Clockwork in the Cold

Swiss-y Stuff, part 2


While the Val-de-Travers has so much to offer by way of absinthe history, it is also in these same Jura mountains where some of the finest clockmaking was done in the history of Europe.

I have a theory (heh-hem) about why the Swiss became such excellent clock-makers, and why it became so much of an industry in a country where the population is sparsely scattered and relatively isolated.

Thanks to AndreJenny

My theory (heh-hem) goes like this: imagine living in a place where you are trapped, indeed kept in idleness, for seven months or more of the year. Imagine your whole family in one very large house with three-foot-thick walls, often with the barn attached on the side or even above the family dwelling, filled with cows and hay, keeping you warm. Imagine how much you tire of each others' company, and how difficult it is to get to the other houses in your village when the wind is howling outside.

Imagine that you have time on your hands. The weather is crazy cold, and you have horrible cabin fever. You have a meticulous mind, keeping things clean and organized; and you are thinking of time, because time is something one counts when one is stuck inside all winter. Plus, where are you going to get income for the winter? Traditionally, farmers and village folk make things in the dark and snowy months, which they sell to bring in a little for those necessities which can't be stored away in the fall.


Now, if you learned how to make clocks - which was a craze in those days, everyone was buying them - think how interesting it would be, losing yourself in that small and meticulous world of rhythm and movement, of calculation and hand-eye coordination, a small world unto itself. Think how large and comfortable your house would appear when you'd been spending hours working in your little world. And, if your family and your regular work got too tiresome, you had that secret place of concentration - of communion, even - to return to.

I'd be willing to bet that the clock industry slowed down considerably during the summer months, when people were busy trying to get their houses in order, the weather is warm and everyone's outside working. But (heh-hem) this is simply my theory.

La Chaux-de-Fonds is famous for its MuséeInternational d'Horlogerie. The architect Le Corbusier was born here (and unfortunately much of the newer architecture seems to reflect this fact). The museum has a pretty good timeline for their collection on their website, color-coded for different types of clocks, with different technologies listed across the top. Very interesting (with some excellent examples, such as the rather graphic little watch from 1820 with the tiny animated picture of Jupiter seducing Callisto, accompanied by "an air of mechanical music").

The Cartier factory outside La Chaux-de-Fonds. I found it really strange, the industry in this part of Switzerland. All the famous, super-luxury watch people seem to be based here, but the factories are small and ineffably Swiss, with clean modern exteriors and usually sandwiched into a small village or out in a field somewhere, like this one is.

In Le Locle, a small town whose charm had clearly been substantially supplimented by the prosperity of its three-hundred-year-old watch industry, we went to see their lesser-known Musée d'Horlogerie before theoretically heading on to the big one in La Chaux-de-Fonds - which we never got to, because the things in this small museum, housed in an old chateau, were amazing, and the people were gracious and forthcoming.


First of all, before you even get into the museum there is a small room in the garden with a replica of ibn al-Razāz al-Jazarī's Elephant Clock, done complete to every detail, and using al-Jazari's technology. There is a nice document explaining the technology, which is essentially a hollow hemisphere with a hole in the bottom, which gradually fills with water, tripping a falling ball which in turn lifts the hemisphere out of the water. It's very ingenious, and thrilling to see something of al-Jazira's in the flesh, so to speak.


Besides all the many, many beautiful clocks - engraved clocks, carved clocks, enameled or guilded or caged clocks - there was a whole room devoted to automata. Not large automata; small ones, from doll-sized dancers who whirl across the floor to a perfect foot-high old women who walks carefully on her own two feet with help from her cane, to tiny birds no more than an inch long who pop out of a hand-mirror and sing with real whistles. There were watches there, too, with extremely tiny automata of dancers and musicians and so on, and my favorite was a pair of segmented enamel and gold caterpillars, only slightly larger than life-sized, which hump their way very realistically along on whichever surface they are put.

Made by Francois Jurod in 2000 for La Semeuse coffee company.

The museum is known to be a gem, in that they house three very particular collections which contain some of the finest specimens of their kinds in the world. But some of their displays are temporary: on the bottom floor, for example, they had an exhibition of coffee technology - ancient machines for roasting and grinding, and a really great automaton of a Turk on a flying carpet pouring himself a cup of real (read: wet) coffee, which he then "drinks" so that his cup is empty again. The best part was the waving carpet, with its attendant, wonderful, mechanism.

