To demonstrate that the Automatic Nanny was safe, Dacey boldly announced that he would entrust his next child to the machine’s care. If he had successfully followed through with this, he might have restored public confidence in the machine, but Dacey never got the chance because of his habit of telling prospective wives of his plans for their offspring. The inventor framed his proposal as an invitation to partake in a grand scientific undertaking and was baffled that none of the women he courted found this an appealing prospect.
After several years of rejection, Dacey gave up on trying to sell the Automatic Nanny to a hostile public. Concluding that society was not sufficiently enlightened to appreciate the benefits of machine-based childcare, he likewise abandoned his plans to build a teaching engine, and resumed his work on pure mathematics. He published papers on number theory and lectured at Cambridge until his death in 1918, during the global influenza pandemic.
The Automatic Nanny might have been completely forgotten were it not for the publication of an article in the London Times in 1925 titled “Mishaps of Science.” It described in derisive terms a number of failed inventions and experiments, including the Automatic Nanny, which it labeled “a monstrous contraption whose inventor surely despised children.” Reginald’s son, Lionel Dacey, who by then had become a mathematician himself and was continuing his father’s work in number theory, was outraged. He wrote a strongly worded letter to the newspaper demanding a retraction, and when it refused, he filed a libel suit against the publisher, which he eventually lost. Undeterred, Lionel Dacey began a campaign to prove that the Automatic Nanny was based on sound and humane child-rearing principles, self-publishing a book about his father’s theories on raising rational children.
Lionel Dacey refurbished the Automatic Nannies that had been in storage on the family estate, and in 1927 offered them for commercial sale again, but was unable to find a single buyer. He blamed this on the British upper class’s obsession with status; because household appliances were now being marketed to the middle class as “electric servants,” he claimed upper-class families insisted on hiring human nannies for appearance’s sake, whether they provided better care or not. Those who worked with Lionel Dacey blamed it on his refusal to update the Automatic Nanny in any way; he ignored one business adviser’s recommendation to replace the machine’s spring-driven mechanism with an electric motor and fired another who suggested marketing it without the Dacey name.
Like his father, Lionel Dacey eventually decided to raise his own child with the Automatic Nanny, but rather than look for a willing bride, he announced in 1932 that he would adopt an infant. He did not offer any updates in the following years, prompting a gossip columnist to suggest that the child had died at the machine’s hands, but by then there was so little interest in the Automatic Nanny that no one ever bothered to investigate.
The truth regarding the infant would never have come to light if not for the work of Dr. Thackery Lambshead. In 1938 Lambshead was consulting at the Brighton Institute of Mental Subnormality (now known as Bayliss House) when he encountered a child named Edmund Dacey. According to admission records, Edmund had been successfully raised using an Automatic Nanny until the child was two years old, the age at which Lionel Dacey felt it appropriate to switch him to human care. He found that Edmund was unresponsive to his commands, and shortly afterward a physician diagnosed the child as “feebleminded.” Judging such a child an unsuitable subject for demonstrating the Nanny’s efficacy, Lionel Dacey committed Edmund to the Brighton Institute.
What prompted the institute’s staff to seek Lambshead’s opinion was Edmund’s diminutive stature: although he was five, his height and weight were those of the average three-year-old. The children at the Brighton Institute were generally taller and healthier than those at similar asylums, a reflection of the fact that the institute’s staff did not follow the still-common practice of minimal interaction with the children. In providing affection and physical contact to their charges, the nurses were preventing the condition now known as psychosocial dwarfism, in which emotional stress reduces a child’s levels of growth hormones and which was prevalent in orphanages at the time.
The nurses quite reasonably assumed that Edmund Dacey’s delayed growth was the result of substituting the Automatic Nanny’s mechanical care for actual human touch and expected him to gain weight under their care. But after two years as a resident at the institute, during which the nurses had showered attention on him, Edmund had scarcely grown at all, prompting the staff to look for an underlying physiological cause.
Lambshead hypothesized that the child was indeed suffering from psychosocial dwarfism but of a uniquely inverted variety: what Edmund needed was not more contact with a person, but more contact with a machine. His small size was not the result of the years he spent under the care of the Automatic Nanny; it was the result of being deprived of the Automatic Nanny after his father felt he was ready for human care. If this theory was correct, restoring the machine would cause the boy to resume normal growth.
Lambshead sought out Lionel Dacey to acquire an Automatic Nanny. He gave an account of the visit in a monograph written many years later:
[Lionel Dacey] spoke of his plans to repeat the experiment with another child as soon as he could ensure that the child’s mother was of suitable stock. His feeling was that the experiment with Edmund had failed only because of the boy’s “native imbecility,” which he blamed on the child’s mother. I asked him what he knew of the child’s parents, and he answered, rather too forcefully, that he knew nothing. Later on I visited the orphanage from which Lionel Dacey had adopted Edmund, and learned from their records that the child’s mother was a woman named Eleanor Hardy, who previously worked as a maid for Lionel Dacey. It was obvious to me that Edmund is in fact Lionel Dacey’s own illegitimate son.
Lionel Dacey was unwilling to donate an Automatic Nanny to what he considered a failed experiment, but he agreed to sell one to Lambshead, who then arranged to have it installed in Edmund’s room at the Brighton Institute. The child embraced the machine as soon as he saw it, and in the days that followed he would play happily with toys as long as the Nanny was nearby. Over the next few months the nurses recorded a steady increase in his height and weight, confirming Lambshead’s diagnosis.
The staff assumed that Edmund’s cognitive delays were congenital in nature and was content as long as he was thriving physically and emotionally. Lambshead, however, wondered if the consequences of the child’s bond with a machine might be more far ranging than anyone suspected. He speculated that Edmund had been misdiagnosed as feebleminded simply because he paid no attention to human instructors and that he might respond better to a mechanical instructor. Unfortunately he had no way to test this hypothesis; even if Reginald Dacey had successfully completed his teaching engine, it would not have provided the type of instruction that Edmund required.
It was not until 1946 that technology advanced to the necessary level. As a result of his lectures on radiation sickness, Lambshead had a good relationship with scientists working at Chicago’s Argonne National Laboratory and was present at a demonstration of the first remote manipulators, mechanical arms designed for the handling of radioactive materials. He immediately recognized their potential for Edmund’s education and was able to acquire a pair for the Brighton Institute.