Poe in Cyberspace: “The Power of Words”

Poe’s three Platonic Dialogues are among the most radical of his science fiction works. In the first, “The Conversation of Eiros and Charmion” (1839), a fiery comet destroys planet earth. In the second, “The Colloquy of Monos and Una” (1841), death and dying are described in exhaustive detail. In the third, “The Power of Words” (1845), an unlimited database of words is created in the air—anticipating today’s internet. As editor, Evert Duyckinck thought so highly of the Platonic Dialogues that he included two of them in the 1845 Wiley & Putnam edition of Poe’s Tales.Regarded as the best of the three dialogues (M 3:1210), “The Power of Words” was inspired by the radical ideas of the British polymath Charles Babbage in his Ninth Bridgewater Treatise (1837), which crossed the Atlantic in magazine popularizations and an 1841 American edition. Martin Farquhar Tupper, a London reviewer of the Tales, asked publisher G. P. Putnam, “Shall we make Edgar Poe famous by a review in the Literary Gazette?” (qtd. in Dwight Thomas and David K. Jackson, The Poe Log: A Documentary Life of Edgar Allan Poe, 1809–1849 [G. K. Hall, 1987], 585).Noted for his impressive combination of science, mathematics, and invention, Babbage drew unusual public attention to his breakthrough prototypes of the difference engine and analytic engine, early versions of the modern calculator and programmable computer. Working at ultra-small and ultra-large dimensions beyond the boundaries of contemporary engineering, Babbage methodically applied Newton’s principle of the conservation of matter to the long-term nature of the vibrations in the air produced by human speech.Babbage’s remarkable theory specified that human speech left permanent impressions in the form of vibrations in the atmosphere. In “Chapter IX. On the permanent Impression of our Words and Actions on the Globe we inhabit” of The Ninth Bridgewater Treatise (1837), Babbage declared, “The pulsations of the air, once set in motion by the human voice, cease not to exist with the sounds to which they gave rise” (108).1 The result was that “in less than twenty hours every atom of its atmosphere takes up the altered movement” (109). Although too small to be detected by the human ear, the phenomenon was “demonstrated to exist by human reason” (110).Babbage observed, “Thus considered, what a strange chaos is this wide atmosphere we breathe! Every atom, impressed with good and ill, retains at once the motions which philosophers and sages have imparted to it, mixed and combined in ten thousand ways with all that is worthless and base. The air itself is one vast library, on whose pages are for ever written all that man has ever said or woman whispered” (111–12). As a result, “the air we breathe is the never-failing historian of the sentiments we have uttered, earth, air, and ocean, are the eternal witnesses of the acts we have done” (112). “No motion,” he asserted, “is ever obliterated” (114).Babbage’s prose in the Treatise was too radical and dense to be popular. Fortunately, the encyclopedia editor Dionysius Lardner wrote lectures and magazine articles that explained and simplified Babbage—sometimes with his help. Incidentally, Americans were most likely to read British magazine articles in their American reprints; in fact, Poole’s Index listed the page numbers of the American reprints, not the British originals.Improbably, some of Babbage’s most advanced ideas found their way into the most unlikely American periodicals. In 1839, the popular literary figure Nathaniel Parker Willis commented on Babbage’s idea of the preservation of past speech in a database in his reprint journal The Corsair, a periodical the New-Yorker judged “dashing and clever and Frenchified” (qtd. in Frank Luther Mott, A History of American Magazines, 1741–1850 [D. Appleton, 1930], 356–57). Willis wrote, “Mr. Babbage in his (miscalled Bridgewater) Treatise announces the astounding fact, as a very sublime truth, that every word uttered from the creation of the world has registered itself, and is still speaking, and will speak for ever in vibration” (qtd. in Terence Whalen, Edgar Allan Poe and the Masses: The Political Economy of Literature in Antebellum America [Princeton University Press, 1999], 256).Since Babbage was best known for his mechanical inventions, when Charles Frederick Briggs wanted to disparage Poe’s work, he remarked, “I think a machine something like Babbage’s[,] might be constructed to write poetry and criticisms like his” (qtd. in Heyward Ehrlich, “The Broadway Journal (1): Briggs’s Dilemma and Poe’s Strategy,” in The Collected Writings of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. Burton R. Pollin, vol. 4 [Gordian Press, 1986], xxi).Poe himself mentioned Babbage as