The Eureka Machine: Automation and Automata in the Age of Steam | WIP Seminar with Padraic Scanlan

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Abstract | In the early industrial era, 'automation' was paradoxical. Replacing handlooms and cottage industries with steam-powered machinery and large factories required more, rather than fewer, workers. Child labour filled the gaps opened by automation, especially in the textile industry. Across Britain and the British empire, the steam engine became a powerful symbol not only of industrial organisation but also of vitality; even physiologists adopted the language of fuel economies, mechanical efficiencies, and automation to explain the functioning of animal bodies. The mind sciences, in turn, grappled with the question of what human behaviours could be considered 'automatic,' and with the psychological consequences of allowing mechanical processes to dictate the pace and shape of labour. And yet, even as automation and automatic behaviours disquieted experts and disrupted workers' lives and working-class culture, industrial Britain was fascinated with automata - with machinery that seemed to 'think.' Thousands flocked to watch machines play (or seem to play) chess and compose poetry.

Padraic Scanlan is an Associate Professor at the Centre for Industrial Relations and Human Resources, cross-appointed to the Centre for Diaspora & Transnational Studies. He is also a Research Associate at the Center for History and Economics at Harvard University and the University of Cambridge, and a Fellow of St. Michael's College. His research focuses on the history of labour, enslaved and free, in Britain and the British empire during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. His most recent book, Rot: An Imperial History of the Irish Famine was published in 2025 by Robinson Books and Basic Books, and reinterprets the history of the Irish Great Famine (1845-1851). He's currently working on a book, which will be published by Profile in the UK and Basic Books in North America, about industrial labour in the British empire and the wrenching political, biological, psychological and cultural consequences of the emergence of industrialism in the first half of the nineteenth century.