Hi Steve and thanks for your comment. I would LOVE to see a high-res scan of that automaton drawing, and to the best of your recollection, the year it was made, if not the month and year. The report that you can download from my Hugo-Automaton site has some of my esoteric ideas and conjecture.
I'd like to compare details of the automaton's drawings at different times in history, as a way to catalog wear and tear on its memory cams. Your automaton drawing, and when it was made, is a snapshot of the condition of the automaton at the moment the drawing was made. Your drawing's details could reveal (by comparison to recent drawings), anything from almost imperceptible degradation in the recent output, to outright corruptions of the drawn lines including dropouts or slashes. I have printouts of drawings from the automaton going back to 1802, which give an ideal picture of what the drawings looked like when the machine was nearly new, and some from the 1930s, a couple from the late '40s and one or two others. Your drawing would bridge a gap that I'd love to see for my study, especially if you could relatively date it. You can reply directly to me at [email protected], and of course it's fine to post the image for whoever might be interested in seeing it. Thanks for communicating about it! Andy On Apr 21, 2012, at 7:56 AM, [email protected] wrote: > Hi Andrew! I didn't know you were on this list. There was an article in > the Philadelphia Inquirer when HUGO was coming out about a guy who retired > from the Franklin Institute and helped advise on the film. > > Ironically, I grew up near Philly (where I now live) and remember the > working Automaton - it was outside the cafeteria. And, just last month, as I > pulled out my old scrapbook of my early teen years I came across the ACTUAL > pen drawing that the Automaton drew for me,. (I think you put in a quarter > to > make it work. The paper it is on has the history of the machine printed on > the back. If important enough that others want to see a scan, I can post > it. > > Steve Ramm > > > In a message dated 4/20/2012 3:28:01 P.M. Eastern Daylight Time, > [email protected] writes: > > For my friends on Phono-L who love antique mechanical things, and the > stories behind them: > http://www.popyrus.com/hugo/index.html > > Best, > Andrew Baron > Santa Fe > > _______________________________________________ > Phono-L mailing list > http://phono-l.org > _______________________________________________ Phono-L mailing list http://phono-l.org
