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The Air Loom Gang (2003)

di Mike Jay

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More than just an improbable tale and one of the most colourful case studies in the history of madness, this text is a portrait of a society poised to break through into the modern age.
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More than two centuries ago, James Tilly Matthews imagined this: a sinister device, the Air Loom Machine, built into a basement beneath London's streets and designed to manipulate world events by controlling, from a distance, the minds of politicians. Today this idea would be rejected by publishing houses as unoriginal; but this was the 1780s with the industrial revolution barely under way and the cutting-edge technology and science from which he wove his machine were things like textile looms and early steam engines, magnetism and the new chemistry of gases.
    He described his Air Loom in meticulous detail—and if he had written all this as fiction, a century before Butler, Verne, Wells or Kafka, his creation would have become as much a classic as Erewhon or The Trial—and, like them, would today be seen as a prescient satire, a glimpse of the future and many of our modern obsessions: conspiracy theories, mind control, paranoia, technophobia. But Matthews wasn't a fiction writer, he believed his Air Loom Machine was real—and, as a result, spent the greater part of his life in Bedlam, the notorious lunatic asylum.
    This, though, doesn't even begin to tell you about his remarkable life. He was considered by almost everyone who knew him—family, friends and even many of his keepers—as perfectly sane in all other respects. There were legal proceedings and campaigns to have him released which went on for years. He was likeable, knowledgeable, intelligent—and talented: before the Air Loom he was an architect and superb draughtsman. Imagine H G Wells as perfectly normal, educated, rational, still H G Wells in every respect...except believing he could travel through time. Or Kafka, still as the same Franz Kafka, with just the single eccentric belief that he had become a giant beetle. Moreover, some of Matthews' other grandiose claims were quite true: he really was a spy—a double agent—in Paris during the Revolution and subsequent Terror. He really was betrayed by both sides. He had the ear of top politicians of the day, had private meetings with Prime Minister Pitt—risked the guillotine and almost starved to death in a Parisian slum.
    The suspicion, even at the time, is that he knew too much about too many people, was declared insane and shut up in Bedlam for the rest of his life as a way of keeping him quiet. If true, then his fantasies about a conspiracy were also true and in this respect he was also ahead of his time: a century and a half later the USSR, for example, took to declaring its dissidents 'insane' and sending them to lunatic asylums.
    Matthews never was released—but did the Air Loom actually save his life? While reading Mike Jay's marvellous biography, a fairly mind-stopping idea came to me: if he'd been completely sane, they might have had to actually bump him off, but the Air Loom gave them enough of an excuse to shut him away—and, in so doing, automatically discredit as lunatic 'ravings' anything he might say about them. More, was it Matthews' unconscious mind which saved his life this way? He had already cheated the guillotine in Paris because the Jacobins simply thought him a mad Englishman and let him go; did his unconscious learn this lesson and, a few years later, create the Air Loom Machine so convincingly the trick worked for real this time?
    Who knows? All I can say is that, if it did happen that way, it would still be the least extraordinary thing about this man's extraordinary life. ( )
  justlurking | Jul 4, 2021 |
The Air Loom Gang is interesting but a little disconnected. Author Mike Jay tells the story of James Tilly Matthews, the first recorded person to believe his thoughts and actions were being controlled by a machine operated by conspirators.


The basic story is weird but simple. According to Matthews, a gang of seven – Bill the King, The Glove Woman, Sir Archy, Jack the Schoolmaster, The Middle Man, Charlotte, and Augusta – working out of a cellar near Bishopsgate in London, inflicted various tortures on him by remote control. Since it was the late 18th Century, there were no implanted computer chips or radio thought waves involved; instead the gang used The Air Loom.


The Air Loom – as near as Matthews could explain it, and he obviously wasn’t the most coherent narrator – worked by collecting noxious substance (Matthews mentions seminal fluid, dog effluvia, and horse flatulence) in barrels, then ducting these to the machine proper. The machine had a bellows, stops and pipes like an organ, and was powered by a windmill. Once in the machine, the various substances were charged with “magnetism” and projected against the victims.


Matthews, despite being a major loon, was a very competent draftsman and produced a detailed drawing of the apparatus. (Matthews admits he couldn’t determine what some of the upper parts of the machine did; he only knew of the machine at all because he saw it in visions). The machine could inflict a variety of effects; Matthews described Fluid Locking (constricting the fibers of the tongue to prevent the victim from speaking); Kiting (forcing a peculiar idea into the mind where it is “lifted and elevated”); “Lengthening the Brain” (making serious ideas seem silly); “Bomb-Bursting” (distending the stomach with gas); “Gaz [sic] Plucking” (forcing the body’s vital magnetic fluids out the anus as gas); “Dream Working”, “Thought Making”, “Laugh Making”, “Brain Sayings”, “Foot Curving” and “Fiber Twisting” (self-explanatory); and, finally, the lethal “Lobster Cracking”.


