The Infernal Machine

ROMAN MARS: This is 99% Invisible. I’m Roman Mars. For most of history, there’s really only been one way to blow things up.

STEVEN JOHNSON: Basically, gunpowder was invented sometime around 800 AD. And you packed a bunch of gunpowder in as small a location as you could and you set fire to it and blew it up, and that was basically the state of the art for a millennium.

ROMAN MARS: That’s Steven Johnson. He writes about science, technology, and the history of innovation. And he explained how the second half of the 1800s forever changed how we make explosives. First came the discovery of nitroglycerin.

STEVEN JOHNSON: Basically, this extraordinarily unstable substance that just jostling could cause an explosion. You didn’t need to kind of light a match to set it off. You could just shake it, and it would blow up in your face.

ROMAN MARS: Nitroglycerin was just too volatile to use. It literally blew up in people’s faces all the time. And so, one scientist, named Alfred Nobel, wanted to figure out how to create a controlled explosion.

STEVEN JOHNSON: Eventually, he hit upon this idea, which he referred to as the “blasting cap,” where you would use basically just a little bit of gunpowder to trigger a small, little explosion, which would then set off the big shockwave explosion of nitroglycerin detonating.

ROMAN MARS: However, working with these materials led to lots of unwanted explosions, including one which hit too close to home.

STEVEN JOHNSON: There was an accidental explosion at the lab that he had set up on his family’s property in Stockholm, and his brother was blown to bits in this explosion.

ROMAN MARS: To avoid these premature detonations, Nobel needed to figure out a way to safely work with and transport this compound. And while tinkering in one of his labs, off the River Elbe, he realized that the solution was in the dunes all around him.

STEVEN JOHNSON: And eventually he realizes that the sand that is a very specific, unusual kind of sand–if you mix it with nitroglycerin, it forms this paste. And it stabilizes the nitroglycerin so that, if you move it or shake it a little bit, it doesn’t explode.

ROMAN MARS: He named the product “dynamite” after the diatomite powder. Basically, he named it after sand. And dynamite changed the way people were building the infrastructure of the modern world from sewers to subways to skyscrapers.

STEVEN JOHNSON: Those were slow, arduous processes if you did them with the pickaxe. And they were a little bit faster if you did them with a large trove of gunpowder that you could use to explode. But if you had this enormously compact and efficient explosive power in the form of canisters of dynamite, you can improve the sense of productivity of building out these spaces by blowing them up by a factor of five or ten. It was an enormous leap forward.

ROMAN MARS: That level of destructive power wasn’t just intriguing to the civil engineers of the world. Governments, criminal gangs, and political groups also saw the potential in having the destructive power of an army in the palm of your hand. Dynamite especially caught the attention of New York City’s burgeoning anarchist movement in the early 20th century.

STEVEN JOHNSON: That anarchists had a lot of different ideas–but for complicated reasons, they fell into this strategy of what we would now call terrorism. You could just literally carry a stick of dynamite in your coat pocket and walk into a cafe and throw it into the crowd and blow it up. It was portable, it could be concealed very easily, and it was basically a force amplifier. And if you were interested in strategic displays of violence–either targeting wealthy people, people in power, leaders of countries, or corporate icons–dynamite gave you a tool that simply didn’t exist before.

ROMAN MARS: Steven Johnson’s new book is called The Infernal Machine: A True Story of Dynamite, Terror, and the Rise of the Modern Detective. And he tells this story about how the anarchist movement in the U.S. gets wooed by dynamite, forever shaping how we think about making political change.

STEVEN JOHNSON: In this strange twist of history, Nobel’s invention, designed for one purpose, gets co-opted by a whole different set of people who are intent on a set of objectives that completely go against everything that Nobel was trying to do. And they get locked in this kind of tragic embrace for 40 years.

ROMAN MARS: While the anarchists used dynamite to spur chaos against the oppressive state, the police embraced and developed their own technology to combat them. And the police’s weapon of choice was surveillance technology. Steven tells the story of the tension between these two technologies and what we can learn from one of the most explosive periods in American history. So, let’s talk about the anarchists. What is it that they believed in?

STEVEN JOHNSON: The contemporary meaning of anarchy that comes to mind? The connotation of it is negative chaos.

ROMAN MARS: Right.

