Abandoning his flirtation with trained animals, Lauritz devised new “human quadrapod” braces for would-be shooters. Each brace was bound to the shooter’s shoulder and upper arm, affixed to a long, crutch-like leg extending down to a rubber foot. This gave the shooter two additional points of contact with the ground—one spar from each elbow—thereby stabilizing the shooter and the gun. This refined design is what Lauritz Auble took to the U.S. Army and Navy for demonstrations in the winter of 1885.
It did not fare well.
According to one military observer, the demonstration shooter “moved about like a newborn calf with a Gatling gun on its back; unsteady and uncertain. . . .” The Navy passed on the gun altogether. The Army ordered one revised Auble gun, but canceled their order within the week. Demonstrations for the British Army, the Canadian Army, and a small band of fanatical freemasons fared no better.
Seemingly, Lauritz was out of options. The unwanted gun had become a mechanical albatross, one that could counterintuitively kill with the slightest mis-shrug, yet could scarcely hit a target.
“My father wouldn’t quit if he were here,” Lauritz wrote in his diary. “In all the hours I spent watching him in his workshops, no lessons were more clear than these: That my father loved me and that he would not abandon his work for anything short of death.
“Neither shall I.”
The Repurposing of the Gun for Entertainment
However, unnoticed by Lauritz, something positive was happening at his demonstrations—something that caught the attention of entrepreneur Luther Fafnerd: crowds of civilians were coming out to see the Auble gun in action.
By 1885, Luther Fafnerd was known for two things: his famed, contest-winning mustache, and the traveling circus shows he produced with his cousin, Thaddeus. Luther Fafnerd visited Lauritz Auble in January of 1886 at the Auble townhouse in Boston, and, over brandy and cigars, devised a new function for the Auble gun (and for Lauritz Auble).
As reported by the local paper, Fafnerd famously said after the meeting, “I know spectacle, and what Lauritz Auble has there is spectacular. Bring your eyeballs, ladies and gentlemen, and your earplugs—we have a new attraction!”
Lauritz tapped into his experiences pitching the Auble gun to military men to transform himself from businessman to showman. He traveled Europe and America with the next-generation Auble gun on his shoulder, demonstrating the weapon’s incredible power and phenomenal noise for audiences from San Francisco to Prague. He wore a top hat and tuxedo and touted the Auble as a gentleman’s engine of war.
Lauritz eroded dummy armies with a withering barrage of lead. Children marveled. Lauritz blasted plaster bunkers to bits. Crowds applauded.
While visitors were cheering, Lauritz was going deaf, like his father. So he incorporated that into the act. Cries of “Wot wot wot Lauritz?!” greeted him every time he ascended the stage.
Encouraged beyond his wildest dreams, and desperate to keep his audience—which he saw as “vindication of my father’s work”—Lauritz devised increasingly theatrical shows, casting himself as a dramatic star and his Auble gun as a variety of famous weapons. He drew the gun from a papier-mâché stone and became King Arthur. Then he shot the stone to pieces and slew a dozen mannequin Mordreds. He strode across a rocky field, perched atop an elephant with an Auble on his shoulder, and became Hannibal blasting cardboard centurions apart with a steam hiss and a rattling thrum.
“People demand not just a performance,” Luther Fafnerd once said, “but heroics!” Lauritz imagined that he was delivering just that.
His plans grew out of control. He devised a fifty-man stunt show called The Battle of the Nile that would pit Auble-armed stuntmen in boats maneuvering and firing blanks at each other off the Chicago lakeshore, but the Fafnerds refused to pay for it. They had something else in mind.
American “automotive inventor” James Tasker had come to the Fafnerds with a new contraption—the Tasker Battle Carriage—and a simple sketch for a show: pit the rumbling Battle Carriage against lifelike animals preserved with rudimentary taxidermy.
Best of all, for outlandish sums, private citizens brought in by one of the Fafnerds’ circus trains could ride the Battle Carriage and hunt animals loosed from pens into Tasker’s private ranch for the occasion. Tasker had effectively found a way to monetize the testing process for his new weapon-wagon. As Tasker wrote the Fafnerds in 1908: “Auble provides a weapon you want to see—I provide a weapon that spectators actually wish they could fire first-hand. For a few, we make that wish come true!”
