It's November 1928 in Philadelphia, and a box arrives at the doors of a science museum called the Franklin Institute.

It's a donation from the estate of a wealthy local lawyer.

And what they find inside is in a pretty sad state.

It's a jumble of gears and metal pieces and levers. There's tattered cloth. The whole thing

is really damaged, this broken down machine.

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

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.

And as if this lifelike figure could hear their questions.

It writes very carefully in French,

the automaton of Myard Day.

I'm Delantheras and this is Atlas Obscura, a celebration of the world's strange, incredible, and wondrous places.

Today we are telling you the story of an amazing automaton, a mechanical boy machine

made in the days before electronics and computers, it dazzled audiences, but then was lost to history, only to be rediscovered by surprise.

That story, after this. Let's begin in 1826. We're at an exhibition hall in London.

Nesho is drawn a big crowd. There are ladies in feathered hats holding their little

kids hands. There's men in silky top hats. There's army

officers carrying swords. And they're all turned towards this little boy.

He's kneeling at a writing desk on top of a large ornate chest, jotting down the words of a poem on a page.

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.

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.

This is Andrew Barron. He runs a clock repair shop in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

So you might hear some ticking and cuckoo clock sounds while he's talking.

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