pages: unmaskingrobert00houdgoog.pdf, 108
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unmaskingrobert00houdgoog.pdf | 108 | THE WRITING AND DRAWING FIGURE the bill used at the time of its appearance in London, England. When Barnum was in London in 1844, with Gen. Tom Thumb, who was then performing at the Egyptian Hall, he first saw the automatic talking machine and engaged it to strengthen his show. Thirty years later Prof. Faber's nephew was the lecturer who explained to the American public the automaton's mechanism and also the performer who manipulated the machine. Barnum always speaks of the talking automaton as being a life-size figure, but the pictures used for adver- tising purposes show that it was only a head. The fate of both the talking automaton and the writing and drawing figure is shrouded in mystery. If they were in the Barnum Museum when the latter was swept by fire in 1865, they were destroyed. If they had been taken back to Europe, they may now be lying in some cellar or loft, moth-eaten and dust-covered, ignominious end for such ingenious brain-work and handicraft. So much for the claims of Robert-Houdin. Now to disprove them. The earliest record of a writing figure I have found is in the "Dictionary of Arts, Manufactures, and Mines," compiled by Andrew Ure, M.D., and published in New York in 1842 by Le Roy Sunderland, 126 Fulton Street. On page 83, under the heading of "Automaton," is this statement: "Frederick Von Knauss completed a writing machine at Vienna in the year 1760. It is now in the model cabinet of the Polytechnic Institute, and consists of a globe two feet in diameter, containing the mechanism, upon which [ 91 ] |