On the top floor they had an almost overwhelming exhibit on the theory and nature of time and its measurement. Geological time, astronomical time, personal time (birth to death), the rise and fall of civilizations, chronological time such as calendars (perpetual calendars, lunar calendars, calendars from different cultures, etc.), almanacs, datebooks, and many more. There was an area devoted to "le temps approximatif": sundials, astrological instruments, and hourglasses. And then, of couse, the area with watches, gear-cutters, and precision watch-making tools, a compliment of the excellent display on the history of movements on the ground floor.


They have a really quite amazing film of the tiny automats all doing their stuff, one by one, in extreme closeup - worth seeing because then when you see the real thing you understand the amazing actions of their mechanisms. The film is interesting in its own right, and they sell it for 30 francs (about $20), but alas, they were out. They do accept money through the mail and will send you a copy if you do so - I will be getting a copy and I will try to post a sample so that you can see how great it is - I think they could do with the business.

Both towns, and indeed many small clock-making villages in between, are in the canton of Neuchâtel. The Musée d’Art et d’Histoire, in the lovely city of Neuchâtel, houses the amazing Jaquet-Droz Automata. You can go see the automata anytime (there is an accompanying film in several languages), but they only demonstrate them the first Sunday every month - it is the same man you see in the videos (the Writer, the Artist, and the Organ Player) doing the demonstration, and he will answer questions happily if you are willing to ask in French.

They are truly as wonderful as I had heard, and I was lucky enough to stumble on a special demonstration outside the usual time. The writer wrote, the artist drew, the man showed us their insides, and the organ-player played her tunes, her wooden fingers actually pressing the keys on her specially-made organ. Most wonderfully, my elder daughter and I sneaked back for a last look at the three pseudopeople and were astonished to find the organ-player sitting in the dimness breathing and tipping her head, long after the demonstration was over, the lights turned off, and everyone had gone home. Apparently her breathing and head movements are natural effects of the mainspring being allowed to wind down so that it doesn't stay tight all the time and lose its...well, springiness.

So we sat there in the dark and watched her eyes gleam slightly as she shifted in her seat, her chest rising and falling, silent and companionable. We kept her company for as long as we could, and then we went home to France.




Links

The organ player

The Writer

The inner workings of the Writer - a true early computer.

The Artist, who actually blows away the pencil crumbs...

San Marco Clock Tower, Venice

Ed. note: I have been meaning to post about this. Pardon my clockwork geeking below; if you are uninterested in technical details it is still worth checking out the photos!

While in Venice, I found out accidentally about the little-known tour of the beautiful clock tower on the Piazza San Marco. Everyone is so busy going into the Basilica or up the Campanile they don't look much at the clock tower; but it's a beautiful thing, marking not only the hours but the date, moon phase and astrological time.

The clock is remarkable: aside from the mechanism, there is a ball painted half gold and half blue, which by its orientation in the clock face will describe the face of the moon. A track circling the outside allows a group of four figures (the three Magi and a trumpeting angel) to pass in front of the figure of the Virgin (this only happens on two festivals a year now, see below). As they do so, the Angel raises its trumpet and its wings, and the Magi bow and move one arm in salute.


At the top of the tower, two larger-than-life shepherds (known as the Moors because of their patina) swing their hammers hourly at the great bell. They are beautifully put together (and vastly anatomically correct), their fleeces hiding the fact that they are segmented at the waist.



The clock was created by clockmaker Gian Carlo Rainieri in 1499. Rainieri then moved into the tower and was paid to keep the clock running and accurate. When he died a number of people of varying skill levels succeeded him, and after two hundred and fifty years the clock was in bad shape. So in 1752 Bartolomeo Ferracina, a reknown clockmaker, was hired to refurbish the clock.

"He actually made a completely new movement. The old mechanism and the original astronomical dial were given to him in part payment. The new movement, although modified, remains until the present day. It has four trains, in a peculiar cruciform pattern, one for the time, two for the hour strike by the Moors and one for the special 132-blow strike mechanism which will be described later. On the upper floor of the tower, above the main movement, there is a separate mechanism for the Magi's carousel." (from Antica Orologeria Famberlan, and excellent page with everything you might want to know about the mechanism's history).

