The Eureka

The Eureka, also known as the Latin Verse Machine, is a mid-19th century machine for generating Latin verses, created and exhibited by the Quaker inventor John Clark of Bridgwater.

Clark, a cousin of Cyrus Clark, was born at Greinton in Somerset in 1785 and moved to Bridgwater in 1809. There he was first a grocer and later a printer. In 1830 he started work on the Eureka and was able to exhibit it in 1845 in the Egyptian Hall in Picadilly. Visitors, for the admission price of one shilling, could see a machine that resembled a ‘small bureau bookcase’, with six narrow windows in the front. As it prepared each new verse, the machine would play the National Anthem, becoming silent after about a minute, when the verse was complete.

Verse production
The verses created by the Eureka were gloomy and oracular hexameters, created to a single format, which allowed for many combinations, all metrically sound and (more or less) meaningful.

Verses output from the machine included horrida spona reis promittunt tempora densa ("horrible brides promise tough times") and sontia tela bonis causabunt agmina crebra ("good weapons will cause frequent raids").

This method of verse creation was not Clark’s invention: already in 1677 a John Peter had published a work, "Artificial Versifying, A New Way to Make Latin Verses". Clark’s contribution was to fully automate this process.

The mechanism was a series of six drums turning at different rates within the cabinet. The words were not simply printed on the drums, but encoded as rows of stop wires of different lengths, onto which wooden staves would be dropped. The staves had any letters that might be needed printed on them in a vertical series, and would fall onto the stop wires with the desired letter opposite the window for the word.

Clark described his machine as an illustration of a theory of “kaleidoscopic evolution” whereby the Latin verse is “conceived in the mind of the machine” then mechanically produced and displayed. Clark can be regarded as a pioneer of cognitive science and computational creativity.

Legacy
After Clark’s death in 1853, the machine passed first to his nephew and then to his cousins Cyrus and James Clark. After it was repaired in 1950 after a period of neglect, it was housed in the Records Office of Clarks’ factory in Street, Somerset. It was later moved to the company's Shoe Museum, but was put into storage in 1996 when it was no longer working. It was renovated in 2015. Since the Shoe Museum closed, the Latin Verse Machine has been in the care of the Alfred Gillett Trust.