STEVEN JOHNSON: It was literally the Greek of “anarcos,” which means no rulers. But the truth of the matter is that anarchism was a very interesting philosophy at that moment in time, particularly in the middle of the early days of the Industrial Revolution, when the body count from the factory system was empirically just much higher than any of the terrorist attacks set off by the anarchists. People were just dying these brutal deaths every single day in factories all around the world. And so, there was this idea that was there in the early days of anarchism that humans had actually lived in much more stable and seemingly sustainable forms in earlier points in history, where you had people working and doing technologically advanced work. But they weren’t doing it inside of these large corporate systems. And they didn’t have large armies. And they didn’t have large governments. They were able to live in a pleasant and productive way of life. And the anarchists were saying, “Hey, it’s not too late to go back to that!”

ROMAN MARS: So, they’re sort of anti-capitalism and anti-government. And, in the early 20th century, they used dynamite to get their message across.

STEVEN JOHNSON: Yeah, in fact, some of the first real terrorist acts,–the first suicide bombing and the first civilian terrorist attack–were perpetrated by anarchists in this period. And in both those cases and in many other cases, the weapon of choice was dynamite. And by the way, it’s worth mentioning that dynamite is so integrated into the worldview and political posturing of the anarchists that they’re often referred to as the Dynamite Club. And you’ll see just quote after quote from these radicals saying, “We can counter the guns of the state with dynamite. This is our best way to fight back.” So, the way they justified it was that there was so much more violence at the hands of big government and big capital. And you did, in fact, have things like the Ludlow Massacre and other labor strikes that ended in terrible violence with the perpetrators of the violence largely being Croatians and sometimes assisted by the government.

ROMAN MARS: And so, how widespread were these bombings at the time? I’m curious how present the threat of bombing was for people in this era.

STEVEN JOHNSON: One of the first facts that got me into this project, actually, is there was a guy named Owen Egan. He was technically a fireman, but he worked very closely with the New York Police Department. I think his title was something like Chief of Combustibles or something like that. He was basically the number one and arguably only bomb diffuser and bomb analyst on the staff of the fire department/NYPD for about 30 years, from about 1896 into the early ’20s. He died on the job of indigestion, apparently. He lived this incredibly dangerous life and somehow survived it all. He lost a couple of fingers over those years. But the thing that struck me so early on was that, over those 30 years, Owen Egan either diffused or analyzed the wreckage from over 7,000 bombs in New York City.

And some of those bombs were actually mob related. It was basically a mechanism for extortion. So, if you didn’t pay up, they would put a small bomb in front of your storefront and just show you that you had to obey the local mafia. But a number of them were political. And having lived in New York City most of my life–having lived through 9/11–I just tried to imagine what it would’ve been like to be living in New York City in a period where, over three decades, 7,000 bombs had gone off. I spent so much time in the newspaper archives. And you just pick a random edition of a New York paper from that period and look at the front page, and it’s pretty likely there’ll be a mention of a bomb going off somewhere. Statistically, it was just happening all the time.

ROMAN MARS: And how much of this destruction was tied to the anarchists in the public mind? How looming a threat was the anarchist movement?

STEVEN JOHNSON: Yeah, a lot of it was. There is kind of a blurring of lines between the socialists and the communists and the IWW and the anarchists. And they were bedfellows in some ways–and in some ways not–largely disagreeing about the role of the state, right? They were equally opposed to big capitalism, but the anarchists also felt that big government was as much of a problem. So, there was a general sense of radicals were causing this political violence.

ROMAN MARS: Right. And one of those radicals that you talk about in the book is Emma Goldman. Could you tell me about her and what her role in the anarchist movement was?

STEVEN JOHNSON: Emma Goldman is one of the most endlessly fascinating figures of this period. A Russian emigre came over without much actual education–came over as a teenager to the United States, somehow was giving lectures on radical politics within a couple of years of her arrival here, became the leading figure of the anarchist movement arguably worldwide by the first decades of the 20th century, and had a very complicated relationship to political violence. She had had this longtime partnership–really what turned out to be a lifelong partnership–with Alexander Berkman, who had a much less complicated relationship with political violence and had notoriously attempted to assassinate Henry Clay Frick in the early 1890s and gone to prison for more than a decade. But those early experiences, which Goldman had been largely supportive of, had kind of turned her against the use of political violence in her writings–in her public statements. This is right around the time that Gandhi is formalizing the principles of nonviolent protests. And if Goldman had really, in a full-throated way, embraced those or had hit upon them independently, the whole history of the anarchist movement might have played out differently.

ROMAN MARS: Right. Since the anarchists did not opt for nonviolent protest, what happened next? And how did they essentially become public enemy number one?