Matthews also identified himself as “James, Absolute Sole and Sacred Omni Imperious Arch Grand Arch Sovereign Omni Imperious Arch Grand Arch Proprietor Omni Imperious Arch-Grand-Arch Emperor Supreme, etc.” I find the “etc.” at the end sadly touching. The sole remaining document of his realm is a reward offer for the apprehension of The Air Loom Gang, with the monetary amounts carefully calculated for each nation of Europe.

Up until 1790 or so, Matthews was a reasonably prosperous tea merchant, with a wife and daughter, He became connected with a fellow Welsh pacifist, David Williams, and the two of them undertook a mission to Revolutionary France in an attempt to stave off war with England. They returned disillusioned; and this is where Matthews (and, to a lesser extent, author Mike Jay) start to go haywire.


Matthews apparently was under the impression that he was an authorized agent of the English government. At any rate, he returned to France by himself and began deluging the French Foreign Affairs office with peace proposals, requests for meetings, demands for responses, and pleas for attention. All these are still carefully filed away in the records; they’re all in English and after the first few the French no longer bothered to translate them. Matthew’s money ran out and he lived for two years only on the sufferance of his Paris landlord; somehow, he never attracted the fatal attention of the Committee of Public Safety until he finally gave up on peace proposals and instead sent an elaborate multipage document explaining how the French could solve their food shortages by growing cabbages in urban gardens. At that point, enough was enough and he was arrested and imprisoned; there he met a disciple of Anton Mesmer who explained magnetic fluids and mesmerism to him. A couple more impassioned letters got him released and he was marched to Calais and put on the boat to Dover.


Now aware of the insidious workings of magnetism (although he seemingly hadn’t worked out the full details of The Air Loom yet) he sent Lord Liverpool two letters. The first was a request to be compensated for his work for the English government; when there was no reply to that he sent a second letter bluntly accusing Liverpool of treason. There was no reply to that, either; Matthews went to a Parliament meeting, sat in the visitors’ gallery, and while Liverpool was speaking rose and shouted “TREASON!” Matthews was grabbed by Bow Street Runners, underwent a cursory examination, and was committed to Bethlehem Hospital as a dangerous lunatic.


This is where Jay goes a little off track; he hints that maybe, just maybe, Matthews really was a British government agent. His evidence is sparse. Matthews’ did once travel to France with David Williams on what could be argued was an informal government mission, but there is no evidence that his subsequent solitary trips were anything but the result of delusions of reference. His letters are still on file in the French Foreign Ministry; I bet there are a lot of letters on file in the French Foreign Ministry. He was convinced that Lord Liverpool had charged him with some sort of mission and then betrayed him; well, Matthews was convinced of a lot of things. Jay’s most telling exhibit is a letter from Lord Liverpool to the Governors of Bethlehem Hospital requesting that Matthews not be released. Bethlehem patients were only supposed to be held for one year; at the end of that time they were to be released (whether “cured” or not). Thus Jay argues, since Matthews was never released even after testimony from his friends and family, he was some sort of secret political prisoner rather than a madman. The case is weak; Liverpool, after all, had been called a “damnable and diabolical traitor” by Matthews and although Matthews had never displayed any tendency toward violence you can’t be too careful with somebody who can get ideas, possibly homicidal ones, put into his head by The Air Loom.


The rest of the book wanders a little. Matthews’ case was published by John Haslam, the Bethlehem apothecary, and Jay devotes quite a bit of text to Haslam, whose ideas about mental health were a little more progressive than his contemporaries. Jay also discusses Victor Tausk, a contemporary and student of Freud, who wrote the first academic paper on “influencing machines”. Tausk noted that patients often believed that the machines were projecting films into their heads; interestingly, although Matthews was well before the days of cinema he complained that the Air Loom Gang sometime sent him visions of obscene puppet shows.


The book drags when Matthews isn’t on center stage, though. Jay lets himself speculate too much on the “cause” of Matthew’s delusions; perhaps it was the horror of the Terror in France, or his poverty, or maybe he really was a British agent and the strain of two roles was too much for him. This is even though Jay has already pronounced on the dangers of attempting retrospective psychiatrics. Well illustrated, often by Matthews himself. No footnotes, and the bibliography seems a little sparse. Certainly worth knowing about as a historical and medical curiosity, although the gist of the situation could have been explained in a slightly-longer-than-normal Wikipedia article. ( )
  setnahkt | Dec 20, 2017 |
The Air Loom Gang: The Strange and True Story of James Tilly Matthews, His Visionary Madness and his confinement in Bedlam

A tale of the madness of politics and the politics of madness.

Within these pages you will find radicals and revolution, mesmerism and madness, influencing machines and imprisonment, architecture and asylums. Definitely to be recommended. ( )
  isabelx | Feb 13, 2011 |
Yes, its all those things in the tag and very interesting and entertaining. Late 18th century. Includes history of Bedlam and madhouses/treatment of madness compared to mental illness today, something of the zeitgeist of the time, a possible government conspiracy, the story of an individual man and loads more. ( )
  stro | Aug 12, 2006 |
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