by Kimberley Askew, Mount St. Mary’s College, Los Angeles
download this essay: SherlockHolmes
Statue of Sherlock Holmes at Meiringen, Switzerland. Created by British sculptor John Doubleday. Unveiled on the 10th September 1988
Was the character of Sherlock Holmes a fictional manifestation of Charles Babbage’s analytical engine, and did both inventions presage Artificial Intelligence? In Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Sherlock Holmes Stories, Watson describes his friend, the fictional detective Holmes, as “the most perfect reasoning and observing machine that the world has seen” (Doyle 32). In fact, time and again throughout the stories, Holmes’s ability to process information or “data” is portrayed as almost super-human. Meanwhile, throughout the 1800s, Babbage was designing what his contemporary Ada Lovelace called the very first “thinking or reasoning” machine. (Otis 19) I will argue that the invention of the machine and the invention of Holmes occurring in the same century was not mere coincidence, but in fact reflected the deeper concerns of Victorian society as it sought to repress, and find a solution for, deviant behavior.
Charles Babbage's Difference Engine
Prior to Doyle’s invention of Holmes, Charles Babbage had begun work on designing his analytical engine, which he was unable to build due to the costs associated with such a project. Laura Otis explains that Babbage’s engine was intended to “generate tables of data without the errors introduced by human calculators.” (15) The idea captured the imagination and interest of Babbage’s friend, the mathematician Ada Lovelace. Lovelace explained that with the analytical engine “a uniting link is established between the operations of matter and the abstract mental processes of the most abstract branch of mathematical science” (Otis 19) She saw that the uniqueness of the engine was “both in the extent of the calculations which it can perform, in the facility, certainty and accuracy with which it can effect them…” (Otis 19)
A Study in Scarlet, the first Sherlock Holmes story, was published in 1887 in Beeton’s Christmas Annual. In the story, Holmes intuits correctly, within a matter of seconds after meeting Watson for the first time, that he has been in Afghanistan and later explains the “train of thoughts” that led him to that correct conclusion. The detective somewhat modestly describes his own uncanny ability to Watson as “a kind of intuition,” adding, “You see I have a lot of special knowledge which I apply to the problem, and which facilitates matters wonderfully… Observation with me is second nature.” (29) Holmes, like Babbage’s computer, relies on data in order to make his conclusions. He says in A Scandal in Bohemia, “I have no data yet. It is a capital mistake to theorise before one has data” (35) and reiterates it again in The Speckled Band, “How dangerous is it always to reason from insufficient data” (172) Holmes observed matter, from a frayed sleeve, to mismatched boots, and processed it as “data” with super-human speed, then made conclusions based on the data, using it to expose criminals hiding among proper Victorian society. Just as the analytical engine didn’t allow for human error, Sherlock Holmes was tasked with weeding out erroneous behavior in society.
Victorian intellectuals were striving to comprehend humanity, on a macro and micro level. As they developed new insight into science and inventions like machines and cameras, they applied them to their analysis of human behavior, employing metaphor to explore the many possibilities. Laura Otis writes that scientists and literary writers “relied heavily on imagination” and that “metaphor can allow insight without consequences” (xxi). Mary Shelley imagined a living being created entirely by science in Frankenstein. In The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Robert Louis Stevenson tackled the subject of a man’s struggle to contain desires that were abhorrent to society, envisioning what would happen if Dr. Jekyll had access to chemicals that would transform him and give free reign to his most reprehensible emotions. Doyle’s character Sherlock Holmes, on the other hand, had a mind that calculated like Babbage’s invention and a heart seemingly incapable of human emotion. In Scandal in Bohemia, Watson declares that Holmes did not love:
All emotions, and that one particularly, were abhorrent to his cold, precise, but admirably balanced mind. He was, I take it, the most perfect reasoning and observing machine that the world has seen: but, as a lover he would have placed himself in a false position… Grit in a sensitive instrument, or a crack in one of his own higher-power lenses, would not be more disturbing than a strong emotion in a nature such as his (32).
Lovelace wrote that the analytical engine had the distinction of
…possessing a yet deeper interest for the human race, when it is remembered that this science constitutes the language through which alone we can adequately express the great facts of the natural world, and the unceasing changes of mutual relationship, which visibly or invisibly, consciously or unconsciously to our immediate physical perceptions, are interminably going on in the agencies of the creation awe live amidst: those who think thus think on mathematical truth as the instrument through which the weak mind of man can most effectually read his Creator’s works, will regard with especial interest all that can tend to facilitate the translation of its principles into explicit practical forms (Otis 18).
It is worthy of note that decades before the invention of the modern computer, Laura Otis writes that Victorian Samuel Butler was “deeply interested in evolutionary theory, depicts machines as developing and growing with the potential to acquire consciousness” (14). In A Case of Identity a typewriter and a human being are compared outright: “It is a curious thing,” remarked Holmes, “that a typewriter has really quite as much individuality as a man’s handwriting. Unless they are quite new, no two of them are exactly alike” (86).
While the analytical engine had the ability to take on human tasks without human error and with some future possibility of consciousness, could humans evolve by learning behavioral characteristics of computers? Whether Doyle intended it or not, Sherlock Holmes with his data-driven analysis and his lack of emotion is just such an experiment. In the 2003 anthology Taking the Red Pill, Glen Yeffeth writes that Artificial Intelligence machines are “intelligent ‘machines’ that think just like humans do—the distinguishing factor between AI and humanity is the physiological makeup; humans are organic and AI are mechanical. Some argue that AI is humanity’s evolutionary destiny” (245). While that assertion is certainly up for debate, it is interesting to consider how the character Sherlock Holmes might have some claim as an ancestor of Artificial Intelligence, alongside the analytical engine.
Works Cited
Lovelace, Ada. “Sketch of the Analytical Engine.” Otis. 1-19.
Otis, Laura. Literature and Science in the Nineteenth Century. New York: Oxford,
2002.
Doyle, Arthur Conan. Sherlock Holmes: The Major Stories with Contemporary
Critical Essays. Boston/New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 1984.
Yeffeth, Glenn. Taking the Red Pill: Science, Philosophy and Religion in The Matrix.
Dallas: BenBella Books, 2003.
