4.6 • 1.6K Ratings
🗓️ 24 May 2024
⏱️ 14 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
0:00.0 | It's November 1928 in Philadelphia, and a box arrives at the doors of a science museum called the Franklin Institute. |
0:08.0 | It's a donation from the estate of a wealthy local lawyer. |
0:12.0 | And what they find inside is in a pretty sad state. |
0:15.8 | It's a jumble of gears and metal pieces and levers. There's tattered cloth. The whole thing |
0:21.2 | is really damaged, this broken down machine. |
0:25.0 | But the machine has a face, the face of a little boy and little human hands too molded to hold a pen. The people at the Franklin |
0:36.0 | Institute think, what is this thing? Where did it come from? And they fix him up as best as they can. They set up a little pen in his hand and they wind him up. |
0:48.0 | And as if this lifelike figure could hear their questions. |
0:55.1 | It writes very carefully in French, |
0:59.1 | the automaton of Myard Day. |
1:10.0 | I'm Delantheras and this is Atlas Obscura, a celebration of the world's strange, incredible, and wondrous places. |
1:15.0 | Today we are telling you the story of an amazing automaton, a mechanical boy machine |
1:21.0 | made in the days before electronics and computers, it dazzled audiences, but then was lost to history, only to be rediscovered by surprise. |
1:32.0 | That story, after this. Let's begin in 1826. We're at an exhibition hall in London. |
1:56.4 | Nesho is drawn a big crowd. There are ladies in feathered hats holding their little |
2:01.0 | kids hands. There's men in silky top hats. There's army |
2:04.4 | officers carrying swords. And they're all turned towards this little boy. |
2:10.9 | He's kneeling at a writing desk on top of a large ornate chest, jotting down the words of a poem on a page. |
2:18.5 | The crowd leans in eagerly, and the boy pauses. And the head lifts up and the eyelids widen and the eyeballs roll up away from the work and gaze out. |
2:30.0 | You could say it's looking at the audience or he's thinking, you know, looking into his own imagination to think about what he's going to continue writing. |
2:39.0 | This is Andrew Barron. He runs a clock repair shop in Santa Fe, New Mexico. |
2:43.0 | So you might hear some ticking and cuckoo clock sounds while he's talking. |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from SiriusXM Podcasts & Atlas Obscura, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of SiriusXM Podcasts & Atlas Obscura and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2025.