an inventor in “Maelzel’s Chess-Player” (1836) and in “The Thousand-and-Second Tale of Scheherazade” (1845). Despite the wide public attention given to Maelzel’s chess-player as a supposed automaton, Poe called attention to its nearly impossible task of mastering all possible chess moves, even those reflecting the “indeterminate will of [an] antagonist” (Edgar Allan Poe, “Maelzel’s Chess-Player,” in Edgar Allan Poe: Essays & Reviews, ed. G. R. Thompson [Library of America, 1984], 1256). At this time Poe was fully aware of the achievements of Babbage’s devices, and he mused, “What shall we think of a [calculating] machine which can . . . actually print off its elaborate results, when obtained, without the slightest intervention of the intellect of man?” (Poe, “Maelzel’s Chess-Player,” 1255).In “The Thousand-and-Second Tale of Scheherazade,” Poe offered tongue-in-cheek circumlocutions to describe recent inventions, including the Electrotype, the Electro Telegraph, and the Electro Telegraph Printing Apparatus. Poe acknowledged that “Babbage’s Calculating Machine” had such great reasoning powers that “in a second, it performed calculations of so vast an extent that they would have required the united labor of fifty thousand fleshly men for a year” (M 3:1166).Today, internet databases are described as residing “in the cloud,” a metaphor for their online location. In Poe’s era the comparable term was “in the ether,” describing the area beyond the atmosphere that supposedly filled all space. Since it was known in nineteenth-century science that sound could not traverse a vacuum, it was assumed that light similarly could not do so and that something else was required to fill space.In “The Power of Words,” Poe argued that the ether “alone pervades all space, [and] is thus the great medium of creation” (M 3:1215). A master of algebraic mathematics could retrieve all vibrations in the air and even those beyond the air in the ether: “To a being of infinite understanding—one to whom the perfection of the algebraic analysis lay unfolded—there could be no difficulty in tracing every impulse given the air—and the ether through the air—to the remotest consequences of any even infinitely remote epoch of time” (M 3:1214). Such a “being of infinite understanding” might trace “all particles of all matter—upward and onward for ever” (M 3:1214). Speaking of the “impulses upon the atmosphere of the Earth” and thus of the “physical power of words,” Poe’s Agathos asked, “[I]s not every word an impulse on the air?” (M 3:1215). Poe also maintained that mathematically capable angels could retrieve past patterns of speech; in addition, other angels with generative capability could create heavenly bodies simply by speaking them (as in Genesis) (M 3:1215).In the communications revolution of Poe’s era, steam and electricity were the two new sources of power. Steamboats and steam locomotives greatly sped up travel and distribution, and the steam-powered printing press greatly accelerated the manufacture of books and periodicals. Moreover, the electric telegraph made messages available nearly instantaneously and on an increasingly global scale. In The Victorian Internet: The Remarkable Story of the Telegraph and the Nineteenth Century’s Online Pioneers (Walker, 1998), Tom Standage argued that in thus raising audience expectations of nearly global and almost instantaneous communications the modern telegraph produced a cultural effect equal to that of the later internet. Before electrification, the early visual telegraph required a clear line of sight between its towers, so straight thoroughfares called telegraph avenues were established. Before the dots and dashes of Morse code became standard, one early electric telegraph, displayed at the Mechanic’s Institute in New York in 1846, used piano-style keys for input and printed paper strips like tickertape for output.For Poe, the wide reprinting of successful works was an early form of networking. “The Raven” (1845) reached a huge reading public as a result “not only of its innumerable reprintings and many translations but also [of] the imitations” in periodicals (M 1:351–52). By contrast, the circulation of books such as Poe’s Tales (1845) and The Raven and Other Poems (1845) was quite limited in comparison to the liberal runs of reprints in periodicals. In detail, most of Poe’s readers encountered his work in newspapers and magazines. Even the celebrity Poe enjoyed as the author of “The Raven” was “largely the product of the poem’s unauthorized reprinting” (Meredith L. McGill, American Literature and the Culture of Reprinting, 1834–1853 [University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003], 218). Poe took especial pride in the remarkable number of reprints of “The Raven,” which exceeded