The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the Nineteenth Century

Wolfgang Schivelbusch

The Railway Journey

The Industrialization of Time and Space

in the Nineteenth Century

With a New Preface

University of California Press

University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu.

University of California Press

Oakland, California

© 1977, 1986, 2014 by Wolfgang Schivelbusch

ISBN 978-0-520-28226-1 (paper)

ISBN 978-0-520-95790-9 (ebook)

The German text of this book was published under the title Geschichte der Eisenbahnreise by Carl Hanser Verlag, Munich, 1977

English translation first published in the United States by Urizen Books, 1979

First University of California Press edition 1986

The Library of Congress has cataloged an earlier edition of this book as follows:

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Schivelbusch, Wolfgang, 1941–

The railway journey.

Translation of: Geschichte der Eisenbahnreise.

Originally published: New York : Urizen Books, c1979

Bibliography: p.

Includes index.

1. Railroads—History—19th century.    2. Railroad travel—History—19th century.    3. Space and time—History—19th century    I. Title.

HE1021.S3413 1986 385'.09'034 86-11226

ISBN 978-0-520-05929-0 (alk. paper)

Contents

Acknowledgments

Foreword Alan Trachtenberg

Preface to the 2014 Edition

1. The Mechanization of Motive Power

2. The Machine Ensemble

3. Railroad Space and Railroad Time

Excursus: The Space of Glass Architecture

4. Panoramic Travel

5. The Compartment

The End of Conversation while Traveling

Isolation

Drama in the Compartment

The Compartment as a Problem

6. The American Railroad

Transportation Before the Railroad

The Construction of the Railroad

The New Type of Carriage

River Steamboat and Canal Packet as Models for the American Railroad Car

Sea Voyage on Rails

Postscript

7. The Pathology of the Railroad Journey

Excursus: Industrial Fatigue

8. The Accident

Accident and Crisis

9. Railway Accident, ‘Railway Spine’ and Traumatic Neurosis

Excursus: The History of Shock

10. Stimulus Shield: or, the Industrialized Consciousness

11. The Railroad Station: Entrance to the City

12. Tracks in the City

13. Circulation

Notes

Bibliographical Note

Index

Illustrations

A coalfield, 1812

Passengers or coal?

A coal wagon and passenger car combined, 1825

The train cuts through the landscape

The cutting as part of the nineteenth-century landscape

The railroad blazes a trail through the city

The viaduct

The railroad journey as panorama

The monotony of the railroad journey

Travelling third-class in France in the 1840s

Third-class travellers, by Gustave Doré

First-class traveller, France, 1900

A European view of the American railroad car

Pullman car interiors, 1870s and 1880s

Daytime cabin of a small riverboat

The main cabin of a riverboat at night

A railroad passenger car, daytime

A sleeping car of the New York Central Railroad

‘Across the Continent’, Currier & Ives, 1869

A railroad disaster, 8 May 1841

The train hall, Euston, London, 1835

The façade of the terminus, Gare de l’Est, Paris, in the 1830s

The boulevard continues the line of the railroad

Haussmannism in Paris, 1860s

Haussmann’s new boulevards

Acknowledgments

For their hospitality and assistance I would like to thank the following American libraries: Library of Congress, New York Public Library, New York Historical Society, New York Academy of Medicine, the Boston Athenaeum, the Kress Rare Books Library and, especially, John McLeod of the American Railroads Association Library.

W. S.

For Shirley D. Carse

‘I thought of railway travelling.’

— Lewis Carroll

Foreword

Nothing else in the nineteenth century seemed as vivid and dramatic a sign of modernity as the railroad. Scientists and statesmen joined capitalists in promoting the locomotive as the engine of ‘progress’, a promise of imminent Utopia. By the end of the century their naiveté came home to them, especially in the United States where railroad corporations were seen as the epitome of ruthless, irresponsible business power, a grave threat to order and stability, both economic and political. But in fact from its beginnings the railroad was never free of some note of menace, some undercurrent of fear. The popular images of the ‘mechanical horse’ manifest fear in the very act of seeming to bury it in a domesticating metaphor: fear of displacement of familiar nature by a fire-snorting machine with its own internal source of power. Once it appeared, the machine seemed unrelenting in its advancing dominion over the landscape — in the way it ‘lapped the miles’, in Emily Dickinson’s words — and in little over a generation it had introduced a new system of behavior: not only of travel and communication but of thought, of feeling, of expectation. Neither the general fear of the mechanical and the specific frights of accident and injury, nor the social fear of boundless economic power entirely effaced the Utopian promise implicit in the establishment of speed as a new principle of public life. In fact the populations of the industrial world, including the American Populists who aimed their profound hostility toward corporate capitalism at the railroad, accomodated themselves to the sheer physical fact of travel by rail as a normal fact of existence.

