Piracy_ The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates - Adrian Johns [78]
The great virtue of such contentions was that they took the otherwise rather metaphysical distinctions-between form and matter, or between doctrine and expression-that were always going to be central to any resolution on literary property and gave them tangible form. They did so by specifying the kinds of machines at issue. Warburton's invocation of utensils was thus dismissed as "ridiculous" by one antagonist who noticed that it prejudged its outcome. Instead, the real issue lay with "Mathematical Machines, such as Orreries, Microcosms, Clocks, and Watches." An orrery, say, was as much a "composition" as a book.54 A few specific machines particularly embodied the mixture of doctrine, expression, skill, labor, and investment, and therefore began to reappear repeatedly in the literary property debates. The air pump (fig. 6.i) and chronometer were two of these. A third, and perhaps the most prevalent, was the orrery (fig. 6.2). Thiswas a clockwork device designed to display the Copernican system in motion. It was also, in a literal sense, a model of enlightenment itself, because the point often seems to have been to model the diffusion of light through the cosmos. Every self-respecting experimental lecturer by mid-century had one. A few were enormously sophisticated and impressive devices. They were the prime public instances of a growing fashion for ingenious automata, or self-driven machines.
One particular automaton was repeatedly adduced in the literary property debates. This was Henry Bridges's "Microcosm" (fig. 6.3). An "Elaborate and Matchless PILE of Aw r," as one showman memorably called it, the Microcosm had originally been constructed in 1741 for the Duke of Chandos, the supreme speculator of the projecting age and Desaguliers's major patron. Since then it had been widely exhibited in coffeehouses. It was a ten-foot-high, six-foot-wide marvel. Built in the form of an ornate Roman Temple, in its fabric it contained musical automata, models of a carpenter's workshop and landscapes with realistically moving figures, and accurate rotating mechanisms showing the Copernican and Ptolemaic systems. It also boasted an orrery for the moons ofJupiter. It played music specially composed for its internal organ-or spectators could ask it to play their own. In all, it combined in one mechanism the principles of architecture, sculpture, painting, music, and astronomy. The Microcosm had taken ten years altogether to build (twenty, it was later claimed) but could be seen for a shilling. That fact symbolized the bargain of rational creativity in a commercial sphere.55
Once the preserve of courts, automata like orreries and the Microcosm were now objects of public regard in a world of goods. As they became ever more complex, so they posed ever more pointed questions in that new context-questions about human nature and its relation to mechanism, about social organization (manufactories being envisaged as automata), and, with a frisson of infidelity, about the powers of matter itself. Automata became a focus for all the intellectual and social issues of mind, labor, and political organization by which the public sphere was confronted. Clockwork people played music and sighed as they did so; clockwork ducks ate and defecated. By a strange and evocative coincidence, the first writing android was unveiled in 1774, just as Donaldson v. Becket determined that literary production was not mechanical. Constructed in Neuchatel (that center of reprinting) by the renownedjacquet- Droz brothers, it was soon being displayed in every European capital, including London:
FIGURE 6.1. Boyle's air pump. R. Boyle, New experiments physico-mechanicall, touching the spring of the air (Oxford: by H. Hall, for T. Robinson, 166o), end piece. Courtesy of the University of Chicago Library.
FICURE 6.2. The great orrery J. Harris, Description and use oftbe globes (London: for B. Cole and