I recently read “The Invention of Hugo Cabret,” a sort of hybrid graphic-young adult novel by Brian Selznik that tells a fictionalized story revolving around Georges Méliès, the frenchman who was the first filmmaker to employ cinematic tricks in narrative. Méliès pioneered many modern special effects and was instrumental in pushing the development of film as its own medium. He made more than 500 films, one of which was A Trip to the Moon, the first science fiction flick, produced in 1904 and still remembered by the enduring image of the moon with the terrestrial rocket stuck in its eye.
Méliès, like many early filmmakers, was also a stage magician, as it was magicians who first recognized the unique power of film to create new forms of illusion. Early on, Méliès worked with Jean Eugène Robert-Houdin, the hugely popular nineteenth century stage magician from whom Houdini took his name in homage. And Robert-Houdin, like many magicians, was also a watch-maker, as it was also magicians who, before film, saw the unique power of machinery to create their own forms of illusions. Stage magic was often created with intricate, complicated mechanisms — technology enabled by the industrial revolution, which was seen by many at the time to be a form of magic all its own. Among the most vivid examples of that mechanical wonder were Automata: figures built to approximate the appearance and doings of living things. Automata sang; they danced; they wrote poems. One automaton was a turban-wearing turkish figured played chess, and he was pretty good: the Turk beat Napoleon, Catherine The Great, and many others.
One of the most famous automata was Vaucanson’s Canard Digérateur, or Digesting Duck, which appeared to eat little duck kibbles and then crap them out. Such a feat was enough to amaze all of Europe: Vaucanson’s Duck toured for years, making Kings smile, and prompting Voltaire to proclaim Vaucanson a “new Prometheus.” There is a great book called Edison’s Eve about how automata like Vaucanson’s Duck and other “philosophical toys” were embodiments of the Enlightenment’s uneasy embrace of the Cartesian question, as master engineers seemed to be animating mechanisms into life forms.
But Vaucanson’s Canard was not alive; it was a ruse with a thousand parts. The thing was an incredible piece of machinery, but it did not metabolize duck food. (The food went in one way, and the hidden cache of pre-loaded duck poop came out the other.) And the Turk turned out to be concealing a man who was actually the one beating Napoeleon and others at chess. Both mechanisms were, in essence, magic tricks, which again explains why famous illusionists like Robert-Houdin were collectors and builders of automata. Robert-Houdin’s own devices included a singing bird, a tightrope dancer, a cup and balls performer (snicker, snicker), an acrobat, and a full-sized man that would write and draw. When Robert-Houdin died, Méliès wound up with many of his automata. But then Méliès went bankrupt in 1913. Not only were most of his incredible films trashed or melted down to be reshaped into boot heels for the french army (a cruel irony, since Méliès’s father was a cobbler and he escaped his familial trade by realizing his dreams in magic and film and now his dreams were being glued to the soles of shoes), but the automata were also lost, donated to a museum that eventually junked them. (One of Robert-Houdin’s automata and famous stage tricks was later discovered and refurbished by master magic builder, John Gaughan, whom I recently profiled for the LA Weekly. Gaughan also discovered the mystery of the Turk and recreated it over several years.)
After his bankruptcy, Méliès fell into obscurity, finding work at the Gare Montparnasse as a toy builder. This is the story of “The Invention of Hugo Cabret,” which imagines an aging Méliès being befriended by the reprobate timekeeper’s nephew who lives in the train station and has discovered one of the lost automata in a state of disrepair. A natural engineer himself, the kid fixes it, and the machine comes to life, and reveals a secret. (Spoiler: the secret is glaringly obvious.)
This is a pretty nifty idea, but even niftier is the entirely real version of the same story, which begins in 1928 in Philadelphia, when the Franklin Institute, a museum named after founding father Ben and dedicated to the “mechanical arts,” received a mysterious delivery. It was an anthropomorphic brass machine, totally ruined, but intriguing because of it’s apparent complexity. The Brock family who donated the mechanism said it once wrote and drew pictures. It had clearly been damaged by fire. More than that, no one knew.
Painstakingly, the machine was restored by a machinist at the Institute. The pieces were cleaned, re-fitted and pieced back together. When it was ready, the staff put down some paper, gave the thing a pen, and turned it on. The motors fired, and the automaton came to life, lowering its head to get a good look as it produced four drawings and three poems. These were elaborate sketches for an automaton, and the staff wondered who had built such a thing. And then, in the border around its final work, the automaton itself explained where it came from by writing: “Ecrit par L’Automate de Maillardet,” or “Written by the Automaton of Maillardet.” The secret of the draughtsman’s origin had been hidden in the memory of its clockworks!
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Footnote: mechanical memory restored, the automaton was forced to live a new life as a transvestite, as the staff changed its soldier boy clothes to a dress.
