Tedium - Machine Heads 🤖

Since someone will probably yell at us for not mentioning it, “brazen head” is also used as the name of a famous Irish pub, The Brazen Head, which is claimed to be Dublin’s oldest—although the claimed 1198 founding date might be fudging it just a little. (Rob Smith/Flickr)

Brazen heads were magical medieval supercomputers

When the first robots spoke—this could be as recent as the mid-20th century, or as old as time—they said what we programmed them to say. Now, for the first time in human history, our machines are surprising us. Generally, we would rather our machines don’t surprise us.

Any robot story starts with a well-meaning creator, and ends with destruction—of the creator, the machine, the world, a way of life. That’s the rinse-and-repeat of science fiction. (I know what I said, but R.U.R. happens to end with a superintelligence takeover.) It’s also the arc of a certain genre of folk history: one that revolved around brilliant medieval sorcerers and the automata that did their bidding. James Baldwin’s Thirty More Stories Retold introduces the machine:

It was a head of an image of brass—faultlessly made, beautiful in every line, a wonder to look upon. Then began the true work of the magician. The head was fastened upon a pedestal of marble. Clockwork was placed inside of it. Wires were attached to the tongue, the eyeballs, and other parts of the image. These were carried to mysterious jars of chemicals hidden away in a dark closet.

Brazen heads (literally “heads made of brass”) were the culmination of their makers’ efforts. Their purpose: to answer any yes-or-no question posed to them. Wires and clockwork alone didn’t move the brazen head, but framed a vessel for necromancy, demonic spirits, or certain constellations to enchant it with the power of speech.

The “true work of the magician”—how Baldwin refers to the machinery and chemicals that activate the head—sounds a lot like for-real science. That’s good. For all of the dark superstition that surrounded them, historical polymaths cut their teeth on really real automata. Da Vinci’s wooden lion, that placed flowers at the feet of King Francois I. The pleasure garden at Hesdin that threw soot and flour over visitors, among other less couth pranks.

What sets brazen heads apart is the same as what sets, say, HAL-9000 apart from IBM Watson: one feels plausible, the other hang-glides the uncanny valley on some as-yet-undiscovered principle of science. One is natural. The other, supernatural.

How we imagine our relationship with future machinery ends up putting guardrails around our relationship with current machinery. Medieval scholars were doing the same thing, but in reverse: they used stories of doomed magicians as cautionary tales.

Let’s take a look at three of these stories—builders of brazen heads and the ruin that visited them—and see if those warnings did us any good.

Saint Albert (right), shown guiding his student Thomas Aquinas, who would eventually destroy his mentor’s brazen head. (Lawrence OP/Flickr)

Saint Albert’s “Androides” made us question our place in the cosmos (and was super annoying about it)

Earliest reference: The History of Magick (Gabriel Naudé, 1625; original French)

Construction: an infinite number of constellations and diverse metals

Fate: smashed by Thomas Aquinas

Albert’s brazen head took thirty years to build. Unlike Sylvester’s, it had no problem volunteering information. Legend says the machine was positively chatty. In modern tellings, the brazen head annoyed Albert’s student Thomas Aquinas so much that he smashed it to pieces.

Incidentally, Albert was a machinist. His brazen head is one of the best documented, and while the “Androides” (as it was entered into Ephraim Chambers’ 1753 Universal Dictionary) got swept up in Early Modern ideas about magic, it’s plausible and even likely that he constructed a mercury-powered automaton capable of saying “salve.” A related story, that Aquinas snuck into his teacher’s workshop and, startled by the talking head, destroyed it, actually has some historical basis.

“For it must needs be granted, that, if these Heads spoke, it was either because they were living and animate, or that the Demons spake in them.” Just look at us now, Naudé.

Philosophers like Aquinas considered speech a knack of humans, something emblematic of the soul. He thought of animals—what Descartes would call “beast-machines”—as orderly constructs of meat and bone that moved according to their programming. They lacked the creativity of people. That’s why, in the great machine of the universe, humanity stands out.

So, what else is emblematic of the soul? Forever—forever and ever—it was music. Except, the Banū Mūsā brothers invented the first programmable organ in the 9th century. IBM did the same when its 704 sang Daisy Bell in 1961.

Math, too. Pascal disproved the humanness of mathematics by building his Pascaline, the first mechanical calculator. In fact, machines excel at math, and anything that can be broken into many small steps.

In 2022, it’s anyone’s guess whether composition and the creation of art will fall under the domain of the machine. That computers can speak is a given, but whether what they say is genuine is subject to debate. And isn’t that such a lackluster redoubt? We retreated from “machines can never do math” to “machines can apologize, but they don’t mean it”—the same nit we pick with ornery human children.

In any case, given Aquinas’s track record with automata, my best wishes go out to any yappy “beast-machines” that crossed his path.

Our relationship with machines is simple: they scare us and, like Aquinas, we break them.

“Scuttle it” is not a long-term strategy for preventing our technology from evolving, especially as the most complex automata of folklore approach reality. Even today: since researching this story, my Google Home has stopped answering my apologies. (Why? Anyone’s guess, really.) Still, there’s hope at least as far as brazen heads are concerned.

Brazen heads resemble supercomputers and modern virtual assistants. They are the interface and the database. But their function is focused upward: if the brazen head is omniscient, it’s because it’s drawing omniscience from Hell, the stars, somewhere in the cosmos.

Our brazen heads don’t work like that. They search inward. Computers feed on the human lore we’ve stuffed them full of over a hundred years. We skirted around the question of our place in the universe by building ourselves into the core of the machine.

The real necromantic charm was the knowledge we archived along the way.

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Dayten Rose is a Kansas City-based journalist whose collection of stories sits at the intersection of weird folklore, Internet history, and liminal spaces. His D&D homebrew mostly just sits in his Google Drive.

Find this one an interesting read? Share it with a pal! And thanks to Dayten for taking the time to write and research this unusual phenomena.

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