This text is the first portfolio-submission for the course “187.329 - VU Sociology of Technology” ) and deals with the the questions listed below. It's mainly based on Shivelbusch’ “Railway Journey, The Industrialization of Time and Space in the Nineteenth Century” (1986), and uses the historical of the railway to study the interplay of society and technology.
The questions:
- Explain why locomotive and rail track constitute a machine ensemble.
- In what way does the introduction of the transportation monopoly around 1840 closely relate to the fact that the railway (locomotive and rail track) is to be understood as an ensemble, rather than the rail track being a traffic route like the road or similar traffic routes?
- Why did the rails have to…
- …be smooth and hard?
- …run a level and straight course?
- Which consequences did this have for the course of the railway trail (contrary to e.g. the road)?
Other posts from the same lecture can be found here.
Task 1/1
Explain why locomotive and rail track constitute a machine ensemble.
Already early on the railway was seen as a machine ensemble consisting of a unified rails and vehicles (Wexler 1955, Poussin 1839, Lardner 1851, Reuleaux 1875) in contrast to other, pre-existing modes of transportation consisting of more independent route and means (Schivelbusch 1986) (e.g. streets and carriages, canals and boats).
The technological predecessors where steam-engines used in coal mines (for pumping water), i.e. an environment that also had rails. Almost as if to highlight this meaning as a machine ensemble, early rails were cogged and described as gearwheel laid out in a line (Lardner 1849, Lardner 1851) matching the cogs on the cart, which heavily influenced the perception of rails, wheels and carriages as one machine ensemble. Later designs found the cogs to be technically unnecessary, but the perception remained.
Technically, compared to road and carriage, the resulting railways require a high level of harmonization of wheels and rails / compatibility between them, or else the danger of derailing ensues (Greenhow, 1846). Put differently, where one can use practically any carriage with any road, wheels and trains need to exactly fit the rails (and vice versa). Also, there's no way to let others pass by on a single rail and ever-increasing speeds required solid administration and communication to avoid conflicts/crashes. Reuleaux (1875) highlights this “join[ing of] carriage and road into one machine” and writes of how “all cogwheels will operate without play”. By this, he means that all parts of the machine require precise adjustment to each other to ensure efficient and stable operation, not just in a technical but also an organizational sense. This adminstrative integration would be a major factor in the establishment of the transportation monopoly (see section 2 below).
Task 1/2
In what way does the introduction of the transportation monopoly around 1840 closely relate to the fact that the railway (locomotive and rail track) is to be understood as an ensemble, rather than the rail track being a traffic route like the road or similar traffic routes?
In contrast to the technical concerns addressed in section 1, Thomas Gray (1825) and Richard Lovel Edgeworth (1802) viewed the railway through the lens of individual traffic, i.e. separate route and means, as extension and improvement upon roads, in line with the liberal economic thinking at the time. The idea was to charge for usage, like one would people using boats on a canal or carriages getting stopped at turnpikes set along a road.
As Lardner (1851) and Jackman (1916) lay out, this way of operating railway business came to an end due to several factors, that one might somewhat summarize and paraphrase as:
- having independent actors on the railway causes high risks, e.g. of collisions, especially as they were more likely to disregard technical regulations.
- the profit for the transport business (as opposed to the railway providers) was marginal
- there weren't enough locations to refill the required coal and water along the way for independent railway usage.
- it did not scale well: Gray (1825) called for six-lane railways leading in and out of London to facilitate this vision.
For these reasons, the railway as seperate/independent route and means, with seperate railway providers and transport companies did not work out. The railway companies argued for the right to exclude other businesses from their line(s) for the sake of “efficiency,… public convenience and safety” and got this “particular monopoly” approved in 1840 in the UK, thus enshrining the machine ensemble under one owner in law (Jackman, 1916)
Task 1/3
3a
Why did the rails have to…
- …be smooth and hard?
- …run a level and straight course?
