The Cylinder

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Helmut Müller-Sievers. The Cylinder

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The Cylinder

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9. The Cylinder: Kinematics of the Nineteenth Century, by Helmut Müller-Sievers

Another dimension to Kleist’s anecdote further connects the motion of the marionettes to the motion of machines and to the massive metaphysical and cultural shift they will bring about. While Herr C. concentrates on the two dimensions in which the puppets transform the linear impulse of inertial motion into the pendular “curves” of the limbs, the narrator notes that part of the naturalness in the puppets’ dance stems from the way they dance “a round dance” (die Ronde).“A group of four peasants doing a round dance to a rapid beat could not have been more prettily painted by Teniers.”24 The ronde—the Reigen, whose motion Arthur Schnitzler would famously use as a narrative figure in his eponymous novella—is a dance that represents not so much curvilinear as rotational motion. Facing and holding each other’s hands, the dancers rotate around a common center; they experience, and by the grip of their hands counter, the centrifugal forces that Newton identified as “real” indicators of the immutability and absoluteness of space.25 The rich cultural significance of this type of dancing can be gleaned from the scene in Goethe’s Werther where the protagonist falls in love with Lotte while waltzing with her—the waltz, like the ronde, consists in a rotational figure the axis of which intersects the gaze of the dancers while their bodies form a virtual cylindrical space around them. We will encounter multiple avatars of this motion in nineteenth-century artifacts; what is important at the moment is the difference between circular or curvilinear motion—which Newton’s mathematical success in calculating the orbits of planets and comets had explained as the sum of two compounding translational motions—and rotation, which is a genuine motion without translational displacement. This difference, as chapter 3 will show, is at the heart of Western valuations of motion, in which rotation has traditionally been associated with transcendence and divinity. The difference between a pendulum arrangement—like Newton’s bucket, like the marionette—and a rigid linkage like a crank to induce rotation will become crucially important in nineteenth-century machines (one of the favorite apparatuses of the time, the chairoplane, uses both).

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