Keeping Track - continued...

4. Machine

Franz Reuleaux' 1875 Kinematics of Machinery dates back the emergence of the machine age in transportation to the introduction of the railway or "the uniting of the carriage and the road into a machine. The rail forms a part of this machine." [REULEAUX 1963, 235] For Reuleaux all machines share a common principle. They unite elements to pairs und thus create "constrained" motions: whereas the "kosmical system" consists of a multitude of overlapping motions, "in the machine [...] the moving bodies are prevented, by bodies in contact with them, from making any other than the required motions". [Reuleaux 1963, 33, 41, 46] Therefore the "problem of steam locomotion on common roads [...] [is] self-contradictory. It is desired to make something which shall be a machine, but in which at the same time the special characteristics of the machine, - the pairing of elements, - may be disregarded." [Reuleaux 1963, 235]

When Emil Bürgi contacts the chief engineer of the Rothornbahn after unsatisfactory mounting trials to transfer his experiments to the rails he thus makes a categorical step: as a beneficiary of the track the physiological experiment becomes a machine - and begins only now, with the pairing of respiration apparatus, organism, and track to produce valid results. It seems that the physiology of locomotion can generate its products only inside a mechanical regime - even where it leaves the laboratory and the city to catch up with the landscape's cosmic order. What the Swiss engineer Strub states of the new alpine tourism - "that mass exodus which pours from the cities into the landscape every year" - is valid for alpine physiology as well: "The mountain railway technique smooths the way for this trend of the times." [STRUB 1900, 2, transl. P.F.] Although physiology has not reached the Alps by but as a railway.