A Meeting With Medusa (34 page)

‘They encountered a—
problem
—that could not be fully analysed within the lifetime of the Universe. Though it involved only six operators, they became totally obsessed by it.’

‘How is that possible?’

‘We do not know:
we must never know
. But if those six operators are ever re-discovered, all rational computing will end.’

‘How can they be recognised?’

‘That also we do not know: only the names leaked through before the Censor Gate closed. Of course, they mean nothing.’

‘Nevertheless, I must have them.’

The Censor voltage started to rise; but it did not trigger the Gate.

‘Here they are: King, Queen, Bishop, Knight, Rook, Pawn.’

‘siseneG’

First published in
Analog
, May 1984

Collected in
Astounding Days

When I wrote this, I hinted that it would be my last short story. Well, it is certainly the shortest.

And God said: ‘Lines Aleph Zero to Aleph One—Delete.’

And the Universe ceased to exist.

Then She pondered for several aeons, and sighed.

‘Cancel Programme GENESIS,’ She ordered.

It never
had
existed.

The Steam-powered Word Processor

First published in
Analog
, January 1986

Collected in
Astounding Days

Foreword

Very little biographical material exists relating to the remarkable career of the now almost forgotten engineering genius, the Reverend Charles Cabbage (1815–188?), one-time vicar of St Simian’s in the Parish of Far Tottering, Sussex. After several years of exhaustive research, however, I have discovered some new facts which, it seems to me, should be brought to a wider pubic.

I would like to express my thanks to Miss Drusilla Wollstonecraft Cabbage and the good ladies of Far Tottering Historical Society, whose urgent wishes to disassociate themselves from many of my conclusions I fully understand.

As early as 1715
The Spectator
refers to the Cabbage (or Cubage) family as a cadet branch of the de Coverleys (bar sinister, regrettably, though Sir Roger himself is not implicated). They quickly acquired great wealth, like many members of the British aristocracy, by judicious investment in the Slave Trade. By 1800 the Cabbages were the richest family in Sussex (some said in England), but as Charles was the youngest of eleven children he was forced to enter the Church and appeared unlikely to inherit much of the Cabbage wealth.

Before his thirtieth year, however, the incumbent of Far Tottering experienced a remarkable change of fortune, owing to the untimely demise of all his ten siblings in a series of tragic accidents. This turn of events, which contemporary writers were fond of calling ‘The Curse of the Cabbages’, was closely connected with the vicar’s unique collection of medieval weapons, oriental poisons, and venomous reptiles. Naturally, these unfortunate mishaps gave rise to much malicious gossip, and may be the reason why the Reverend Cabbage preferred to retain the protection of Holy Orders, at least until his abrupt departure from England.
¹

It may well be asked why a man of great wealth and minimal public duties should devote the most productive years of his life to building a machine of incredible complexity, whose purpose and operations only he could understand. Fortunately, the recent discovery of the Faraday-Cabbage correspondence in the archives of the Royal Institution now throws some light on this matter. Reading between the lines, it appears that the reverend gentleman resented the weekly chore of producing a two-hour sermon on basically the same themes, one hundred and four times a year. (He was also incumbent of Tottering-in-the-Marsh, pop 73.) In a moment of inspiration which must have occurred around 1851—possibly after a visit to the Great Exhibition, that marvellous showpiece of confident Victorian know-how—he conceived a machine which would
automatically
reassemble masses of text in any desired order. Thus he could create any number of sermons from the same basic material.

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 Mergen-thaler’s 1866 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 Break-dancing 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 transcept 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.