Cultural Babbage: Technology, Time and Invention

by Francis Spufford

With contributions from both sides of the science/humanities divide, this is a quirky collection of essays on science and the imagination. It springs from the Science Museum's construction of Charles Babbage's "difference engine", the mechanical computer which he designed in the 1830s but never built. The essays deal with topics such as the invention of the phonograph, the Victorian delight in robots and automata such as the steel tarantula spider which crawls out of its box and runs around, microphotography and the minuscule, and the Internet and the British.

Genres: Nonfiction, Science, Essays

224 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1996

About the author

Officially, I was a writer of non-fiction for the first half of my career, and I certainly enjoyed scraping up against the stubborn, resistant, endlessly interesting surface of the real world. I like awkwardness, things that don't fit, things that put up a struggle against being described. But when I was excited by what I was writing about, what I wanted to do with my excitement was always to tell a story. So every one of my non-fiction books borrowed techniques from the novel, and contained sections where I came close to behaving like a novelist. The chapter retelling the story of Captain Scott's last Antarctic expedition at the end of "I May Be Some Time", for example, or the thirty-page version of the gospel story in "Unapologetic". It wasn't a total surprise that in 2010 I published a book, "Red Plenty", which was a cross between fiction and documentary, or that afterwards I completed my crabwise crawl towards the novel with the honest-to-goodness entirely-made-up "Golden Hill". This was a historical novel about eighteenth century New York written like, well, an actual eighteenth century novel: hyperactive, stuffed with incident, and not very bothered about genre or good taste. It was elaborate, though. It was about exceptional events, and huge amounts of money, and good-looking people talking extravagantly in a special place. Nothing wrong with any of that: I'm an Aaron Sorkin fan and a Joss Whedon fan, keen on dialogue that whooshes around like a firework display. But those were the ingredients of romance, and there were other interesting things to tell stories about, so my next novel "Light Perpetual" in 2021 was deliberately plainer, about the lives that five London children might have had if they hadn't been killed in 1944 by a German rocket. Ordinary lives, in theory; except that there are no ordinary lives, if you look closely enough. It was longlisted for the Booker Prize. Then in 2023 I returned to strong forms of story, and to plotting more like "Golden Hill", with a noir crime novel called "Cahokia Jazz", set in the 1922 of a different timeline, where a metropolis full of Native Americans stood on the banks of the Mississippi. I was aiming for something like a classic black and white movie, except one you never saw, because it came from another history than our own. It won the Sidewise Award for alternate history. And now (2025/6) I've written a historical fantasy, "Nonesuch", set during the London Blitz, where as well as German bombs the protagonist Iris needs to deal with time-travelling fascists, and the remnants of Renaissance magic, preserved in the statues of the burning city. As writers of fantasy, I like C S Lewis, Ursula Le Guin, John Crowley, Tamsyn Muir, Guy Gavriel Kay, Katherine Addison. If you like them, you may like this.

Biography: I was born in 1964, the child of two historians. I'm married to the Dean of an Anglican cathedral in eastern England, I have two daughters, and I teach writing at Goldsmiths College, London.

Reviews

[Tony Lawrence]

Sub-title "Technology, Time and Invention" As a nerd and book 'completist' I wanted to read this book, edited in collaboration by Francis Spufford ... he also writes an essay.

This is an unusual collection of essays, loosely linked by themes of technology as it inspires and interacts with society, culture, and the arts, and sometimes the frictions between these worlds of thought and expression. Jumping to the end I probably enjoyed Francis Spufford’s own contribution most, and one of only 3 that mention Babbage, his life and designs to create Victorian mechanical ‘computers’. Wither the title? Spufford discusses the creation of a working Difference Engine by the Science Museum and comparison with a science fiction book, The Difference Engine (Bruce Sterling & William Gibson, p276). The parallel is imaging an alternative 'fictions' where Babbages’s designs were created as an historical artefact and were successful realised in his lifetime. Was the Sterling/Gibson book a jumping off point - a counterfactual history - that became the germ of the idea for Spufford’s own ‘Cahokia Jazz’?

Many of the other essays in the book are written by academics and deep-dive into quite dense explorations of some feature of science, from Victorian obsessions with automatons and microphotography, to C20th development of domes as an architectural motif, and broader themes of wireless (radios) and forensic science. Other essays are fascinating in themselves, but get slightly lost; as with fiction short stories this collection suffers a bit with too much stimulus and too many ideas. I’ve made a mental note to read more about Thomas Paine (a contemporary of William Blake who I read about recently) and Thomas Edison.

[Grant · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really liked this one since I learned things I had no idea about previously from practically every well researched & written essay.