1 Introduction: Novelty as Nuisance or Worse
The insight that informs this volume is that there is nothing self-evident about the connection between ‘new’ and ‘improved’, despite the advertising jingle and the relentless hype about innovation in every realm from scholarly grant proposals to laundry detergent. On the contrary, historically speaking, the association has rather been not ‘new and improved’ but ‘new and untested and potentially disastrous—or at very least, inconvenient’—as anyone who has ever been forced to update a perfectly satisfactory computer program knows. As this volume’s theme of ‘Anchoring Technology’ underscores, new technologies have historically been anchored in existing social and material contexts, not presented as radical ruptures with all that came before.1
There are good reasons for this: every technology exists within a finely calibrated ecosystem of human customs and material infrastructure. Just as in natural ecosystems, the sudden introduction of a new species can have disastrous knock-on effects. Abrupt change can rip apart delicate webs of interdependence, whether these concern symbiotic relationships among species, global just-in-time supply networks, or horse-drawn city traffic before the advent of bicycles. This is why anchoring remains essential even in cultures that glorify innovation, the more radical the better. For example, even the much-touted ‘disruptive’ technology of driverless cars is anchored in current automobile design, extant highway systems, and entrenched human habits. I will therefore not focus on innovation but rather on three alternative values in the history of technology: improvisation, emulation, and virtuosity. My examples will be drawn mostly from early modern Europe, but I suspect that these values already in the sixteenth and seventeenth century boasted a long historical lineage and that they are to some extent still relevant.
2 Emulation
Circa 1600 Philip Galle of Antwerp published a series of 20 images designed by Jan van der Straet and engraved by Jan Collaert I. The collection was entitled Nova Reperta, or ‘New Discoveries’, and these give a fair idea of what a well-informed European of the time thought were the cutting-edge novelties of the era. Not all were what we would call technology: the discovery of the Americas featured prominently on the frontispiece (fig. 4.1). But many were, including the three inventions singled out by Girolamo Cardano, Francis Bacon, and other early modern novatores as proof that the moderns had surpassed the ancients, at least in the mechanical arts: gunpowder, the printing press, and the magnetic compass.
Frontispiece, Jan van der Straet, Nova reperta (c.1600), engraved by Theodor Galle
Photo: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Public domain
However, the ‘nova’ in the title Nova Reperta did not mean ‘new’ in the breaking-news sense of the modern word ‘innovation’. Many of the inventions and discoveries (two ideas still conflated c.16002 ) were centuries old, like water mills. Others were not so much isolated inventions, much less datable inventions made by an identifiable person, as they were long production processes, like silk manufacture. Even the plates that commemorated a relatively new invention (‘new’ here meaning less than 300 years old) are group portraits showing a division of multi-staged labor (fig. 4.2).3 The one signed invention, the magnetic compass attributed to Flavio Gioja of Amalfi (see fig. 4.1), dates back to the early fourteenth century.
Book Printing, Jan van der Straet, Nova reperta (c.1600), engraved by Theodor Galle
Photo: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Public domain
Although the Nova Reperta is often presented as an early witness of pride in modern technological innovation, its underlying assumptions about what innovation is seem anything but modern. There is no sharp distinction between inventions like gunpowder and discoveries like the Americas; ‘new’ can mean anything from yesterday to 500 years ago; the invention in question is more a process than a thing in most cases, involving many stages and many people; as a result, there is rarely a single inventor. Instead, innovation itself is a slow, incremental process in which workers are constantly tweaking and adjusting prototypes to make them more efficient or multi-purpose or easier to use. This process was called ‘emulation’, which was distinct from both imitation and innovation.4 Between the extremes of slavish copying of old designs and the introduction of radical new ones, artisans took a proven device and the work process associated with it and made small improvements, which were in turn emulated by others. This is a process as old as Hesiod’s good kind of eris (‘rivalry’, ‘competition’) in the Works and Days5 and as new as Adam Smith’s description of worker ingenuity in the pin factory in the Wealth of Nations (1776).6 It is competitive but not necessarily individualized; ingenious, but rarely disruptive. When Francis Bacon in the Novum organum (1620) contrasted the progressive mechanical arts with the stagnant sciences, this was what he meant by progress: slow, incremental, cumulative but in the end remarkable.7
3 Improvisation
My second early modern category, improvisation, is closely related to the first. The fact that the mechanical arts could be described as ‘arts’ rather than as unskilled labor indicated that they were governed by principles that could be taught. However, because the mechanicals arts involved the imposition of form upon recalcitrant matter, artisans were constantly having to adjust their rules to the peculiarities of their materials: the carpenter who had to work around the knotty grain of this piece of wood; the tailor who had to modify a pattern for this bolt of unusually fine-spun silk; the apothecary who had to substitute a different ingredient for a spice that could not be found; the dyer who had to make do with a woad plant that did not deliver the desired shade of blue. As in the case of medicine, which had to deal with the infinite variety of human bodily complexions, the mechanical arts were constantly adjusting to the infinite vagaries of matter. Recipes and the so-called books of secrets warned users that the instructions and ingredients given should not be followed slavishly: everything from water to the potency of healing herbs varied locally and had to be adjusted accordingly.
