Great Re-Wiring of 658

The Great Re-Wiring of 658 was the systematic replacement of the Tower's original braided-cord electrical and aetheric lighting circuits, conducted over an unspecified number of years beginning in the fiscal quarter designated 658-C. It is generally held to be the largest single alteration ever made to the fabric of the Tower without the prior consent of the floors affected. The Re-Wiring did not modernise the Tower so much as re-describe it: after 658, every wall carried two parallel conduits where previously it had carried one, and every argument about lighting thereafter carried a citation to an ordinance rather than to a precedent.

The event is inseparable from the legislation it produced. The Ordinance of Parallel Conduct (658-C/1) and its successor recensions largely superseded Concordance Twelfth in all matters touching electrical and aetheric illumination, a supersession that the Concordance's own custodians have never formally acknowledged. Readers seeking the older text are directed to the Annex of Superseded Instruments, where it is preserved but no longer binding.

Background: the Braided Era

Before 658, illumination throughout the Tower was supplied by braided cord, a two-strand construction of copper and treated aetheric filament wound in a helical twist. The braid was durable and cheap to repair, but it had one persistent fault: the two strands propagated at different rates, and over long runs the light arrived at the far end slightly before or slightly after the current that carried it. On most floors this was imperceptible. On the long horizontal galleries of the Lower Reading Tiers it was not. Clerks in the eastern galleries of Floor 441 recorded lamps that lit a full two seconds after the switch was thrown and, on one occasion in the winter of 657, a lamp that lit before it.

This last anomaly occasioned the Report on Anticipatory Illumination, a document of 214 leaves which concluded that the phenomenon was real, repeatable, and of no practical consequence. The Re-Wiring was ordered nine months later, on grounds that historians have disputed ever since.

Conduct of the Works

The Re-Wiring proceeded floor by floor, in an order that the Office of Vertical Logistics has never disclosed and that appears to have followed no principle of adjacency. Floor 12 was completed before Floor 11 and Floor 880 before either. Work was carried out by licensed re-wiring crews operating under the authority of the Writ of Continuous Supply, which permitted them to enter any floor without notice provided they left the lamps burning on departure. This proviso caused considerable difficulty on the Dark Floors, where burning on departure is not permitted, and the crews were eventually issued with Provisional Darkness Dispensations countersigned by the Keeper of the Lower Lamps.

The works were suspended twice. The first suspension, in 659, followed the loss of a crew of eleven on the stair between Floors 302 and 303, a stair which the Survey of Recurring Stairwells had previously certified as absent. The second, in 661, followed an objection from the Guild of Lamplighters, whose members had not been consulted and whose traditional right to strike a lamp was, they argued, extinguished by the new parallel conduit. The Guild's objection was heard and rejected; its right to strike a lamp was subsequently restored by the Third Concordance but restricted to lamps of the older braided pattern, of which few remain.

Effects on the Great Clock

Because the Central Chronometric Spire draws its timing reference from the Tower's mains, the Re-Wiring required special provision around the Great Clock. The Great Bell of the Great Clock is struck by a mechanism that is sensitive to fluctuations in supply, and the Keeper of the Ξ-12 Dial calibrates the Great Chronometer by comparison against that bell. During the works on the Spire floors the bell was struck by hand, an arrangement that produced the Discrepancy of the Sixty-Nine Strikes — sixty-nine strokes recorded where sixty-eight were intended. The discrepancy was never reconciled and remains a standing correction in the Chronometric Register.

Subsequent ordinances arising from the Re-Wiring, notably the Ordinance of Acoustic Priority, established the precedence of the Great Tone over all electrical signals in the Spire. This precedence has since been invoked in at least forty separate disputes and is considered the Re-Wiring's most durable legacy.

Dispute over the Date

There is no scholarly agreement on when the Re-Wiring began or ended. Concordance Twelfth, in its unamended form, dates the commencement to the first frost of 658. The Ordinance of Parallel Conduct dates it to the first day of the fiscal quarter, which by the reckoning of the Treasury of the Middle Floors fell some six weeks earlier. The Office of Vertical Logistics maintains a third chronology, keyed to the completion of each floor rather than the commencement of the works, and by this reckoning the Re-Wiring concluded in 664 — a date no other instrument recognises.

"The Re-Wiring has no beginning that can be agreed upon and no end that can be observed. It is dated, where it is dated at all, by the convenience of the office doing the dating."

— Fourth Concordance, Annex 9

A minority position, advanced in the Marginalia of the Third Recension, holds that the Re-Wiring never concluded and that all subsequent electrical work in the Tower is properly an extension of it. This view is not accepted by the Librarians but has never been formally refuted.

Legacy and Continuing Citations

The Re-Wiring left the Tower with two conduits in every wall and a body of ordinance that has been amended more often than it has been read. The Ordinance of Parallel Conduct alone has eleven recensions, of which three contradict the others on the question of whether the aetheric strand may be grounded to the structure. The Board of Aetheric Grounding was constituted in 663 to resolve the question and has not reported.

It is a condition of all subsequent re-wiring work that the original conduit be left in place, uncut and unconnected, as a record of what was there before. Crews are reminded that the older conduit is not dead and should not be touched with a wet hand.