Early Victorian Artificial Intelligence

Event information

The Egyptian Hall at Piccadilly in summer of 1845 displayed a remarkable novelty: the Eureka Machine. It was a cabinet-sized “Machine for Composing Hexameter Latin Verses.” Its inventor was a relative to the Clarks shoe manufacturing fortune, Mr. John Clark of Somerset—historian of Glastonbury, inventor of the mackintosh, updater of Lord Byron.   
 
At the pull of the Eureka machine’s lever, cylinders turned, forming new (if strange) Latin verses in a window at its center—to the tune of “God Save the Queen.” It also showed a changing display of patterns of coloured glass: Clark called its principle “Kaleidoscopic evolution,” after the optical toy recently invented by David Brewster, which also combined finite elements into an infinite variety of arrangements.
 
This conversation will explore just what John Clark might have had in mind with his feat of early Victorian Artificial Intelligence—including some scandalous theories about the Creation. We'll trace its connections to Charles Babbage, Ada Lovelace, Charles Darwin, and Edgar Allan Poe, and put the “Eureka Machine” into the world of nineteenth-century London’s dazzling, sometimes deceptive spectacles and high-tech curiosities.


John Tresch is author of “The Reason for the Darkness of the Night: Edgar Allan Poe and the Forging of American Science” (2021, finalist for the LA Times Book Award) and “The Romantic Machine: Utopian Science and Technology after Napoleon” (2012, winner of the History of Science Society's Pfizer Prize). He teaches the history of science and art at the Warburg Institute in London. 

Ross MacFarlane is an archivist who has over twenty years’ experience working on the history of science and medicine. He has researched, lectured, and written on a range of topics, such as aspects of the occult, the history of early recorded sound, and the collection of amulets and charms in Edwardian London. He is a regular book reviewer for “Fortean Times” and has also published in magazines and journals such as “New Scientist”, “The Lancet”, “Folklore”, “Notes and Records of the Royal Society”, and has contributed to books such as “The Morbid Anatomy Anthology (2014) and A Practical Course in Magnetism: The Victorian Guide to Health, Happiness, Power and Success” (2017). As well as being an Honorary Research Fellow at Queen Mary University London, he currently serves on the managing council’s of the Folklore Society and the British Society for the History and Science.