STEVEN JOHNSON: So, after McKinley is assassinated by an anarchist in 1901, in a complicated set of events, Goldman is incorrectly blamed for it. Teddy Roosevelt ascends in the presidency, and he delivers a speech. And basically the speech is saying that the number one threat in the world is anarchism. He refers to the anarchist as “the enemy of all mankind.” But just the idea that the president of the United States would address Congress and say, “This is our biggest problem right now: fighting the anarchist threat,” that tells you just how significant it was at that moment in time.

ROMAN MARS: Wow. So, anarchism and these bomb plots are really front of mind for much of the country. And one of the most dramatic parts of the book is an anarchist bomb plot where the bombs were sent in the mail. Could you tell me that story?

STEVEN JOHNSON: So, you have this period in the first two decades of the 20th century where these bombings just increase in regularity in the United States. It kind of swept across Europe. And then they come to the United States and really are concentrated initially in New York, and then they start spreading across the rest of the country. And one of the most extraordinary events that happens in the spring of 1919 is a series of bombing attacks–mail bombing attacks–that begin with an attempted bombing in Seattle that is accidentally foiled. Basically, like, the package is opened upside down, and so the bomb doesn’t go off. And then the next day, a package is opened at the home of a Georgia Senator by his wife and a servant. And that does explode. The servant loses both of her hands, and the wife is injured in this. The senator isn’t home at the point. And the news reports mention that the package had a very distinctive kind of marking and was wrapped from Gimbels, the department store. And that night, a postal clerk in New York is riding the subway home at midnight from his kind of late shift at the post office. And he happens to read a story about these mail bombs, and he realizes that he has seen that exact wrapping in the main central post office in New York. In fact, he has seen 16 identical packages with that exact wrapping. And what’s happened basically is that the packages had been sent out by anarchists, but they had slightly messed up the postage. And so, there was some question about whether… I think it’s something about it being a novelty item. And there was some question of whether you got this cheaper postage rate with novelty items as opposed to other things. And so, this clerk had put the packages aside–all 16 of them–and was waiting for his superior to basically deliver a ruling on whether these things had to be sent back or not.

ROMAN MARS: So, this postal clerk who notices these 16 identical packages–what does he end up doing?

STEVEN JOHNSON: He realizes that potentially these bombs are just sitting down there at the post office. And so, he jumps off the train, goes all the way back down to 34th Street, and calls in his boss. They identify the packages and say, “Yeah, these do fit the description.” And so, then they call Owen Egan–Chief of Combustibles–and he goes in and diffuses one of these bombs. And the whole plot is largely avoided.

ROMAN MARS: Wow.

STEVEN JOHNSON: And so it’s one of these things where literally, I mean, on some level, the course of American political history could have been changed if they had just decided to spend an extra 10 cents on the postage for these bombs that they were sending out.

ROMAN MARS: When we come back, Steven Johnson tells us about how the state tried to organize and contain the chaos.

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Okay, so we’re in these decades where the anarchist movement is really active. There are these bombs going off all over the city, and there’s this real fear of the anarchist movement and what these so-called radicals can do. And at the same time as all this is going on, you’ve got the police and the government trying to figure out how to regain some kind of control of the situation. But they don’t exactly have the tools to do it. Could you tell me more about this?

STEVEN JOHNSON: So, up until the late 1880s, the idea of true detective work being done with scientific tools, like, for instance, fingerprint science, and done in a formal way with complex records, histories of people convicted of crimes, identification systems, including fingerprints–all that stuff just didn’t exist. And crucially–this is another thing that I think is so important to this story–there was really no federal investigative force. There was no FBI. There was a bureau of investigation that was chronically underfunded. There had generally been a suspicion–kind of an old school, American suspicion–of consolidating too much power, particularly investigative power, in the federal government. If you were charged with a federal crime… You could be charged with a crime, but it was very hard to prove it because there was no system. There were no people on payroll, basically, who could kind of marshal the evidence together to prove that you were guilty.

ROMAN MARS: But soon, fingerprint science develops alongside all these other technologies that we’d call biometrics today.

STEVEN JOHNSON: And because there was no national institution in the United States to use these new advances in confronting the threat of anarchism, the real pioneers in adopting these new techniques happened on a city level and particularly happened in New York.

ROMAN MARS: And so, how did the police start using these new tools and techniques?