Curiously, the pendulum was lengthened twice, and became long enough that it necessarily hung down into the next floor. This meant that the temperatori, living in the tower below the clock mechanism, had the pendulum moving across his living room at all times. Here is a picture from the 1950s:



The climb through the tower is "not recommended for pregnant women or people suffering from claustrophobia" as the stairs are narrow and get narrower as you go up. Personally, I was impressed with their very Enlightenment look:



In 1857 more repairs were required, and Giovanni Doria, the temperatore of the time, made a careful survey of the necessary repairs to both building and mechanism. While they were at it, the Venetians decided they wanted a luminous display on it so that the time could be read at night. So Luigi De Lucia (appropriately named) designed the two wheels that displayed lamp-lit numerals in the windows that the Magi had once come through. The light shone out through glass-covered cutouts in the metal wheels.

When I was there, I noticed a strange whirring clunk that happened every five minutes; this was the minute wheel regulator going off, and the wheel doing its turn to the next display panel. It was quite extraordinary to be privy to this mechanism, as it's very beautiful from the inside:


Note the triangular frames hanging from the ceiling. These have small, strong metal hooks on them which are hooked onto the number-wheels, allowing them to be easily disengaged and drawn backwards into the room for those days during Ascension when the Magi are once again attached to their wheel (on the floor) and allowed to parade past Mary.

There are two faces to the clock, both driven by the same movement: one of them, elaborate and decorative, faces the Doge's Palace and the Piazza San Marco, for the Doge to look at (and presumably all the Senators and so on who ran the government from the Palace). The other one was for the regular people, who lived outside the square; this one was very simple, though still elegant.



Nowadays, the clock is driven by "weights" which are actually wheels on bicycle-type chains, pulled or lifted daily by electric motors. This was based on a decision not to rely on a temperatore to pull the weights down each day and wind the movement. It is the only part of the 1750's mechanism which has been completely modernized.



I was intrigued and impressed as I followed our guide, not only because it's the kind of thing most of us dream of - living in a tower with a bunch of clockwork - but because so much of the place was designed with beauty and functionality hand-in-hand. I do love the Enlightenment and Victorian eras' penchant for lovely design! Here, for example, is the top floor, before you climb to the rooftop where the bell-ringers stand:


Or this rooftop structure which tops the spiral stairs and keeps them watertight:


I mean, really! Captain Nemo, where are you??

One of the best parts of this tour was being taken out onto the roof to see the high-Rennaissance Moors, who look about double life-size. It was so great to get up close and see the difference in their faces and poses, and understand, finally, not only how the pivot at their waists were so beautifully disguised, but to have the mechanism explained: inside their legs is a rod which turns each of them; if you look at the main clock mechanism (above) you will see a large wheel with notches in it. If you look closely, you may see that there is one notch, followed by two notches, followed by three, and so on: the wheel is actually a great cam, which moves the bell-ringers to ring the appropriate number of times.



There are two of these cams, one on each side of the clock mechanism, to drive the two Moors.

Also, if you notice there is a double cable going up to a small hammer on the edge of the bell. This was put there as part of the 1752 mechanism; at midnight every night, every blow to the bell by the Moors is relived via this little hammer: 132 blows. Whether this is a sort of "rewind" feature, or a "design feature" (or some combination of the two), I have not yet discovered.

I feel so lucky to have found this tour, which I found through an idle inquiry at the Tourist Information office at Piazza San Marco. Since then, I have tried to find the name of the place we bought our tickets, but every online source seems to try to sell them to you at great expense. It was (somewhat) cheaper in person - just enquire, as I did, and they will direct you to the nearby gallery where you can book a spot on a tour (and where there is a wonderful miniature of the tower and its mechanism). You must book it ahead of time, and show up early, as you are taken in a group over to the tower and let in the little door at the bottom (a curiously thrilling moment). When we went, it was a tour of two - my daughter and I had the place to ourselves.

I am hoping to get permission to go up in the clock in the cathedral at Strasbourg on our way through in ten days. Wish me luck!


Links:

Wikipedia, of course, has a bunch of information about the various restorations and attendant controversies.

