The previous chapters unfolded how Hero inscribed himself into an evolving textual tradition and the strategies he devised to turn books into sites for exploratory engagements (real or imagined) with the world. Hero’s most distinctive features as an author are his systematic reorganization of a body of past technical knowledge into an accessible and orderly group of new texts and his deployment of that systematic knowledge to restructure how his reader negotiates between the textual and material worlds. He exhibits a deep concern that his reader be able to understand everything in his texts, and he often seeks to augment that understanding with vivid accounts of embodied engagements with the technologies he describes. His texts are often quite simple in their rhetoric and structure, but they open a window onto a world of material complexities.

This is the story of a mechanical tradition, so let us begin with a machine (Figure 1.1).1 Take a hollow bronze sphere, drilled at two diametrically opposite points to allow the insertion of two L-shaped tubes, carefully soldered to the outside of the sphere so that it remains completely sealed except for their ends. Add one more tube, in the plane perpendicular to the first two, and a socket for a pivot opposite that. Place the sphere on a covered vat of boiling water so that the third tube conducts steam into the sphere, where it can be ejected from the L-shaped tubes. Once the steam begins to flow, the sphere will rotate on the pivot, propelled by the steam leaving the tubes.

Hero’s concern for systematization within and between the texts of his corpus, his emphasis on organizing his works to facilitate their legibility and utility, and his respect for the differences between the parts of his complex disciplinary superstructure reflect a belief that the reader should be able to take his works into the world and do things with them. These “things” include building new (and possibly improved) artifacts, measuring or otherwise defining natural and artificial objects, and finding appropriate analytical regimes (mathematical, physical, mechanical, etc.) for further analyzing and describing those objects. It would not be going too far to say that Hero intends that the textual and disciplinary structures discussed in the previous chapter should help his reader learn to see the world in a new way. Just how that process is meant to work is the question that drives this chapter.

Strabo portrays the geographer at work, sitting at the nexus of innumerable pathways of information. He collects the data to be inscribed on his pinax from an assortment of witnesses, who have seen the far corners of the Earth and bring their information to him for synthesis.1 Strabo compares these voyagers to sensory organs, each with its own subset of information about an object (he offers an apple by way of example) and each presenting its own part of the story to the understanding (dianoia), which then synthesizes them into a single schēma.2 So eyewitnesses transmit their knowledge to those who want to learn it (οἱ φιλομαθεῖς ἄνδρες), who take responsibility for collecting a world’s worth of information and synthesizing it into a single synoptic diagramma.

During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, phrenology as folk science featured prominently in two contrasting sites: the city, with its nooks of seamy thrills; and the bush, the stomping ground of itinerant male labourers. While phrenologists had long taken rooms in city markets and arcades, their work transformed by century’s end into a mystical hybrid of bumps, clairvoyance, palmistry and even tea-leaf reading. Urban diviners emerged concurrently with another archetype: the bush phrenologist of the new, masculinist ‘radical nationalist’ literary tradition. Bush phrenologists – real and imagined – echoed the resourcefulness of city diviners, switching between occupations and combining heads with palmistry and even water divining. But while urban divination was feminised and stigmatised, the male bush phrenologist often escaped the mark of perceived irrationality and exemplified a muscular identity. When pitted in court against working-class women or girls reporting assault, even the most disreputable bush phrenologist benefited from legalistic misogyny.

During the 1870s, popular scientist Professor Bruce grew accustomed to improvisation as he travelled through the Eastern colonies of Australia. While visiting the timber town of Bulahdelah, on the Central Coast of New South Wales, he lectured on phrenology in his Irish brogue within the best space set aside by town residents for the job. In a hut knocked together from slabs of Eucalyptus, the faint glow of six candles in bottles flickered over the faces of thirty or so locals. The audience crowded onto “three boards deposited on three boxes or casks, in the shape of a triangle” to watch the Professor read heads. “I have seen many entertainments in our bush villages and on stations, but never such a gloomy one,” declared a correspondent. “The more so, as I heard that this hut had been not long ago the depositary of a dead body, awaiting an inquest, and some one called it the ‘dead-house’.”1

From 1880, the performer Lio Medo embarked on a career as a phrenologist in colonial New Zealand and – later – Tasmania, fleeing controversy and another name. As a man of African descent, Medo laboured under heavier cultural baggage than his white brethren, not least because of a recurrent minstrel trope. Originating in the US, the joke of the ‘lack phrenologist’ sailed to Australia with minstrel troupes, sheet music and newsprint, constantly confronting real-life Black phrenologists such as Medo. A performer’s awareness and skill in navigating such representations created opportunities, even while these caricatures perpetuated oppressive racial myths. Men such as Lio Medo therefore plied popular science within a paradox, the signifier of skin attracting attention that added to the usual phrenological work of winning improved social status. For Lio Medo, signs of identity emanated not just from a top hat and a gold watch, but from his very body.

When I drove up the Hume Highway to the Australian capital of Canberra in the autumn of 2014 to begin a PhD, I knew that phrenology was not dead-and-buried history. Far from it.