Language of the Machine

The one-hour midday meal was served in the institute's ground-floor canteen.

The room smelled of hot pea soup, boiled cabbage, and fresh rye bread, with long trestle tables laid out beneath whitewashed brick arches.

Eleanor had insisted on the canteen. Ernest had originally calculated that thirty minutes was sufficient for a worker to consume cold bread from a tin box, but Eleanor had vetoed the schedule over the dinner table at Oriel with a single, unyielding look.

"If you treat them like boiler stokers, Ernest, they will learn like boiler stokers," she had told him. "A craftsman needs a hot meal, a clean bench, and forty minutes to talk about what he just saw."

She had been right.

At first, the men sat strictly by trade: the wheelwrights at the north window, the coach carpenters near the stove, and the stable mechanics clustered together by the door.

By the end of the hour, however, the table lines had blurred.