Now, as the railroad recedes in importance as a mode of personal travel and of economic distribution, it reappears as an object of study, of historical contemplation. Scholars have weighed its importance in the making of industrial capitalism, as transportation and as the business of organization. Not only was its economic function of first importance, but that function exerted itself in many indirect ways upon what seemed to be simple personal needs for getting from one place to another. Personal travel by railroad inevitably (if unconsciously) assimilated the personal traveller into a physical system for moving goods. Behind the railroad’s ‘annihilation of space by time’, wrote Karl Marx, lay the generative phenomenon of capital. The ‘creation of the physical conditions of exchange’ was ‘an extraordinary necessity’ for capital, which ‘by its nature drives beyond every spatial barrier’. Products become commodities only as they enter a market. They must be moved from the factory to the customer. Entering a market requires a movement in space, a ‘locational moment’. The industrial system also requires the movement of resources from mine to factory — a movement which is already a transformation of nature. Thus the railroad fulfilled inner necessities of capital, and it is this alone that accounts for its unhindered development in the nineteenth century.

The ‘railway journey’ which fills nineteenth-century novels as an event of travel and social encounter was at bottom an event of spatial relocation in the service of production. By exposing this hidden nerve within mechanized travel, Wolfgang Schivelbusch has placed the journey by rail in a new and revealing light. It was a decisive mode of initiation of people into their new status within the system of commodity production: their status as object of forces whose points of origin remained out of view. Just as the path of travel was transformed from the road that fits itself to the contours of land to a railroad that flattens and subdues land to fit its own needs for regularity, the traveler is made over into a bulk of weight, a ‘parcel’, as many travelers confessed themselves to feel. Compared to what it replaced, the journey by stage coach, the railway journey produced novel experiences — of self, of fellow-travelers, of landscape (now seen as swiftly-passing panorama), of space and time. Mechanized by seating arrangements and by new perceptual coercions (including new kinds of shock), routinized by schedules, by undeviating pathways, the railroad traveler underwent experiences analagous to military regimentation — not to say to ‘nature’ transformed into ‘commodity’. He was converted from a private individual into one of a mass public — a mere consumer.

This puts too crudely and schematically the form of Schivelbusch’s astute analysis. But the brief summary does suggest the special kind of light that flows from his insights. He wishes to recover the subjective experience of the railway journey at the very moment of its newness, its pure particularity: to construct from a magnificent display of documents written and graphic what can be called the industrial subject. In this enterprise Schivelbusch writes in the spirit of Siegfried Giedion, Walter Benjamin, Norbert Elias and Dolph Sternberger — cultural historians who look for evidence of new forms of consciousness arising out of encounters with new structures, new things. One feature of modernity as it crystallized in the nineteenth century was a radical foregrounding of machinery and of mechanical apparatus within everyday life. The railroad represented the visible presence of modern technology as such. Within the technology lay also forms of social production and their relations. Thus the physical experience of technology mediated consciousness of the emerging social order; it gave a form to a revolutionary rupture with past forms of experience, of social order, of human relation. The products of the new technology produced, as Marx remarked, their own subject; they produced capacities appropriate to their own use. In their railway journeys nineteenth-century people encountered the new conditions of their lives; they encountered themselves as moderns, as dwellers within new structures of regulation and need.

