Mike Jay - The Influencing Machine: James Tilly Matthews and the Air Loom

In some apartment near London Wall, there is a gang of villains profoundly skilled in Pneumatic Chemistry...

John Haslam, Illustrations of Madness , 1810

On 30 December 1796 one man was on an unbelievable mission, and in unbelievable jeopardy.

His mission was taking him through the packed thoroughfares of London, the worlds largest city teeming with a million inhabitants, to the House of Commons: the most public place in Britain where truth, once spoken, could not be ignored. His jeopardy, by contrast, emanated from the most private place in London: an underground cellar concealed somewhere beneath the paving and cobbles of the city centre whose existence was, as far as he knew, a secret to everyone but him.

The House of Commons was not Pugin and Barrys Victorian gothic icon of today but, in the words of a disappointed German visitor in 1782, rather a mean-looking building, that not a little resembles a chapel. Indeed it was a chapel: a plain stone single-celled building with a steeply sloping roof, a Tudor adjunct to the Palace of Westminster that had been co-opted as the House of Commons chamber over two centuries before and still served its new secular ministers. It stood in a courtyard, surrounded by the Palaces other structures the Law Courts, the House of Lords and backing onto the Thames, where Westminster Steps teemed with river traffic, a melee of barges and their passengers, goods and their traders.

He approached the House seemingly unnoticed, yet he was well aware that it would nonetheless require a powerful effort of will for him to reach it. There was no-one pursuing him, and no-one to block his way. But neither of these were necessary. The jeopardy he faced was generated by something new to science and to history: a machine that operated invisibly, from a distance and with irresistible force.

He was aware that, in the darkness of its basement cellar, the machine was in operation. Although the cellar was dank and airless, the windmill sails that powered it were turning hypnotically, filling it with its mysterious charge. Its rows of hooped brass barrels hissed conspiratorially as their chambers filled with pressurised gases. Its wooden levers creaked as the warp of its central loom was tensed by magnetic currents. The man tasted copper in his saliva.

He passed through the doors to the House of Commons. Inside, its origins as a chapel were unmistakable: a single vaulted space, with ante-chapel and chapel separated by a screen into lobby and debating chamber. The Speaker, in a huge wig with two knotted tresses, sat on a raised dais behind the former altar with the gilt sceptre lying upon it, backlit by three arched chapel windows. The members benches, covered with green cloth, were the old chapel stalls, stacked in a steep rake into an area little larger than a tennis court. Above them, the only modern improvement: Christopher Wrens gallery, more raked seats set into the walls fifteen feet up, where visitors could take their chances on finding a space between the members who overflowed onto the higher perches.

In the cellar, the machine was cranking towards full power. Its gases and fluids agitated intensely, with a muffled cacophony of swishing and crashing sounds like ocean turbulence in a subterranean cavern. The smell was foul beyond belief, noxious gases and corrosive acids ripped apart and recombined in the magnetic flux. Factitious airs gases that had never existed in nature hissed ominously into being, jets of pressure forcing them through tubes and valves, sending them out like sightless eels into their new world. A pair of gloved hands worked in silence, modulating the keys on the machine like organ stops, focusing an invisible force out beyond the cellars mouldering stone walls, through the London streets, where it passed without resistance through walls, houses and crowds, infallibly seeking out its target.

As he climbed the steep, crowded stairs to the public gallery, he began to feel a turbulence in the air around him, and a probing pressure around his mouth, sucking at his breath. He knew what this meant: the bellows on the machines controls were being delicately primed, feeling for the rhythm of his breathing and attempting to synchronise with it. Each time he filled his lungs he felt a little more of the magnetic fluid seeping into them, into his bloodstream and brain. Each breath dulled his mind a little, like a shadow passing over the sun.

He knew what to do. He opened his mouth and held his breath for as long as he could, then took in a sharp, unexpected draught of air. The lever of the bellows, at its lowest arc, was raised immediately, but the magnetic fluid seeped out too slowly to reach him. The machine, he had discovered, could be temporarily fooled in this way. He expelled the breath from his lungs sharply, sucked it in again immediately and held his mouth wide open, like a suffocating fish. He could hear a faint, frustrated hissing around him as it searched again for his rhythm. The clerks and politicians on the stairs looked at him oddly, and he clutched his chest in a pantomime of asthmatic attack.

He reached the public gallery, and jostled his way into earshot and towards a seat. Both house and gallery were packed. A random visit would likely have found members stretched out on benches, cracking nuts, eating oranges, sleeping or gossiping. But today there were nearly three hundred MPs in attendance for a debate crucial to the nations political future: on the possibility of peace with France.