I read the book Daughter of Venice with my daughter before going to Venice (heh), and it really put us in the mood - and filled in some details about Venetian history. It's about a girl living in 16th century Venice and is full of interesting details about what life was like for women and how families worked to keep their wealth. It describes some aspects of the governmental system of Venice and the kind of wrangling that was always going on. Great book! ...In the Young Adult section, like many good books, but readable by all ages, I think. Unfortunately, though, it doesn't discuss the clock tower in any detail.

Guerilla Clockwork

I don't usually simply pass on things I hear about from other blogs, but this is simply too good to pass up. A friend of mine found it on Crooked Timber:

"For a year from September 2005, under the nose of the Panthéon's unsuspecting security officials, a group of intrepid "illegal restorers" set up a secret workshop and lounge in a cavity under the building's famous dome. Under the supervision of group member Jean-Baptiste Viot, a professional clockmaker, they pieced apart and repaired the antique clock that had been left to rust in the building since the 1960s. Only when their clandestine revamp of the elaborate timepiece had been completed did they reveal themselves....

Klausmann and his crew are connaisseurs of the Parisian underworld. Since the 1990s they have restored crypts, staged readings and plays in monuments at night, and organised rock concerts in quarries. The network was unknown to the authorities until 2004, when the police discovered an underground cinema, complete with bar and restaurant, under the Seine. They have tried to track them down ever since.

But the UX, the name of Untergunther's parent organisation, is a finely tuned organisation. It has around 150 members and is divided into separate groups, which specialise in different activities ranging from getting into buildings after dark to setting up cultural events. Untergunther is the restoration cell of the network."

Sometimes, guerrilla culture is the best kind.

link

Animation About Clockwork Freedom

Check out The Cags, a stop-motion-and-CG animation from Alexei Petrov. Very cool. I love the endless lines they draw, and the sound they make when they touch.

Tycho Brahe, Bibliodyssey, and other Astrological Landmarks

Thanks to BoingBoing, who were featuring something interesting, as usual, I have discovered Bibliodyssey, which, in case you didn't happen to read that particular BoingBoing post, is a blog devoted to "Books -- Illustrations -- Science -- History -- Visual Materia Obscura -- Eclectic Bookart" and is full of amazing Wonder-ful images and sources for that kind of Mobius-think which I associate with my favorite time period.


Looking through the site, which has a lovely side-bar with visual links to previous posts, I came across a reference to Tycho Brahe's Astronomiæ Instauratæ Mechanica, a book originally published in 1598 in an effort to secure more funding after a royal death cut off Brahe's sponsorship. The illustrations show what seem to be enormous, house-sized azimuth quadrants and Christmas-tree sized sextants.

Apparently, Brahe came up with the idea for this long-term project: to make a reliable chart of the heavens, using observations from a fixed point over time. He accomplished this, with the aid of royal patronage, by building a huge observatory on the island of Hven (between Denmark and Sweden). Please note that this was long before the first telescopes, which is why he did his measuring with large, accurate versions of those instruments that ships' captains had been using for many years. Bibliodyssey mentions that this was the "first" of his observatories, and is, unfortunately, long-lost.

This reminds me of the Jantar Mantar Observatory [wiki], which I saw when I was in India, at the palace in Jaipur. It was built in 1734 by Sawai Jai Singh, the first Maharaja of Jaipur, who "...succeeded to the throne of Amber in 1700 at the age of thirteen. Abandoning that capital, he founded the city of Jaipur in 1727. A soldier, ruler, and scholar with a lifelong interest in mathematics and astronomy, Jai Singh built observatories in Delhi, Jaipur, Ujjain, Mathura and Benares. Jai Singh was conversant with contemporary European astronomy through his contacts with the Portugese Viceroy in Goa. He supplied corrections to the astronomical tables of de la Hire, and published his own tables in 1723."
- Quote loaned from Michael D. Gunther's Old Stones website, which has very detailed descriptions of the observatory's workings


Each of the eighteen observation instruments, which are mostly built out of masonry and are simply enormous, are meticulously constructed, with markings for the positions of the known heavens, and truly ingenious ways for people to get inside or to stand far enough above to be able to measure things as accurately as possible. Standing within one of the sundials, for example, manages to take you out of human scale far enough that you begin to get an inkling of the enormity of the heavens.

I can only imagine what that first observatory of Brahe's must have been like. The instruments look impressive, though without people in there to scale them, it's hard to tell if it's quite as stunning as Jai Singh's contribution. Sigh.