Lardner (1851) sees an ideal road as one without friction, where one could hypothetically accelerate a carriage to a velocity at one end and have it reach the other without any loss/deceleration except for air-resistance. He gives the requirements for such a road as following: “a perfect road should be smooth, level, hard and straight.” This definition follows from Newton's Laws of Dynamics, which first law can be paraphrased as “a body at rest stays at rest and a body moving with a given velocity (and direction) keeps moving like that, unless an outside force applies.”
Such outside forces that would counteract the movement along a given rail / road, thus making it “less than ideal” by decelerating the carriage, include: friction, air-resistance, as well as gravity when going up-hill (the steeper the stronger the force pulling down-hill). Curves would require changing the direction of velocity, thus requiring outside forces and thus constitute a speed loss again (and would also limit the maximum velocity to prevent derailing due to centrifugal forces).
Friction in particular results from the properties of the two materials involved (in the case for railways the wheels’ steel and rails’ steel) and the object's weight. To be exact, the materials’ respective hardness and smoothness result in a specific friction coefficient that is multiplied with the normal force (i.e. mass times gravity-coefficient) to the get the friction-force opposed to the movement.
Lardner also writes, that a frictionless road wasn't possible to achieve with horse-drawn carriages, as the horses needs for a soft ground, where their hooves can find purchase instead of slipping, directly conflicts with the definitions for such an ideal road. In contrast, the railway appears as a way to close in onto this ideal.
3b
Which consequences did this have for the course of the railway trail (contrary to e.g. the road)?
To construct a railway as close as possible to this “ideal road” (see section 3a) hills and valleys had to be adapted to the railway as much as possible rather than the other way around. Where roads were built winding along the ebb and flow of the terrain, for railways cuttings/excavations, embankments, tunnels and bridges were built to allow the rails to run as straight and level as possible.
These changes represented a dominance of “mechanical regularity” over “natural irregularity” (Schivelbusch 1977) by the way of symbolic meaning.
Also, on the same aspect of the railway as a cultural element: The view of and connection with the outside world was limited or entirely negated due to train-window's framing, routes through tunnels and excavations, and blurring due to high speeds. Together with the apparent independence of rail-placement from the terrain, these implementation details lead to the perception of an alienation and disconnectedness from nature (symbolic meaning), as cast into lyrics by Paul Verlaine in 1951 (and quoted by Schivelbusch 1977). This lead to people experiencing their surroundings they “travel through” instead of “travel in” – an effect caused by onlooker's perception of the surroundings via the railway machine ensemble as a medium. This effect was reinforced by the telegraph poles lining the route (and used for collision-preventing communication), that were interposed between passengers and landscape.
References
- Edgeworth, R. L., (1802)
- Gray, T., 5th ed. (London, 1825), p. 12
- Greenhow, C. H., An Exposition of the Danger and Deficiencies of the Present Mode of Railway Construction (London, 1846), pp. 5–6.
- Jackman, W. T., The Development of Transportation in Modern England(1st ed., 1916; repr. London, 1962), p. 573-4.
- Lardner, D., Railway Economy (London, 1851), pp. 421–2.
- Lardner, D., The Steam Engine, 3rd American ed. from 5th British ed.(Philadelphia, 1849), p. 161.
- Poussin, G. T., Examen comparatif de la question des chemins de fer en 1839 en France et à l’étranger (Paris, 1839), pp. xi–xii.
- Reuleaux, Franz, Theoretische Kinematik: Grundzüge einer Theorie des Maschinenwesens (Brunswick, 1875), p. 231-234.
- Schivelbusch, W., The Railway Journey, The Industrialization of Time and Space in the Nineteenth Century (Munich 1977, Oakland 1986)
- Wexler, Peter J., quoted in, La Formation du vocabulaire des chemins de fer en France, 1778–1842 (Geneva and Lille, 1955), p. 31.
- Verlaine, Paul, Oeuvres poétiques complètes (Paris, 1951), p. 106.