In November of 1928, a truck pulled up to The Franklin Institute in Philadelphia and unloaded the pieces of an interesting, complex, but totally ruined brass machine. The family who donated it kept it for many years because they understood that it had once been able to write and draw pictures. The machine, however, had been in a fire and needed significant work. After careful study and restoration by staff, the Franklin Institute began to realize the treasure it had been given...When they donated the Automaton to the Franklin Institute, the descendants of John Penn Brock knew it had been ruined in a fire and hadn't run for years. The Brock family's understanding was that the machine was made by a French inventor named Maelzel, and that it had been acquired in France. An Institute machinist began tinkering with the Automaton and eventually had it functioning.
When the repairs were completed and the driving motors were set in motion, the Automaton came to life. It lowered its head, positioned its pen, and began to produce elaborate sketches. Four drawings and three poems later, in the border surrounding the final poem, the Automaton clearly wrote, "Ecrit par L'Automate de Maillardet." This translates to "Written by the Automaton of Maillardet." Amazingly, the first clue of the true history and identity of the machine had come from its own mechanical memory!
A young child whom zeal guides,
Of your favors solicits the price,
And obtains, don't be surprised,
The gift of pleasing you, a child to these wonders.
Henri Maillardet was indeed a Swiss mechanician of the 18th century who worked in London producing clocks and other mechanisms. He spent a period of time in the shops of Pierre Jaquet-Droz, who was in the business of producing automata that could write and draw. It is believed that Maillardet built this Automaton around 1800. He made only one other Automaton that could write; it wrote in Chinese and was made for the Emperor of China as a gift from King George III of England.
The Franklin Institute's Automaton has the largest "memory" of any such machine ever constructed—four drawings and three poems (two in French and one in English). Maillardet achieved this by placing the driving machinery in a large chest that forms the base of the machine, rather than in the Automaton's body.