STEVEN JOHNSON: Yeah. New York between 1900 and 1920 really reinvents itself as a state-of-the-art police department led by a few people, like Joseph Faurot and Arthur Woods, who adopt these new tools. In many cases, they travel over to Europe to kind of find out about them and come back. And one of the things that I think is just so extraordinary is the basic lack of identification systems throughout the 19th century. People didn’t largely have passports or driver’s licenses, obviously, or any kind of biometric evidence for who they were. So, if you were arrested for a crime, they’d be like, “What’s your name?” and you could say, “My name is Bill Jones.” And on some level, there’s no way to prove that you were not Bill Jones, even if you’d just been arrested three days ago under another name. And so, just the basic ability to capture people’s identity and prove that they were that person and that they were the person who had been convicted of a crime or suspected of a crime two years ago or five years ago was an enormous leap forward. And biometrics and fingerprinting and photography and all that really introduced that.

ROMAN MARS: And the power of something like fingerprint technology takes a little while to gain popularity. And there’s this incredible court case that you write about that really shepherds in this era of forensic science. Could you tell us that story?

STEVEN JOHNSON: Yeah. It’s a case against a burglar named Charles Crispy, who had broken into a soho loft and stolen some, I believe, undergarments. I think it was kind of a ladies undergarment store. And he left behind a fingerprint, and it matched a previous fingerprint. And the fingerprint evidence was really central to the case, but no one had ever been successfully convicted of a crime based on fingerprint evidence before that.

ROMAN MARS: So, what does Faurot end up doing?

STEVEN JOHNSON: Faurot, who has kind of built up this–against a lot of resistance internally at the NYPD–small identification bureau, is pretty much the fingerprint guy inside the NYPD. This is, like, 1911. And he has called in and is pretty much the only witness for the prosecution because they really don’t have any other evidence other than this fingerprint. And so Faurot is testifying, and he’s asked to explain his method. And he just rolls out this crazy explanation that clearly just bombs in the room.

ROMAN MARS: So, what does the prosecution do then?

STEVEN JOHNSON: So, they come back, and they basically are like, “We’d like to do an experiment. We’d like to do a demo, in a sense, of this technology for the jury so that they can understand it.” And they basically have Faurot leave the room. And the jurors come through. And one of the jurors presses his finger against a pane of glass, simulating what Charles Crispy, the accused criminal, had done. And then all the other jurors–including the one who pressed his finger on the glass–do a traditional fingerprint impression. And they bring Faurot back. And then Faurot is basically seated in front of the jury. And he has to identify which juror has put their finger on the glass, and he nails it. He goes through and he picks it out and he’s like, “It’s this juror right here.” And this jury is like, “What is this witchcraft?” They’re just blown away at this incredible display of his scientific power. And, almost instantly, Crispy changes his plea to guilty. He just sees the scientific firepower that’s up against him, and he gives in.

ROMAN MARS: Right, because before this, someone who committed a crime could really just essentially disappear. Like, an anarchist could throw a stick of dynamite into a church or something and then disappear into the crowd. But the advent of these new technologies really takes away that anonymity.

STEVEN JOHNSON: Yeah. And so, the tide starts to turn inside the NYPD. And then this Arthur Woods figure becomes commissioner, who’s very interested in these things. They build up the information architecture that allows them to kind of track criminals. And they increasingly are using that to investigate the anarchists and other political attacks in New York in that period. And that infrastructure then becomes the basis of what leads to the consolidation of this kind of investigatory power on a federal level.

ROMAN MARS: And as the police departments and the federal government are gathering all this information, they need a way to organize all of it. And this is where another key historical figure comes into the picture. And that’s J. Edgar Hoover. Could you tell me about Hoover’s contribution here and how this all collides with the history of the anarchists?

STEVEN JOHNSON: Yeah. Hoover had basically moonlit in D.C., when he was in high school and in college, as a library clerk. And he was organizing–helping to organize–the Library of Congress’ voluminous collections. And there had been a new system that had been introduced around this period by the former director of the Library of Congress whose name was Putnam. And Putnam had introduced basically something similar to the Dewey Decimal system. It was basically like, “Hey, we have all these books and they’re in different categories and they have authors. And so, we’ll figure out a systematic way of taking this information so that you can explore.” It was really, on some level, like what we would now call a search algorithm.