Schivelbusch has undertaken to reconstruct the immediacy of encounter through an extraordinary richness of detail. The book is rich in proportion to its breadth as well as its intensity of concentration. It brings into focus a single system that underlies a diversity of partial facts: the design of under-carriages and cars, compartments and corridors, platforms and waiting rooms. It explores the nodal points of juncture between railroads and cities and shows the effect of the new mode of travel upon traffic circulation and the segregation of urban spaces. It also discloses hidden connections among journeying by railway, walking on city streets and shopping in department stores. It is not only the changes in physical behavior that concern the author — the new demands upon the nerves, for example — but the cultural perceptions and definitions of such changes. The book is itself a kind of journey, from the railway experience to the larger formations of culture within industrial capitalism. It suggests that we look for evidence of culture at those minute points of contact between new things and old habits, and that we include in our sense of history the power of things themselves to impress and shape and evoke a response within consciousness. There is nothing here of nostalgia for a lost ‘romance’ of the railroad, but a great deal that compels us to conceive of that romance in a new way. The book contributes provocatively to a much-needed critical history of the origins of modern industrial culture.

Alan Trachtenberg

Yale University

Preface to the 2014 Edition

World Machines:

The Steam Engine, the Railway,

and the Computer

When this book was first published, in 1979, the personal computer was barely known and the Internet not dreamed of.

The following thirty years brought the Digital Revolution, an event often compared in scale and impact to the Industrial Revolution of the nineteenth century.

Could it be that the railway, the accelerator of the Industrial Revolution, and the computer occupy different points along/on the same trajectory of machine evolution?

• • •

When, in the early 1970s, after having completed my PhD with a dissertation on Post-Brechtian East German drama, instead of continuing the study of literature I switched to the subject matter of railways, none of my late Frankfurt School and early post-structuralist friends showed any interest. They jovially derided my perceived interest in choo-choo trains bestowing me with gifts like railroad engineers’ caps and station masters’ whistles.

Their concern with things technical and material was limited to Adorno and Horkheimer’s concept of the culture industry and to texts like Walter Benjamin’s The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technical Reproducibility.

There was, to be sure, Norbert Elias’s The Civilizing Process, a rediscovery from the Weimar period, causing a certain delight. Understanding concrete objects such as the fork and the handkerchief as subjects of history was welcomed as an antidote to the thin air of Adornian and Habermasian texts. But that was about how far it went.

• • •

I shared this world view until the summer of 1970, when, before embarking on my dissertation, I first visited America.

The trip was intended as an escape from the ennui following the excitement of the Berlin years of 1967 to 1969.

To the romantic neophyte of Karl Marx, the election of Richard Nixon seemed like a modern replay of the Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon.

In terms of more recent history, the America of the Vietnam War, the ghetto riots, the Democratic convention in Chicago, and Nixon’s election suggested a repeat of the last throes of the Weimar Republic on a larger scale.

Having by late birth missed the latter, I now hoped to occupy a ringside seat and watch the Götterdämmerung of the American republic.

It did not happen in the summer of 1970, nor in the following decades.

Every educated European fascinated by the American experience attempts to become a little Tocqueville. I was no exception.

The discovery that America’s exceptionalism/Sonderweg had a lot to do with the American way of technology came fast. Leo Marx’s classic The Machine in the Garden helped, in tandem with Siegfried Giedion’s Mechanization Takes Command. An important moment was the discovery, in a standard history of technology in America, of the peculiar American ax. Its evolution from its European cousin through two centuries of American tree felling perfectly illustrated one of my favorite Marxian concepts: the metabolic exchange between Human and Nature, or more precisely, the different ways this metabolism worked in Europe and in America.

From the ax to the railway was but a step.

My original idea was to understand America by studying the different paths of European and American railway technology, railway design, railway psychology.

In the writing, the perspective broadened. The European-American comparative perspective was reduced to one chapter. Thus The Railway Journey became my journey into the industrialization of space, time, and mind in the nineteenth century.

• • •

Opening The Railway Journey with a historical sketch of the steam engine’s technical evolution, I followed an established pattern.

Every history of the nineteenth century presents it as the central character—a kind of technological Napoleon—in the epic of early industrialization.

Following this convention, I reaffirmed how the decisive step had been the translation of the alternate up-and-down—or oscillating—movement of the steam-driven piston into the circular motion of the driving wheel. According to received wisdom, without this transformation there would have been no locomotion, no railway, no Industrial Revolution.

• • •

It took me forty years and the Digital Revolution to realize that I had missed the more important point of the invention preceding it.

