The Automaton's Secret
by Gregg Chadwick Henri Maillardet's Automaton at The Franklin Institute In November 1928, the fire scarred remains of a mechanical boy were dropped off at The Franklin Institute in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Left in pieces, it took months of painstaking work to reassemble the automaton. Little was known about the history of this extraordinary object. Like the automaton in Brian Selznick's magical, graphic novel The Invention of Hugo Cabret and Martin Scorsese's wonderful film adaptation of the book now simply entitled Hugo , the machine itself provided the clue to its origins. When the complicated cogs and mechanisms were repaired and the machine was rewound for the first time in decades, the automaton's hand began to draw. Remarkably the machine's mechanical memory, held four drawings and three poems (illustrated below). One of the poems finished with a signature in French, "Ecrit par l'Automate de Maillardet." The mechanic...