My Excellent New Watch

Okay, I don't usually indulge in patting-self-on-the-back, but I'm so excited about my new watch I just had to show it off. I found this on eBay, and it appeals enormously to the clockwork fiend in me (as well as the steampunk/clockpunk/wonder-ous parts of me). I paid 99¢ for it (plus $40 shipping), which I consider a deal, as it was sent to me from China.

It keeps excellent time, as long as I wind it; it is durable, and best of all, I can see it working - tiny gears and springs ticking around. The crystal, front and back, is actually a deep lense, giving it a magnifying effect which is curiously intimate and magical. You feel, on looking into it, that you are peering into a secret world, where delicate parts move and glow, and perhaps an alchemist hovers in the background, waiting for you to look away...



And besides, strangers stop me on the street to look at it - which I would do if I saw someone else wearing it. It is indeed magic.

More on Monday...

Glorious, Magical Orreries

‘Orrery,’ defined:
“...a mechanical device that illustrates the relative positions and motions of the planets and moons in the solar system in heliocentric model. They are typically driven by a large clockwork mechanism with a globe representing the Sun at the center, and with a planet at the end of each of the arms.”
- Wikipedia

Orreries first caught my imagination while reading that fine book, Little, Big, by John Crowley:

”The moon was silver. The sun was gold, or at least gold-plated. Mercury was a mirrored globe - mirrored with mercury, of course. Saturn was heavy enough to be lead...The orrery, brass-bound and oak-cased, was one of those turn-of-the-century scientific instruments that couldn’t have been more solidly rational, material, engineered: a patented universe, made of rods and balls, meshing gears and electroplated springs.

“Then why couldn’t Smoky understand it?

“...[He] had come to understand the basic principle of clockwork, upon which all those ingenuities were based: that a motive force - a falling weight, a wound spring - was prevented by an escapement from expending all its energy at once, and made to pay it out in ticks and tocks...The difficulty, the maddening difficulty, about Edgewood’s orrery was that Smoky couldn’t discover a motive force that made it go around.”

...And of course, nothing is driving it, it just goes on moving, through some magical force, unwinding with the ticks and tocks of the story.

(I thought I was the only one who knew about this book until I read a mention of it by Neil Gaiman once, which made me feel somewhat redeemed. A lovely book, by the way.)

But I digress.


There are still loads of wonderful orreries out there in museums and (probably) very rich people’s homes. The name comes from Charles Boyle, who was the 4th Earl of Orrery, for whom one was made in the early 1700’s.


But - check this out - orreries, or something like them, go back to antiquity. A thing called The Antikythera mechanism ”is believed by many to be an ancient mechanical analog computer (as opposed to most computers today which are digital computers) designed to calculate astronomical positions.”
-Wikipedia
Look at this picture, below - is this deserving to be in the Cabinet, or what?


And by the way, I’m in love with Carlo G. Croce, a retired (or nearly) marine engineer who has a website in Italian and English. Mr. Croce is a clockwork-loving person who went to Greenwich...well, let’s hear it in his words:
“During my last holiday in England I paid a visit to the Greenwich Observatory Museum, where I saw a couple of orreries. Having no camera with me, I tried to fix their design in my mind. Back home I realized I could remember very little about their construction. Wishing to built an orrery my first step was to make a drawing.
I found a visit to the local public library very helpful in finding out what really happens above our heads. After many calculations I was able to fix the number of teeth for each wheels of every train.”

Mr. Croce's creation

Mr. Croce’s website, The Home of Antique Clocks, is a fine example of someone who loves what they do - he has links to pictures and descriptions of each one of his tools, in case you want to go home and make an orrery yourself. But his love is evident in the quality of his constructions, which are truly beautiful. Take a look at the Orrery page, and his wonderful Astrarium - and my favorite, the “wheels cutters” page, where we get to see things through his eyes for a moment.

These are magical devices, in the extreme. I’ve gone on long enough, but if you want to pursue this on your own, here are a few interesting links:

- John Gleave, Orrery Maker: a maker of modern orreries
- Paul Kellar’s orreries, based on James Ferguson's designs (circa 1763), hosted on Sherwood’s Astronomical Supply website.

(Special thanks to the unknown David Wilkinson, of the Fitzwilliam Music Society, Cambridge, for his pics of the Whipple Science Museum, for which I am indebted.

