Children examine the Automaton during a visit to The Franklin Institute.

About 5 years ago I brought home a curious book called The Invention of Hugo Cabret by Brian Selznick.  Both of my sons had been avid readers and lovers of detailed illustrations since childhood and books like The Eleventh Hour by Graeme Base had been favorites for as long as I could remember, so the elaborate charcoal drawings and almost graphic novel design in this new book were intriguing.

The most fascinating moment came with poking around the history behind the story itself.  Although placed within a work of fiction, both Georges Méliès and automatons are quite real. The Franklin Institute of Science and Technology has one in their collection with a history similar to the one in Selznick’s book:

In November of 1928, a truck pulled up to The Franklin Institute science museum in Philadelphia and unloaded the pieces of an interesting, complex, but totally ruined brass machine. Donated by the estate of John Penn Brock, a wealthy Philadelphian, the machine was studied and the museum began to realize the treasure it had been given.

This Automaton, known as the “Draughtsman-Writer” was built by Henri Maillardet, a Swiss mechanician of the 18th century who worked in London producing clocks and other mechanisms. It is believed that Maillardet built this extraordinary Automaton around 1800 and it has the largest “memory” of any such machine ever constructed—four drawings and three poems (two in French and one in English).

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The 1700s onward saw an explosion of mechanical inventions, from ever elaborate clockworks, to music boxes and player pianos.  People were especially fascinated by those that imitated living creatures, songbirds in cages, dancing figures and the like.  Automatons were a perfect example, and pieces such as Maillardet’s toured the cities and courts of Europe astonishing commoners and kings alike.

Franklin Institute researchers believe this particular automaton was purchased by P.T. Barnum, who brought it to the United States, but the history of how it came into the Brock family’s possession is unclear.  Despite the lack of detail of its provenance, the extraordinary fact remains that since its donation in the late 1920s several incredibly talented Franklin Institute staff have restored it to working order without guidance from blueprints or designer’s notes.

One has to marvel at that achievement almost as much as the invention itself is marvelous… even in the computer age when the astonishing seems to happen daily.