This week’s choice is by Rudyard Kipling, and it is “The Secret of the Machines” which, although it was written around 1911, makes points that are still valid in today’s technology-driven society.
Though our smoke may hide the Heavens from your eyes,
Rudyard Kipling (1865—1936)
It will vanish and the stars will shine again,
Because, for all our power and weight and size,
We are nothing more than children of your brain!
Poem 347. The Secret of the Machines (Modern Machinery)
We were taken from the ore-bed and the mine,
We were melted in the furnace and the pit—
We were cast and wrought and hammered to design,
We were cut and filed and tooled and gauged to fit.
Some water, coal, and oil is all we ask,
And a thousandth of an inch to give us play:
And now, if you will set us to our task,
We will serve you four and twenty hours a day!
We can pull and haul and push and lift and drive,
We can print and plough and weave and heat and light,
We can run and race and swim and fly and dive,
We can see and hear and count and read and write!
Would you call a friend from half across the world?
If you’ll let us have his name and town and state,
You shall see and hear your crackling question hurled
Across the arch of heaven while you wait.
Has he answered? Does he need you at his side—
You can start this very evening if you choose
And take the Western Ocean in the stride
Of seventy thousand horses and some screws!
The boat-express is waiting your command!
You will find the Mauretania at the quay,
Till her captain turns the lever ‘neath his hand,
And the monstrous nine-decked city goes to sea.
Do you wish to make the mountains bare their head
And lay their new-cut forests at your feet?
Do you want to turn a river in its bed,
Or plant a barren wilderness with wheat?
Shall we pipe aloft and bring you water down
From the never-failing cisterns of the snows,
To work the mills and tramways in your town,
And irrigate your orchards as it flows?
It is easy! Give us dynamite and drills!
Watch the iron-shouldered rocks lie down and quake,
As the thirsty desert-level floods and fills,
And the valley we have dammed becomes a lake.
But remember, please, the Law by which we live,
We are not built to comprehend a lie,
We can neither love nor pity nor forgive.
If you make a slip in handling us you die!
We are greater than the Peoples or the Kings—
Be humble, as you crawl beneath our rods!—
Our touch can alter all created things,
We are everything on earth—except The Gods!
Though our smoke may hide the Heavens from your eyes,
It will vanish and the stars will shine again,
Because, for all our power and weight and size,
We are nothing more than children of your brain!
This poem is unusual—rather than rhapsodising or agonising over the natural or human worlds, it is about the march of technology and there are not many poems on that subject—perhaps we engineers and technologists are too literal-minded and hard-headed to write poetry about our work.
The poem appeared at the end of “A History of England” which Kipling co-wrote with C.R.L. Fletcher and accompanied the following interesting comments:
One point I have left till the last. When your great-grandfathers were young, the fastest method of travelling was in a stage-coach with four horses at ten miles an hour, or in a private (and very expensive) post-chaise which might perhaps do twelve miles an hour. When they wanted to light their candles and fires (and they had nothing else to light) they had to strike a spark with a bit of steel on a bit of flint. The navy was built of oak instead of steel, and moved by sails instead of steam. Letters cost twopence apiece for the smallest weight and the smallest distance; a single-sheet letter from London to Edinburgh cost 1s 1d.
Look round you and see in what a different England you now live. Gas was first used in the streets of London in 1812; but gas already is going, and electric light is taking its place. The first railway was opened in 1829 between Liverpool and Manchester; already people are wondering when the first service of passenger airships will begin to cut out railways for long journeys, as electric tramways and motor-cars have begun to cut out horses and railways alike for short ones. The first steamship began to ply on the Clyde in 1812; it was of three horse-power and moved at five miles an hour; the Mauretania, of 78,000 horse-power, now crosses the Atlantic in less than five days. During the Great War a system of wooden signals from hill-top to hill-top, worked by hand, would carry a message from Dover to London in about an hour; now the electric telegraph flashes messages round the world in a few minutes. By another kind of wire, the telephone, a man in London can talk to a man in Paris, and they can hear each other’s voices and laughter. The discovery of chloroform in 1847 has reduced human suffering to a degree which we can hardly conceive; and the other improvements in medicine and surgery have saved and prolonged countless useful, as well as many useless, lives.