Recommended Book on Clocks

My friend Rhabyt recommended this book: Clocks and Culture: 1300-1700, written by Carlo M. Cipolla, a professor at UC Berkeley. It's a small but comprehensive history, told with enthusiasm. Rhabyt says it's great.

Here's a description:

"How did a time-keeping device affect the growth of crafts guilds and the scientific research that led to the Industrial Revolution? Clocks and Culture is a brief history of the changes wrought by and on Europe over four hundred years due to technological advances in timekeeping and the rise of a time-aware culture."

Can't wait to read it.

Clocks as the Devil

(interior of rare lantern clock c.1700 by Thomas Shilling of Boughton - exterior below)

A brief history of clocks:
(Caution: takes awhile to get to the point, but might be interesting along the way!)

The earliest clocks were water clocks built by the Chinese, and later, the Europeans; but they depended too much on physical geography and the caprices of water supply.


(Town clock in Auxerre, France)
The Rennaissance idea of having a town clock, run by weights, changed the overall time paradigm of people’s lives, in that they moved from a daily time division (ie: sun-up to midday to sun-down) to an hourly one. Suddenly the day was divided into twenty-four little slices.


Now imagine what it meant when clocks came inside the house. Manufactury became more refined and cheaper - became an industry rather than, or as well as, a craft - and suddenly anyone with enough money could keep time in their own house. This was a charming diversion, a conversation piece, but with a side-effect: the twenty-four little slices became thirty-six little slices, and so on, down to the present day with our atomic clocks and those clocks that count hundredths of a second.

And somewhere along the way, someone had the brilliant idea of timing their workers by the clock. Now I ask you, who lives under a greater tyranny of time: those people with the town clock, watching the hours? Or we modern folk, delayed by the natural events of life, and marked as “late” because we arrive two minutes after the mark on the clock claims we should be there?

In the old world, the daily-time one, there was a sense of the world being under constant adjustment. The days got longer, and there was more time to work. The days got shorter, people stayed in their homes and slept, or made things (or made babies). With the clock regulating how we worked, things like night shifts came into being. The world ceased to flow in a natural way. The conversation between nature and the man-made world began to peter out.

So: are clocks the devil? Have they offered us some fruit of knowledge that has turned us out of our easy ignorance? Has consciousness of time taken magic out of the world?

There is an interesting essay based on a talk given by John H. Lienhard on the nature of power (in both senses of the word). Below an interesting discussion of the history of the steam engine, he talks about how for two millenia after the invention of the first self-regulating device, no one took it any further:

“Now consider something about feedback -- about the self-regulation of machines: When we let go of the knob, we relinquish control. For the totalitarian mind that's a very uncomfortable thing to do.”

In light of this, he has some interesting things to say about the invention of the clock:

”The mechanical clock had no feedback features whatsoever. Its accuracy depended entirely on getting everything absolutely right at the start.
The orderly mechanical clock diverted the medieval imagination. Clockwork, with its wheels and gears, became the new metaphor for God's creation. God had ordered the planets just like clockwork, they said. He wound them up and set them in motion.
So the last vestige of self-regulation evaporated. We embraced the concept of clockwork, and by the year 1700 we'd stretched that concept to its limit.”

Thus begin the seeds of what came to be modern scientific thinking: determinist (everything being a matter of cause-and-effect); reductionist (looking at things as much in isolation as possible, disregarding big-picture ideas for those that are provable); and, in the long run, lacking in wonder. Oh, sure, scientists will tell you that the reason they love science is the sense of wonder, the finding out; but for the rest of us, to whom the world is constantly being defined, explained, diagrammed and delineated, there is indeed something lacking.

Look at the way kids amble along, looking at things, ordering the world into their own system, their own cosmology. They are not constrained by time (just watch parents trying to hurry them along to be on time for school or to get in the car for the next errand). They do not have their world defined for them yet.

Perhaps this is why there is such an interest in Steampunk, Clockpunk, and other milieu of that ilk: it gives rein to the imagination, it allows us alternate physics, alternate geographies; it frees us from the constraints of science and the clock’s tyranny.

I, for one, would like to continue to be an explorer of the universe. I would like to bring clocks back to their very best state: that of conversation-piece, automata, a magical example of the marvels of intellect and skill. Onward! Or perhaps, Backward, and then Onward!