In 1921, Cranks and Steam was published to widespread acclaim, much to Lauritz’s dismay. Inside, the Auble was touted as a turn-of-the-century marvel of steam engineering and a bizarre breakthrough in firearms design. Yet the work was not quite a celebration of Auble ingenuity. The Auble gun was the steam, but the Auble men were the cranks. And there, on page 201, was an interview with James Tasker about his “profound vision” for the next-generation Battle Carriage, along with a smug quote about the Auble gun.
Humiliated by the book, Lauritz withdrew from society.
It was in the earliest weeks of 1922, when Lauritz Auble was dwelling alone in his tiny flat, quietly withering away, that a young Thackery T. Lambshead came calling. He wanted to buy the last remaining Auble gun—the gun he had marveled at so many years before from the stands of the Fafnerd Cousins Circus—and install it in his burgeoning collection of antiquities and curios. Lambshead was offering the Aubles some measure of recognition for the marvelous thing they’d created, ridiculous and grand.
“It’s a grand and curious thing, that gun,” Lambshead supposedly told Lauritz. “It’s the gun that war didn’t want.” Lambshead reportedly spent the day with Lauritz, hearing tales of Franz Auble and Daisy and of Lauritz’s time with the circus. They drank port and smoked cigars. “Your gun might not have shot anyone, but its report echoed in imaginations from the California coast to the uttermost edge of Europe,” Lambshead recalls telling Lauritz. “That’s quite a difficult shot to make.”
Of Lauritz’s reply, there is no record.
Dacey’s Patent Automatic Nanny
Documented by Ted Chiang
From the catalog accompanying the exhibition “Little Defective Adults—Attitudes Toward Children from 1700 to 1950”; National Museum of Psychology, Akron, Ohio
The Automatic Nanny was the creation of Reginald Dacey, a mathematician born in London in 1861. Dacey’s original interest was in building a teaching engine; inspired by the recent advances in gramophone technology, he sought to convert the arithmetic mill of Charles Babbage’s proposed Analytical Engine into a machine capable of teaching grammar and arithmetic by rote. Dacey envisioned it not as a replacement for human instruction, but as a labor-saving device to be used by schoolteachers and governesses.
For years, Dacey worked diligently on his teaching engine, and even the death of his wife, Emily, in childbirth in 1894 did little to slow his efforts.
What changed the direction of his research was his discovery, several years later, of how his son, Lionel, was being treated by the nanny, a woman known as Nanny Gibson. Dacey himself had been raised by an affectionate nanny, and for years assumed that the woman he’d hired was treating his son in the same way, occasionally reminding her not to be too lenient. He was shocked to learn that Nanny Gibson routinely beat the boy and administered Gregory’s Powder (a potent and vile-tasting laxative) as punishment. Realizing that his son actually lived in terror of the woman, Dacey immediately fired her. He carefully interviewed several prospective nannies afterwards, and was surprised to learn of the vast range in their approaches to child-rearing. Some nannies showered their charges with affection, while others applied disciplinary measures worse than Nanny Gibson’s.
Dacey eventually hired a replacement nanny, but regularly had her bring Lionel to his workshop so he could keep her under close supervision. This must have seemed like paradise to the child, who demonstrated nothing but obedience in Dacey’s presence; the discrepancy between Nanny Gibson’s accounts of his son’s behavior and his own observations prompted Dacey to begin an investigation into optimal child-rearing practices. Given his mathematical inclination, he viewed a child’s emotional state as an example of a system in unstable equilibrium. His notebooks from the period include the following: “Indulgence leads to misbehavior, which angers the nanny and prompts her to deliver punishment more severe than is warranted. The nanny then feels regret, and subsequently overcompensates with further indulgence. It is an inverted pendulum, prone to oscillations of ever-increasing magnitude. If we can only keep the pendulum vertical, there is no need for subsequent correction.”
Dacey’s Patent Automatic Nanny in stand-by mode. In active mode, the arms meet so that the Automatic Nanny can rock the baby to sleep without the need for a cradle or even a blanket.
Dacey tried imparting his philosophy of child-rearing to a series of nannies for Lionel, only to have each report that the child was not obeying her. It appears not to have occurred to him that Lionel might behave differently with the nannies than with Dacey himself; instead, he concluded that the nannies were too temperamental to follow his guidelines. In one respect, he concurred with the conventional wisdom of the time, which held that women’s emotional nature made them unsuitable parents; where he differed was in thinking that too much punishment could be just as detrimental as too much affection. Eventually, he decided that the only nanny that could adhere to the procedures he outlined would be one he built himself.
In letters to colleagues, Dacey offered multiple reasons for turning his attention to a mechanical nursemaid. First, such a machine would be radically easier to construct than a teaching engine, and selling them offered a way to raise the funds needed to perfect the latter. Second, he saw it as an opportunity for early intervention: by putting children in the care of machines while they were still infants, he could ensure they didn’t acquire bad habits that would have to be broken later. “Children are not born sinful, but become so because of the influence of those whose care we have placed them in,” he wrote. “Rational child-rearing will lead to rational children.”
It is indicative of the Victorian attitude toward children that at no point does Dacey suggest that children should be raised by their parents. Of his own participation in Lionel’s upbringing, he wrote, “I realize that my presence entails risk of the very dangers I wish to avoid, for while I am more rational than any woman, I am not immune to the boy’s expressions of delight or dejection. But progress can only occur one step at a time, and even if it is too late for Lionel to fully reap the benefits of my work, he understands its importance. Perfecting this machine means other parents will be able to raise their children in a more rational environment than I was able to provide for my own.”
For the manufacture of the Automatic Nanny, Dacey contracted with Thomas Bradford & Co., maker of sewing and laundry machines. The majority of the Nanny’s torso was occupied by a spring-driven clockwork mechanism that controlled the feeding and rocking schedule. Most of the time, the arms formed a cradle for rocking the baby. At specified intervals, the machine would raise the baby into feeding position and expose an India-rubber nipple connected to a reservoir of infant formula. In addition to the crank handle for winding the mainspring, the Nanny had a smaller crank for powering the gramophone player used to play lullabies; the gramophone had to be unusually small to fit within the Nanny’s head, and only custom-stamped discs could be played on it. There was also a foot pedal near the Nanny’s base used for pressurizing the waste pump, which provided suction for the pair of hoses leading from the baby’s rubber diaper to a chamber pot.
The Automatic Nanny went on sale in March 1901, with an advertisement appearing in the Illustrated London News (shown on the next page).