He then goes to work for the Justice Department. And World War I is still evolving. The United States is not yet involved in the war, but the country is moving in that direction. And there’s serious concern about German nationals inside of the United States who are also actually setting off bombs on their own during this period. And so, Hoover gets assigned to run the New York branch of the big push to register all the German nationals living in the United States, which was arguably the largest kind of identification management roundup in United States history at that point. And Hoover’s really good at it. He’s something like 23 or 24, and he wins the praise of his superiors. And so, shortly after that–after these bombs are starting to go off in 1918 and 1919–the Bureau of Investigation opens up a new division called the Radical Division. And the Radical Division is going to be charged with rounding up these dangerous anarchists and communists that are setting off these bombs all across the country, using these new state-of-the-art, information science, crime-fighting techniques. And they put J. Edgar Hoover in charge of the radical division.

And Hoover’s first guiding quest is to use this new information science to see that Emma Goldman is deported from the United States of America. She and Berkman had been sent to jail for encouraging draft resistance leading up into World War I. So, in this period, Goldman has been released from prison. But the mood in the country is very much kind of turning against these radicals–the kind of endless bombing campaigns that have happened. There have been many more. And so, Hoover–in really his first act as head of the Radical Division–collects just an enormous amount of information on Goldman and on Alexander Berkman. Just going through, I’ve seen all these files and it’s just extraordinary how– It’s a whole book basically of information of speeches she’d given. And he’s organized it all systematically. He’s kind of annotated everything, and it’s precisely the kind of information gathering and management that the federal government just had been incapable of doing before. It’s just a case that could not have been made before. And Hoover, for the first time, has kind of marshaled all this information. And so, there’s a kind of really intense moment where there’s a deportation hearing on Ellis Island. And Goldman is there. And Hoover shows up. And Goldman looks over. And Hoover just has these stacks of paper on his desk, and it’s all the evidence that he’s put together to finally make the case that Emma Goldman needs to leave the country for good. And she kind of looks over there, and she says to herself, “I’m not going to be able to fight this.” So, Hoover ends up successfully deporting her and Berkman along with a number of other radicals, they leave in one of the last days of 1919 aboard a ship that the press dubbed the Red Arc, and they sail out through the New York Harbor and end up in Leninist, Russia, where they are instantly disillusioned with everything that is happening there.

ROMAN MARS: It’s interesting that this whole story is taking place in the backdrop of these two designs, which work in opposite directions. If you simplify them to their most basic concepts, dynamite is this destructive power that creates chaos. And information science is basically trying to order everything–to put everything back together. And ultimately, what you see is this sequence of events where dynamite supercharges the anarchist movement, which leads to the supercharging of the forensic sciences, and that ultimately snuffs out the anarchist movement. And then the surveillance state ascends, and it has its own destructive and pernicious power.

STEVEN JOHNSON: Well, I think one of the things is how long it took me to see it that way. But they were kind of invisible, I think–not to be too on brand here. But that kind of high level clash between technologies or approaches or designs that come into being slowly over time–it’s almost like a very slow motion film that nothing seems to be happening when you watch it at that slow speed. When you’re watching it over, like, 40 years, it seems like there’s just little isolated things happening. But then when you speed it up, you realize, “Oh, this is really a crash between these two different forces.” But once you see it that way, it is very illuminating.

ROMAN MARS: Steven Johnson, thank you so much for being on 99% Invisible. It was a real pleasure to talk to you.

STEVEN JOHNSON: Oh, Roman, I love the show. And it’s such an honor to be on it.

ROMAN MARS: Steven Johnson’s new book is called The Infernal Machine: A True Story of Dynamite, Terror, and the Rise of the Modern Detective. You can find a link to the book in our show notes. And you can also just go to a store or go online and just buy every Steven Johnson book because they’re all so, so good.

99% Invisible was produced this week by Jeyca Maldonado-Medina and edited by Neena Pathak. Mix by Martin Gonzalez. Music by Swan Real. Kathy Tu is our executive producer. Kurt Kohlstedt is our digital director. Delaney Hall is our senior editor. Taylor Shedrick is our intern. The rest of the team includes Chris Berube, Jayson De Leon, Emmett Fitzgerald, Christopher Johnson, Vivian Le, Lasha Madan, Joe Rosenberg, Gabriella Gladney, Kelly Prime, and me, Roman Mars. The 99% Invisible logo was created by Stefan Lawrence. We are part of the Stitcher and SiriusXM Podcast Family, now headquartered six blocks north in the Pandora building… in beautiful… uptown… Oakland, California. Home of the Oakland Roots Soccer Club, of which I am a proud community owner. Other teams may come and go, but the Roots are Oakland first, always.

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