This invention was, of course, placing a piston in a cylinder and applying the pressure of steam.

The resulting up-and-down (or forth-and-back, or oscillating) motion became humankind’s first artificially produced mechanical movement.

The analogy between the steam engine and the firearm was a later conclusion. For could the gun’s barrel not be seen as a cylinder projecting its missile piston forward, and the steam cylinder as a reciprocating gun? In other words, were both not machines producing power out of nowhere, and did they both not revolutionize their centuries—the fifteenth and the nineteenth—respectively?

• • •

Before the invention of the piston-cylinder-steam ensemble, motion had to be removed, or borrowed, from an external natural source (wind, water, animal) and transferred to the tool or machine or vehicle in question. This analogue transfer took place in a one-to-one ratio. No waterwheel was able to outrun the stream driving it, no sailing vessel could outspeed the wind, no coach could top the velocity of the horses pulling it.

By no longer receiving its motion from an external source but somehow creating it within itself, the steam engine seemed to be the mechanical equivalent of the Copernican revolution.

In chemical fact, of course, it did not create power but took it out of nature as well, just as all previous forms of locomotion had. The difference was that it did not transfer an existing form but forced a new form of power out of combustible matter.

• • •

Oscillating motion in itself was obviously nothing new, let alone revolutionary.

Any blacksmith using his hammer practiced it.

The revolution of the steam-driven piston was that its oscillating stroke was a type of motion not found anywhere else in nature. This stroke was a mechanical building block, or more precisely: it was the mechanical equivalent of a binary action. Or even more precisely: the piston’s up-and-down movement was no longer the analogue of any form of movement found in nature but possessed a binary-digital logic all its own.

The device that enabled the steam engine to automatically reverse the piston’s course and at the same time change it into rotating motion was the crankshaft.

According to the laws of mechanics and kinetics, to reverse a movement, it must first be brought to a halt and then set in motion again. The crankshaft manages to do both in a continuous motion and with unheard-of velocity. For the non-engineer, this borders on the miraculous. As do the digital switches in the computer.

• • •

We can understand the motion that the steam engine produces as a kind of atom or molecule of motion. As with the smallest particles of matter, those of motion can be reproduced/repeated in quantities as inexhaustible as the supply of fuel and of water. That supply at the time of the invention of the steam engine was seen to be as infinite as today’s supply of silicon for computer processors.

Building blocks—as the literal brick in the wall, Lucretius’s atoms, and today’s digital bits—are particles whose sole function is to constitute a minuscule part of a whole. Uniformity and limitless quantity are their characteristics.

The old atomistic question regarding the whole and its parts remains. It can—or must?—now be applied to the digital: how does the heterogeneity of the things that constitute the world evolve from a pool of identical particles?

That we still experience the difference between the machine-made and the handmade as strongly as ever seems to reveal an almost instinctual human disposition to cling to—and communicate with—the non-machine-made. Fascination with ever-smarter machines alternates with repulsion. The disgust, described by Kant, of the man who enjoys the nightingale’s song, only to discover that it was a mechanical imitation, recurs whenever we feel—and are—deprived of the original by the reproduction.

• • •

At this point it is important to remember that the original—preindustrial—meaning of machine was not the technical contraption but the effect of being tricked or cheated, as the word machination and the term deus ex machina suggest.

At the high point of nineteenth-century industrial culture, Franz Reuleaux, the great theorist of machinery, caught the double-crossing nature of the machine when he defined it as the merciless transformer of ‘the cosmical freedom of natural forces’ into the ‘order and law which no ordinary external force can shake’.¹ This was the full-circle return to the early modern view of the world as the world machine. The machine’s promise was not only to duplicate and imitate nature but to multiply her efficiency.

• • •

Once we accept that every new technology is an attempt to submit nature to its rules, that the physical means to achieve this is the machine, and that the resulting new reality is a machination, doppelgänger, or alias of nature, we have to conclude that each time this happens the world becomes a world machine.

It does not matter whether the new technology is immaterial or material, whether it is script, print, money, mechanical clocks, firearms, steam engines, or computers.