Thaddeus Fafnerd signed the deal with Tasker in the summer of 1908 without telling Lauritz. Soon after, Lauritz was out of a job.
The Auble gun had failed as a weapon of war and had gone out in a hail of glory as a novelty. What could the future possibly hold? “Perhaps a joke, perhaps a curious footnote,” Lauritz is said to have muttered on more than one occasion.
The Aftermath and Dying Fall of the Auble Gun
In the years that followed, Lauritz gradually faded from the spotlight, even for weapons enthusiasts. Young weapons designers tended to associate the Auble gun with sideshows, and thus any of his attempts to serve as a consultant failed.
Immediately following his circus departure, Lauritz started to woo Daisy Fafnerd, the forty-year-old widowed daughter of Thaddeus the ringmaster. Thaddeus, an ordained minister and never one to let business come before love, married them the same summer that the Auble shows were finally canceled: 1908. The new couple traveled with the Fafnerd Cousins Circus for years afterward, managing performances and arranging venues.
Just shy of fifty specimens of the Auble gun, in various makes and models, were put into storage in a Fafnerd Cousins warehouse in Nebraska—only to be destroyed in a tornado in 1912. One local headline read, “Circus Warehouse Destroyed, Nothing Valuable Lost, Show Must Go On.” The field around the warehouse was littered with top hats, clown shoes, and bent Auble barrels. Clown makeup smeared the grass for years. Only one working Auble gun, a model used during the early circus days and kept in Lauritz Auble’s Boston townhouse, now remained intact.
As the Fafnerd cousins grew older, they sold off their circus piece by piece and retired. Lauritz and Daisy lived for a few years off their savings, but the Auble family fortune was gone—spent on Auble guns—and their circus money was rapidly dwindling. They sold the Boston townhouse and moved into an apartment, with, according to Birch, “a third of the space given over to half-finished inventions.”
The Tasker Battle Carriage in action, re-created by Sam Van Olffen from period newspaper descriptions for use in one of his interminable performance art productions.
After the Great War exploded in Europe, Lauritz donated his time to the stateside war effort, assembling and testing weapons for the U.S. Army until peace came in 1918. That same year, Laurtiz was diagnosed with Brandywine syndrome, inherited from his father. Daisy passed away from a bout of pneumonia the following year.
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 g
rand 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).
It is worth noting that, rather than promoting the raising of rational children, the advertising preys on parents’ fears of untrustworthy nursemaids. This may have just been shrewd marketing on the part of Dacey’s partners at Thomas Bradford & Co., but some historians think it reveals Dacey’s actual motives for developing the Automatic Nanny. While Dacey always described his proposed teaching engine as an assistive tool for governesses, he positioned the Automatic Nanny as a complete replacement for a human nanny. Given that nannies came from the working class, while governesses typically came from the upper class, this suggests an unconscious class prejudice on Dacey’s part.
Whatever the reasons for its appeal, the Automatic Nanny enjoyed a brief period of popularity, with over 150 being sold within six months. Dacey maintained that the families that used the Automatic Nanny were entirely satisfied with the quality of care provided by the machine, although there is no way to verify this; the testimonials used in the advertisements were likely invented, as was customary at the time.
What is known for certain is that in September 1901, an infant named Nigel Hawthorne was fatally thrown from an Automatic Nanny when its mainspring snapped. Word of the child’s death spread quickly, and Dacey was faced with a deluge of families returning their Automatic Nannies. He examined the Hawthornes’ Nanny, and discovered that the mechanism had been tampered with in an attempt to enable the machine to operate longer before needing to be rewound. He published a full-page ad, in which—while trying not to blame the Hawthorne parents—he insisted that the Automatic Nanny was entirely safe if operated properly, but his efforts were in vain. No one would entrust their child to the care of Dacey’s machine.
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 child care, 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 they 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 advisor’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.
The Thackery T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities Page 5