What I didn’t realise until today is that Leeds already has a giant walking robot. If you’re in the area for one of its rare openings to the public I strongly recommend you go and see it.

Meet Oddball, a US-made Bucyrus Erie 1150, which worked the open cast coal mine at St Aidan’s, Swillington, near Leeds, until 1983.

Its sheer scale is impressive enough: the largest preserved walking dragline excavator in Western Europe, 1200 tons, the size of 60 double decker buses, apparently.

But the thing is, it walked, the whole thing, backwards, a metre per earth-shaking step, up to a maximum speed of half a mile per hour. Imagine that.

Imagine that stomping towards you across an open-cast collliery…

The machine has been saved and maintained by volunteers, the Friends of St Aidan’s BE1150 Dragline, who open it as part of the excellent Heritage Open Days series.

They’ll even let you sit in the driver’s seat…

… and have a look around the belly of the beast, which was powered by electricity…

… but also tea…

The strangest thing is the setting.

While Leeds and Bradford retain at least some of their mills and factory buildings, Yorkshire’s coal mining heritage has been almost entirely erased from the landscape. Where once the Bucyrus trod, ripping fossil fuel from the ground, we now see lakes, trees, wild flowers and grass.

Teletubbyland itself has appeared from far away, leaving the machine an alien in its own country. Its walking days are over, but it’s a joy to know that this robot won’t be left to rust.

More photos here.

The walking dragline is at St Aidan’s Open Cast Coal Site, Astley Lane, Swillington, Leeds, West Yorkshire, LS26 8AL. It’s open to visit free on Saturday and Sunday 10th/11th September, from 2pm to 4pm.

A strange cast of people have occupied my reading in recent months – English and French, writers and scientists, aristocrats and hackers. Now, like a Heroes season finale, I find them converging on a single year.

To keep track of the people and places I scribbled a map. On the right, my six-year-old son has added, with relish, a depiction of the Battle of Fleurus. More on that further on.

The story goes like this.

On February 22, Joseph Priestley, radical preacher and discoverer of oxygen, resigns his nonconformist ministry in Hackney, London, shortly to leave Britain for America.

After the destruction of his Birmingham home and laboratory by a loyalist mob in 1791 Priestley considered a move to France. But three years on, the revolution is devouring its children. Camille Desmoulins, the journalist whose cry “to arms!” sparked the storming of the Bastille, goes to the guillotine in Paris on 5 April, along with his political mentor Georges Danton and 13 others. Their crime – arguing for restraint against Maximilien Robespierre’s violent faction.

On 8 April, Priestley and his family board the Samson to sail from Gravesend. Six days later, the radical London Corresponding Society holds a mass meeting at Chalk Farm, with the writer and orator John Thelwall as master of ceremonies. As Robespierre’s terror grows in Paris, William Pitt’s British government begins a clampdown of its own.

Throughout the summer the panic spreads. We find advertised in the  Leeds Intelligencer of 12 May: ‘Just published, price sixpence, a concise sketch of the intended revolution in England with a few hints on the obvious methods to avert it.’

Is Priestley, mid-Atlantic, completely incommunicado during May? How soon after his arrival in New York on 4 June does he hear of the arrest of  Thelwall and other LCS leaders, and of the execution in Paris of Antoine Lavoisier, the aristocratic chemist who named the gas that Priestley had isolated? Are Priestley’s American hosts aware of Lavoisier’s role in improving the quality of the gunpowder which they used just a few years earlier to win independence from the British?

On 26 June, France’s revolutionary army takes Fleurus after the hot air balloon l’Entrprenant provides vital reconnaissance, the world’s first decisive use of aircraft in warfare. Imagine being among the first in human history to see the world from above.

On 28 July Robespierre himself goes to the guillotine, but the war goes on.

On 15 August Claude Chappe ushers in the age of communication at the speed of light, by sending a semafore message over a series of towers from Lille to Paris reporting on the capture of Le Quesnoy from Prussian and Austrian forces. The invention is called the “telegraph”.

Somewhere in hiding, having been on the losing side in the siege of Lyon a year earlier, is the impoverished weaver Joseph Marie Jacquard. Soon he will switch sides and gain the attention of Napoleon Bonaparte with his machine for weaving complex patterns in silk using programs stored on punched cards.

Back in Britain’s rapidly industrialising north, rival start-ups are forming to exploit the new energy technology of steam.

In Leeds, where Priestley first isolated the component parts of air, Matthew Murray and David Wood are planning the construction of the Round Foundry, the world’s first purpose-built engineering works.

In Birmingham, home of Priestley patrons the Lunar Club, Matthew Boulton and James Watt are founding the business that will carry their names around the world. Later, they will send spies to Leeds and buy up the land adjacent to the Round Foundry to stop Murray and Wood expanding.

How did it feel for Murray to leave Marshall’s Mill, of which he was the chief engineer, to set up his own business doing something no one had ever done before? Was it all the more intimidating to do so in a time of war, with the threat of revolution in the air?

On 28 October Thelwall and the other LCS leaders go on trial at the Old Baileycharged with high treason. In essence, the prosecution argued that they sought ot overthrow the Crown and institute a Jacobin terror in Britain

But on 5 December – 10 months to the day after his counterpart Desmoulins lost his life – Thelwall is acquitted, saying he sought change “by peaceable means, by reason alone”. Thelwall goes on the be a thorn in the side of an increasingly repressive government, a champion of democratic government, and a critical commentator on the living conditions of the industrial cities.