This accepted, it is easy to see what the railway of the nineteenth century and the computer of the present have in common. Both are attempts to re-create and reproduce the world in their image. Both succeed. And they succeed through their machinations. Whether the world they create is the global web of steam-powered industrial production and transportation or the digitalized cyberworld of information, it is their world machine.

Let them derail, explode, crash, or simply pull the plug, and both world machines come to an immediate halt.

• • •

In his classic On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures (1832), Charles Babbage speaks of a machine able to precisely count the strokes of the piston in a steam engine’s cylinder. Babbage knew what he was talking about. Before he became the famous mathematician and constructor of the first calculating machines, he had worked as a computer. A computer in the 1830s was not a machine but a person employed for the sole purpose of producing mathematical tables required for calculating vast amounts of numbers in the fields of astronomy, navigation, and industrial machinery. In other words, a computer was a worker who instead of serving an industrial machine with his hands served the task of calculation with his brain. What connected both kinds of work was, as Babbage later put it, their ‘intolerable labour and fatiguing monotony’.² He became the first to think of a machine to execute this kind of mechanical calculating labor. His often quoted exclamation ‘I wish to God these calculations had been executed by steam!’ and his wishful vision that ‘it would be extremely convenient if a steam engine could be contrived to execute calculations for us’ are proof of the contemporary belief in the omnipotence of steam, whether factory or railway applied.³ As the steam engine was able to perform physical work endlessly without fatigue, so Babbage imagined a steam-driven mechanical brain calculating without ever getting bored or fatigued.

In a similar vein, Ada Lovelace (daughter of Byron), Babbage’s collaborator on his next machine project, suggested programming the Analytical Engine with punched cards, following the model of the mechanical loom constructed by the French inventor Jacquard: ‘The Analytical Engine weaves algebraic patterns just as the Jacquard loom weaves flowers and leaves’.⁴

William Whewell, a philosopher of science and a contemporary of both, compared the calculating machine with a railway, on which ‘we are carried along  .  .  .  entering it at one station, and coming out of it at another’.⁵

Compare this to Heinrich Heine’s image in 1842 of the railway bringing the surf of the North Sea right to his doorstep in Paris, and to the various accounts of early twentieth-century Ford factories, according to which raw materials such as iron and rubber entered the assembly line at one point and reappeared at the end as the finished Model T automobile.

In short, steam-driven machinery, whether applied in industry, transportation, or calculation, seemed to miraculously annihilate the toil formerly associated with any kind of production.

• • •

Babbage and other highbrow advocates of the Industrial Revolution were in their time labeled intellectual industrialists because they believed in the universality of the principles of mechanization, whether material or immaterial.

Multiplying the production of commodities and multiplying the capacity of the mind through mechanization are obviously two different things, involving different consequences.

The former has been around for some time now and led to what is known as consumerism.

Although the latter is a more recent reality, Babbage glimpsed its potential.

What has been called his ‘fantasy of mechanically amplified intelligence’, able to produce a ‘divine archive of matter and spirit, extending down to the most basic molecular level’, marks the crossing of two lines.⁶

The first line is the utopian desire of mathematics to reproduce the real world in numbers, as stated in Pierre-Simon Laplace’s A Philosophical Essay on Probabilities, better known as Laplace’s demon: ‘An intellect which at a certain moment would know all forces that set nature in motion, and all positions of all items of which nature is composed, if this intellect were also vast enough to submit these data to analysis, it would embrace in a single formula the movements of the greater bodies of the universe and those of the tiniest atom; for such an intellect nothing would be uncertain, and the future just like the past would be present before its eyes’.⁷

The second line is the production of the real computing power needed to achieve this.

Here the aim is to not just to record the world in numbers but to make a numerical alias of it, which subsequently can be reconstituted/recomputed at one’s leisure. No previous world machine had been able to do this.

In the following passage written by Babbage in 1837, from a text titled ‘On the Permanent Impressions of Our Words and Actions on the Globe We Inhabit’, we need only replace his term ‘a Being’ (i.e., God) with the present day’s megacomputing agencies such as Google and the NSA to realize that the digital reproduction of the world has penetrated to its very molecular level: ‘Every atom, impressed with good and with ill, retains at once the motions which philosophers and sages have imparted to it, mixed and combined in ten