MDDM23: The Man Voltaire Call'd a Prometheus

[Dave Monroe]

   "Too true, alas.  A Mechanician of blinding and
world-rattling Genius, Gentlemen, yet posterity will
know him because of the Duck alone,-- they are already
coupl'd as inextricably as...Mason and Dixon?  Haw-
hawhawnnh.  The Man Voltaire call'd a Prometheus,--"
(M&D, Ch. 37, p. 272)

>From Siegfried Giedion, Mechanization Takes Command: A
Contribution to Anonymous History (New York: W.W.
Norton, 1969 [1948]), Pt. II, "Springs of
Mechnanization," Sec. 1, "Movement," pp. 14-29 ...

"... in 1741 Cardinal Fleury, the real ruler of
France, named Vaucanson 'Inspector of the Silk
Manufacturer.'  It is then that his genius turns to
the mechanizing of production.  He makes numerous
improvements in spinning and weaving, and proves
himself a foresighted organzier.  About 1740 he
constructs a mechanical loom for figured silks.  Its
heddles are automaticaly raised and lowered by menas
of a drum pierced with holes, on the same principle
that controlled the air supply and teh selection of
notes in his flutist....  Vaucanson's loom did not
have immediate consequences.  In 1804 the inventor
Jacquard of Lyons assmbled the fragments of
Vaucanson's loom  in the Paris Consevatoire des Arts
et Metiers and thus invented his weaving automaton,
the Jacquard loom, which has remained standard to this
day, and reproduced mechanically even the most
fantastic patterns.
   "It is Vaucanson's practical activities that are
historically the most interesting.  In 1756 he set up
a silk factory at Aubenas near Lyons, improving or
inventing every detail of the builkding and of the
machinery, even to the reels ....  To the best of our
knowledge this is the first industrial plant in the
modern sense, built nearly two decades before Richard
Arkwright founded the very first succesful spinning
mills in England.  Vaucanson had insight into the fact
that industry could not be housed in wooden shacks or
in random buildings, but required a concentrated plant
where every detail was carefully thought out, and
whose machines were moved by a single power....
   "Yet these efforts came to nothing. 
Eighteenth-century France was a testing ground in
almost every domain,  Ideas arose that could become
reality only in the nineteenth century, for they were
unable to sink roots in Catholic France under the
Ancien Regime.  Mechanization was among these." (pp.
35-6)

My guess is, Kenner, Chapuis & Droz, and Giedion--in,
perhaps, even that receeding order--might well have
been sources for Pynxhon, even ...

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