The Eureka
The Eureka, also known as the Latin Verse Machine, is a 19th century invention that mechanically generated Latin hexameter. It was built from 1830 to 1845 by a grocer and printing shop worker named John Clark, who then exhibited his invention in the Egyptian Hall in London. For an admission price of one shilling, visitors could watch the "small bureau bookcase" produce a new verse of English hexameter in about a minute. The Eureka played God Save the King while running, and went silent when the verse was complete. Output from the machine included horrida sponsa reis promittunt tempora densa and sontia tela bonis causabunt agmina crebra.
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 meaningful.| Word 1 | Word 2 | Word 3 | Word 4 | Word 5 | Word 6 |
| dactyl | trochee | iamb | molossus | dactyl | trochee |
| adjective, neuter plural nominative | noun, neuter plural nominative | adverb | verb, third person plural | noun, neuter plural accusative | adjective, neuter plural accusative |
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.
Reception
At the time, the Latin Verse Machine was viewed as a curiosity. A writer in the Athenæum wrote, "I do not see its immediate utility; but, as something curious, it is, perhaps, entitled to take its place with Babbage's Calculating Machine, and inventions of that class."In the 2020s, the machine has been discussed as a precursor to electronic literature, and in particular as an early example of computer-generated poetry.