the well-publicised report that the hardest currency in the free world was now the New York subway token.

‘George,’ said the President, ‘is it true that there’s gold in seawater? If so, can we get it out?’

Dr Keystone promised an answer within the hour. Although he had never quite lived down the fact that his master’s thesis had been on the somewhat bizarre sex life of the lesser Patagonian trivit (which, as had been said countless times, should be of interest only to another Patagonian trivit), he was now widely respected both in Washington and academe. This was no mean feat, made possible by the fact that he was the fastest byte slinger in the East. After accessing the global data banks for less than twenty minutes, he had obtained all the information the President needed.

She was surprised – and a little mortified – to discover that her idea was not original. As long ago as 1925 the great German scientist Fritz Haber had attempted to pay Germany’s enormous war reparations by extracting gold from seawater. The project had failed, but – as Dr Keystone pointed out – chemical technology had improved by several orders of magnitude since Haber’s time. Yes – if the United States could go to the Moon, it could certainly extract gold from the sea …

The President’s announcement that she had established the Budget Defense Initiative Organisation (BDIO) immediately triggered an enormous volume of praise and criticism.

Despite numerous injunctions from the estate of Ian Fleming, the media instantly rechristened the President’s science adviser Dr Goldfinger and Shirley Bassey emerged from retirement with a new version of her most famous song.

Reactions to the BDI fell into three main categories which divided the scientific community into fiercely warring groups. First there were the enthusiasts, who were certain that it was a wonderful idea. Then there were the sceptics, who argued that it was technically impossible – or at least so difficult that it would not be cost-effective. Finally, there were those who believed that it was indeed possible – but would be a bad idea.