1794, so much to answer for. I feel an e-book coming on.

In particular some social media evangelists seem to appropriate the language of radical politics to describe the alleged impact of Facebook, Twitter and the rest in some way turning the tables on big government and business. Yet, as Evgeny Morozev says,  ”no dictators have been toppled via Second Life.“

It prompted me to re-read the writing of John Thelwall, the 18th Century radical orator I studied for my final year history dissertation.

Thelwall was a colourful, controversial character, a romantic poet and friend of Coleridge and Wordsworth. He was radicalised by Britain’s war against revolutionary France, being tried and acquitted of treason as a leader of the London Corresponding Society. His writings in 1795-96 are seen as significant in their focus on the economic as well as political condition of the common people in wartime Britain. And he wore a cudgel-proof hat as protection against ruffians loyal to the Government, which I always thought was rather cool.

Thelwall’s writing can be hard going for a modern reader. He lacks the timeless, elegant theoretical exposition of his more famous contemporary Tom Paine. He spends a lot of time attacking the Tory Edmund Burke, condemning Parliamentary borough-mongers and invoking now obscure classical allegories.

But I think he deserves our attention for a number of reasons.

He worked in a time and place where real and imagined threats to national security had been used to curtail civil liberties. The repressive “Two Acts” introduced by William Pitt’s goverment to clamp down on free speech and assembly were said to have been framed with Thelwall in mind.

He stood at the cusp of the Industrial Revolution – seeing a shift from an agrarian economy to an industrial one, from a critical perspective, never rushing back to the woods. The diffusion of knowledge was central to the working of this trade. From The Tribune:

Commerce, uncorrupted by monopolizing speculation, is one of the greatest advantages that result from social union. It is by this that the comforts and accommodations of each corner of the globe are transplanted to every other, and that every individual spot of the universe might be benefited by the knowledge of all the rest.

During the mid-1790s Thewall appears to have moved from a rather dour first-things-first-ism to a position where, I suspect, he would have agitated for more equal access to cat food, stripy toothpaste and fizzy water. The growth of capital was to be welcomed, but only if all members of society could share in the fruits of economic advances.

And most of all in the context of the whole social media thing, John Thelwall understood the power of communication – so much so that when forced to retire from political life he forged a second career teaching elocution and is regarded by some as a founder of modern speech therapy. Today it’s the right who complain the loudest that children don’t speak proper, but Thelwall regarded elocution as a tool to widening participation in politics.

And so to some red meat for the social media mafia. Ten days ago I posted this quote without comment. Now I offer it wreathed round with hyperlinks, in my own grossly ahistorical London-As-Tokyo-style attempt to make the words of an 18th Century cudgel-proof-hat-wearer fit the world in which we now live.

“The fact is that the hideous accumulation of capital in a few hands, like all diseases not absolutely mortal, carries, in its own enormity, the seeds of a cure. Man is, by his very nature, social and communicative – proud to display the little knowledge he possesses, and eager, as opportunity presents, to encrease his store. Whatever presses men together, therefore, though it may generate some vices, is favourable to the diffusion of knowledge, and ultimately promotive of human liberty. Hence every large workshop and manufactory is is a sort of political society, which no act of parliament can silence, and no magistrate disperse.”

… and after expanding on how Socrates spread his message by wandering the public places of Athens he goes on…

“Now, though every workshop cannot have a Socrates within the pale of its own society, nor even every manufacturing town a man of such wisdom, virtue and opportunities to instruct them, yet a sort of Socratic spirit will necessarily grow up, wherever large bodies of men assemble. Each brings, as it were, into the common bank his mite of information, and putting it to a sort of circulating usance, each contributor has the advantage of a large interest, without any diminution of capital.”

As we move now to a “post-industrial” world it’s fascinating to see how our predecessors engaged with the disruptions of two centuries ago.

Delightfully, “The rights of nature against the usurpations of the establishments” is now digitised by Google and reprinted by Kessinger Publishing.

Update 30/04/2009: I found this and this.

“The fact is that the hideous accumulation of capital in a few hands, like all diseases not absolutely mortal, carries, in its own enormity, the seeds of a cure. Man is, by his very nature, social and communicative – proud to display the little knowledge he possesses, and eager, as opportunity presents, to encrease his store. Whatever presses men together, therefore, though it may generate some vices, is favourable to the diffusion of knowledge, and ultimately promotive of human liberty. Hence every large workshop and manufactory is is a sort of political society, which no act of parliament can silence, and no magistrate disperse.”

…

“Now, though every workshop cannot have a Socrates within the pale of its own society, nor even every manufacturing town a man of such wisdom, virtue and opportunities to instruct them, yet a sort of Socratic spirit will necessarily grow up, wherever large bodies of men assemble. Each brings, as it were, into the common bank his mite of information, and putting it to a sort of circulating usance, each contributor has the advantage of a large interest, without any diminution of capital.”

Rights of Nature, Against the Usurpations of Establishments.  A Series of Letters to the People, in Reply to the False Principles of Burke. Part the Second. London, 1796.

More follows.