As you may or may not know, recently in class we have been working on a project called metaphor machines. For this project, each group was given a different revolution to study. Our group studied the Haitian revolution. We spent some time researching our revolutions, and once we were familiar with our revolution, we started to plan out our machine. The type of machine that we all created, was a Rube Goldberg machine. Our machine also had to have a steampunk ascetic, to tie it into the book that we read, called Leviathan.

We split up our revolution into six main events to represent in our machine. After that, we created metaphors for each of the six stages. We then planned it out, and started to build.

Before we started making our machines, we studied Crane Brinton’s theory about the four stages of a revolution.

Once we finished our machine, we made a video, about our machine, and our revolution.

The Haitian revolution

Stage one
This revolution started because the slaves were being mistreated. Not only did they work in the blazing heat for long hours without many breaks, but they were often whipped and beat by their owners. After years of mistreatment, they eventually realized that they could fight back. Once this was realized, word spread quickly among the slaves, and eventually thousands of slaves attended a ceremony, and planned an uprising. Later that night they killed masters, and plunged the state into war. Within the next ten days, the slaves had gained control of the northern province. Just one month into the war, over 100,000 slaved joined the fight.

Stage two
In 1793 approximately 600 British soldiers invaded Santo Domingo in an attempt to prevent the slaves’ revolt. Eventually, on January 1st 1804, the British surrendered, and Dessalines proclaimed Saint Domingue to be the second independent state of the Americas, under the name of Haiti.

Stage three
Slavery in all french colonies was put to an abrupt end in 1794 by the government in an attempt to prevent military disaster. At this time, black men were given civil and political rights.

Stage four
The war of knives lasted from June of 1799 to 1800, between Toussaint Louverture (the leader of the Haitian revolution) and André Rigaud (a free coloured person of mixed race who controlled the south.) they fought for control of Saint Domingue during the war. Eventually Toussaint won, and took control of Saint Domingue, resulting in André Rigaud fleeing the country.

Stage five
Toussaint was the leader of the slave rebellion in 1791. Throughout his years in power he worked to improve the economy and security of Saint Domingue. He restored the plantation system, this time paying the workers. He negotiated trade treaties with the UK and the US and maintained a large army.

Stage six
On 1 January 1804 Dessalines proclaimed the colony of Saint-Domingue to be the second independent state in the Americas, under the name of Haiti

Creating the machine

Before we started building, we planned out our machine on sketches pro  so we knew what supplies we needed in order to build our machine. Once we finished the blueprint on our iPads, we got a piece of paper to do a full sized sketch. After our full sized sketch was done, we got to start working on our machine. First we spray painted our board with a faulty can of spray paint, to give it a steampunk ascetic. Then we started to build, going in order according to our blueprint. We ran into many many problems when we were creating our machine. Most of the problems we had were involving the circuits or the tracks. Almost everything on our machine broke at least once (not including the deconstruction). We also had the most crowded board out of all of the groups. Everything on our machine worked separately, but we couldn’t get our machine to do a full run through.

Scimathics

This project was about 50/50 between humanities and scimathics. In humanities we learned about the revolutions, and Crane Brinton’s theory, and in scimathics we learned about circuits, and we built the machine. When we were in scimathics we mainly worked on our machines, but before we started building we had multiple labs to learn about series and parallel circuits. We were also taught the symbols for different things in circuits (like batteries, wires, switches, etc) so we could properly draw circuit diagrams on our rough sketch, full sized sketch, and final blueprint.

Group work

Most of my group worked really well together. We all had different strengths, so that worked well. We had some struggles with work distribution at the beginning of the project, but once we got further along with the project the work became more evenly distributed. At the start of the project I was doing more work in humanities, and less work in science, but as I’ve already said, it didn’t stay like that for long.
My group:
Luca
Logan
Daniel

What I would do differently next time

The first thing that comes to my mind is the machine itself. The design of the machine was very flawed, especially the three tracks at the start. The timing didn’t work out at all how we planned it, so I would definitely put more thought into the machine before actually starting to construct it. The other thing I would’ve done differently, is I would’ve tried to get the rest of my group to do more work at the beginning of the project.

The video