A History of England, C.R.L. Fletcher and Rudyard Kipling.
Ignoring the disparaging tone that emerges in the last sentence, it is interesting to consider the points made in the light of our own technological revolution. In Fletcher and Kipling’s view, chloroform was the most important discovery of the age—what would they have thought of the advances in medicine since? Antibiotics, plastic surgery, organ transplants, genetics and vaccines have transformed human life “to a degree we can hardly conceive.” Telecommunications have likewise changed to a degree that might have been thought impossible by the authors of “A History of England” with the Internet making global communications practically instantaneous, rather than a matter of minutes. Their idea of passenger airships seems far-fetched now but all the same, we have international air travel.
The poem begins with the origin of most machines of the time: the iron ore and coal that powered Victorian Britain, wrought and forged into the engines of industry and fed by “water, coal and oil” and working every hour, every day.
We see the gamut of activities undertaken by these machines, the immense power brought to bear in moving objects, performing repetitive tasks and making human life easier—from the writers’ perspective, not necessarily that of the mill hands, railway engineers, and others whose livelihoods depended on tending their mechanical charges and many whose lives were taken by them.
The poem shows us the advent of the ‘wireless telegraph’ with powerful radio transmitters sending messages “across the arch of heaven”, while great ships like the Mauretania with its nine decks could transport passengers that arrived by the ‘boat-express’ train across the world. Nine decks and 70,000 horses! The largest cruise ship in the world at the time of writing is Royal Caribbean’s Icon of the Seas, which has twenty decks and 81,000 horsepower—the power may not have increased much in absolute terms but it is driving a much bigger ship—1,200 feet long and 217 feet wide compared to 790 feet long and 88 feet wide for the Mauretania. The screws referred to in the poem are not the sort you fasten shelves to the wall with—they are the propellors that drove the ship across the sea.
The poem continues to list the human activities that machines had made more efficient though no less dangerous—“Give us dynamite and drills!” We see the automatic planting of seeds and their subsequent harvesting in farming, the construction of aqueducts to provide water to the ever-growing towns and cities and the damming of rivers to create reservoirs to supply the aqueducts.
At the end of the poem, a warning note is sounded—though all these machines are marvellous inventions and great contributors to the power of Victorian industry, they are dangerous when misused or misunderstood (“If you make a slip in handling us, you die”) or when fed false information (“We are not built to comprehend a lie”). They have no souls, no real intelligence or emotions and although their power is undeniable and their impact on the world immense, they are not above Heaven and are ultimately human creations and limited by the human mind.
I like this poem because although it was written over a hundred years ago, the points it makes are as true today as when Kipling set them down. We see much marketing froth over artificial intelligence, for example—every product has to have it, seemingly—I wouldn’t be surprised if toilet rolls began being sold with an AI tag. Before AI, we had the Internet of Things, and long before that, icons and mice. All technology, as Kipling points out, is the product of human minds and is limited by our own preconceptions and preoccupations. He also suggests that once the smoke from these machines has cleared from our eyes, we will see the skies clear again, perhaps implying that the human infatuation with technology must run its course in the end, though it seems to me that we are still deeply in love with it.
The Kipling Society, as usual, has an excellent page about the poem and links to the Internet Archive where the pages from the original book, including the illustration by Henry Ford, can be viewed.
Janelle Shane writes a machine learning humour blog where she writes about the foibles of AI systems. Her articles often show amusing examples of how AI frequently fails in subtle ways to pass itself off as human and her book “You Look Like a Thing and I Love You” is an interesting exploration of Artificial Intelligence. YouTube has a selection of readings of the poem, but I have to choose the one with Kipling’s own reading of his poem with a slightly odd animation of his face.