those of the previous leader, “The Gold-Bug” (1843).” He quipped, “The bird beat the bug, though, all hollow” (M 1:351).Poe believed that a heightened style was a necessity for publication success. In defending “Berenice” (1835), Poe listed the essential ingredients of such a style: “In the ludicrous heightened into the grotesque: the fearful coloured into the horrible: the witty exaggerated into the burlesque: the singular wrought out into the strange and mystical.” Moreover, Poe argued that such a style was necessary in the building up of magazines as articles “find their way into other periodicals, and into the papers, and in this manner, taking hold upon the public mind they augment the reputation of the source” (O 1:84, 85).When Poe discovered a new method of self-publishing called anastatic printing, he believed it would “revolutionize the world.” Adding acid to the manuscript and pressing the page against a metal plate etched a printing positive. Poe claimed that “a vast number of absolute fac-similes” could thus be made inexpensively, offering an alternative to expensive but underused stereotype plates stored in London warehouses that constituted an investment of “a million sterling” (Edgar Allan Poe, “Anastatic Printing,” in The Collected Writings of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. Burton R. Pollin, vol. 3 [Gordian Press, 1986], 84, 85).The rise of the internet had more revolutionary effects than those Poe imagined for anastatic printing. In the 1960s government support was important for the early internet. The Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), an arm of the U.S. Department of Defense, produced the pioneering ARPANET to connect big computers at UCLA, Stanford, the University of California, Santa Barbara, and the University of Utah. To protect early online platforms from the risks of legal liability, Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996 held that online platforms were not legally liable for content they recirculated. As as result, web pages could present third-party content without copyright and avoid damaging lawsuits. Thus, if the New York Times falsely calls you a swindler, you can sue, but if Facebook reposts someone saying the same thing, you cannot.In the 1990s, Tim Berners-Lee simplified the difficulty of reading online pages with different formats. HTML (hypertext markup language) could be configured to support different browsers in users’ machines. Afterward, HTML added CSS (cascading style sheets) for formatting and JavaScript for elements of programming, but the most radical changes were produced by the introduction of the iPhone and its competitors, which made the internet personal, worldwide, and omniscient. Gatherings of web pages began to appear. The first collection was made at Project Gutenberg. An archive that sampled almost all web pages was formed at the Wayback Machine of the Internet Archive. A wide sampling of internet research was offered at Google Scholar. Many published books, including copyrighted works under the “fair use” exemption, were collected at Amazon Books. A deep gathering of web pages became available at HathiTrust.org.The introduction of AI (artificial intelligence) by ChatGPT in 2022 led to an investment race by Amazon, Apple, Google, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia, and OpenAI, each seeking a dominant position. The oddity of the AI boom is that nobody really knows how it works or why sometimes it produces inappropriate responses called “hallucinations.”Babbage’s idea of a database of words in the air, discussed by Poe in “The Power of Words,” enjoyed an unexpected revival in a recent project in Australia titled Atmospheric Memory. From August 12, 2023, to November 5, 2023, Atmospheric Memory was presented at the Sydney Science Festival at the Powerhouse Museum, combining light, sound, and colossal projections. The museum posted the following description on its web page: “Inspired by computing pioneer Charles Babbage’s proposal that the air is a ‘vast library’ storing every word ever spoken, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer’s breathtaking immersive art environment invites audiences to a multisensory experience at the intersection of art and science.” Of this project, Lozano-Hemmer stated, “I hope the project makes the atmosphere tangible, so it’s no longer seen as something neutral or invisible we take for granted. It is something complex, beautiful and irreversible.” This unusual application of the internet led to an unexpected question: “If we could ‘rewind’ air molecules to recreate all voices of the past,” he wondered, “whose voice would you want to hear?” (https://powerhouse.com.au/program/atmospheric-memory).

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