The variability of matter was usually regarded as a nuisance, but it was also the occasion for productive novelty. The medieval experimentum, or trial, was a test of some new ingredient or process, not an experiment that probed into hidden causes, and experiments were of necessity being constantly conducted in artisan’s workshops and also in households. Generations of women might keep, annotate, and hand down recipes for everything from eye ointment to puddings to cosmetics, each new owner adding her notes about successful improvisations to the original recipe.8 Like emulation, improvisation was incremental, cumulative, and anonymous, but it was also constant and serendipitous. Every workshop, every kitchen was willy-nilly a laboratory, like it or not.9 When dedicated laboratories started to appear in the late seventeenth century, it is no accident that their equipment of stills, hot fires, and cooking ware was borrowed directly from the kitchen and apothecary shop.
4 Virtuosity
The third and last of the alternative early modern values to technological innovation was virtuosity. Because of the growing prestige of the fine arts of painting and sculpture and the concomitant cult of individual artists from the fifteenth century onwards, virtuosity is often narrowly associated with the tradition of mimesis, in a lineage stretching back to Pliny’s story of the competition between the ancient Greek painters Zeuxis and Parrhasius.10 The trompe l’oeil still life is a tribute to the continued vitality of artistic virtuosity as illusionist imitation.
However, there was also a tradition of virtuosity in the early modern mechanical arts that was not so narrowly defined by mimesis. In contrast to the highly mimetic automata of the eighteenth century, like Jacques de Vaucanson’s duck that quacked, swam, ate, and defecated,11 the virtuoso automata of the sixteenth century were more likely to be works of elaborate clockwork, like the 1574 astronomical clock at Strasbourg with its sophisticated astronomical calendar clockwork tracking the motions of the planets and eclipses, its carillon that played six tunes as well as a golden cock that crowed every day at noon.12 Or a work of artisanal virtuosity could display supreme mastery of form over recalcitrant matter, like this delicate frigate crafted of hard brittle ivory as a showpiece for the Wunderkammer of the Saxon kings (fig. 4.3).
Ivory frigate by Jacob Zeller (1620)
Photo: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Public domain
Virtuosity aimed to inspire wonder at the maker’s extraordinary skill, not necessarily at novelty and very rarely at utility. The astronomical clock could tell time, but that was the least of its attractions. These were objects meant to be displayed to an admiring audience, not to make work easier or more efficient, to cure diseases, or win wars. They did serve political purposes: the princely Wunderkammer was regularly enlisted to impress and over-awe visiting dignitaries, the prince basking in the reflected wondrousness of his collection.13 Yet here too improvisation and emulation were at work—the rivalry of Zeuxis and Parrhasius was emblematic of the rivalry among master craftsmen to outdo one another. Here novelty was the byproduct of competition—things never before imagined or achieved, a perfection that challenged all rivals.
5 Conclusion: Novelty for Its Own Sake
These early modern alternative values to innovation were embedded in a system of labor organization centered on the workshop, in an understanding of technology as a multi-stage process rather than as a product, and in an Aristotelian philosophy of form and matter that recognized variability as a fact of life. Within this system, inventors might be individualized (this was especially the case with works of virtuosity) but by and large the processes of innovation were as collective as they were incremental and cumulative. Although many of the resulting technologies were ultimately as disruptive as anything Silicon Valley has thrown at us—just think of the printing press—they did not explode upon the scene like stellar novae in the heavens. And almost none were celebrated because they were new: the “nova” in Nova Reperta refers to anything that happened since Antiquity.
The only early modern technology that did celebrate novelty for its own sake was the one most reviled, then as now: fashion. Then as now the St. Vitus’ dance of febrile innovation in dress was grudgingly tolerated for its economic benefits. But then as now fashion exposes the shadow side of innovation: pure novelty for its own sake, as short-lived as surprise.
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Jones, Matthew L., Reckoning with Matter. Calculating Machines, Innovation, and Thinking about Thinking from Pascal to Babbage. Chicago, 2016.
Leong, Elaine. Recipes and Everyday Knowledge. Medicine, Science, and the Household in Early Modern England. Chicago, 2018.
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