In July 1845, British curiosity-seekers headed to London’s Egyptian Hall to try out the novelty of the summer. For the price of one shilling, they could stand in front of a wooden bureau, pull a lever, and look behind a panel where six drums, bristling with metal spokes, revolved. At the end of its “grinding,” what it produced was not a numeric computation or a row of fruit symbols, but something quite different: a polished line of Latin poetry. [...]
The Eureka was the brainchild, and obsession, of a man in southwest England named John Clark. The eccentric Clark was a cousin of Cyrus and James Clark, founders of the Clarks shoes empire (which went on to popularize the Desert Boot in the 1950s and is still going strong). Clark built the Eureka at a time when such devices were all the rage. As literature scholar Jason David Hall explains in an academic article on the Eureka, the machine joined other proto-computers like the Polyharmonicon, a machine that composed polkas, and the Euphonia, which “spoke” when a person played an attached keyboard. [...]
The number of possible permutations the Eureka can run through is a dizzying 26 million. “If we had it running continuously, it would take 74 years for it to do its full tour before it started repeating itself,” says Karina Virahsawmy, a curator at the Alfred Gillett Trust, the nonprofit that preserves the history of the Clark family and their company. “Every time I think about it, I’m still mind-boggled as to how somebody did that in the early 19th century.”
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