The Thackery T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities

After the Great War exploded in Europe, Lauritz donated his time to the stateside war effort, assembling and testing weapons for the U.S. Army until peace came in 1918. That same year, Laurtiz was diagnosed with Brandywine syndrome, inherited from his father. Daisy passed away from a bout of pneumonia the following year.

In 1921, Cranks and Steam was published to widespread acclaim, much to Lauritz’s dismay. Inside, the Auble was touted as a turn-of-the-century marvel of steam engineering and a bizarre breakthrough in firearms design. Yet the work was not quite a celebration of Auble ingenuity. The Auble gun was the steam, but the Auble men were the cranks. And there, on page 201, was an interview with James Tasker about his “profound vision” for the next-generation Battle Carriage, along with a smug quote about the Auble gun.

Humiliated by the book, Lauritz withdrew from society.

It was in the earliest weeks of 1922, when Lauritz Auble was dwelling alone in his tiny flat, quietly withering away, that a young Thackery T. Lambshead came calling. He wanted to buy the last remaining Auble gun—the gun he had marveled at so many years before from the stands of the Fafnerd Cousins Circus—and install it in his burgeoning collection of antiquities and curios. Lambshead was offering the Aubles some measure of recognition for the marvelous thing they’d created, ridiculous and grand.

“It’s a grand and curious thing, that gun,” Lambshead supposedly told Lauritz. “It’s the gun that war didn’t want.” Lambshead reportedly spent the day with Lauritz, hearing tales of Franz Auble and Daisy and of Lauritz’s time with the circus. They drank port and smoked cigars. “Your gun might not have shot anyone, but its report echoed in imaginations from the California coast to the uttermost edge of Europe,” Lambshead recalls telling Lauritz. “That’s quite a difficult shot to make.”

Of Lauritz’s reply, there is no record.

Dacey’s Patent Automatic Nanny

Documented by Ted Chiang

From the catalog accompanying the exhibition “Little Defective Adults—Attitudes Toward Children from 1700 to 1950”; National Museum of Psychology, Akron, Ohio

The Automatic Nanny was the creation of Reginald Dacey, a mathematician born in London in 1861. Dacey’s original interest was in building a teaching engine; inspired by the recent advances in gramophone technology, he sought to convert the arithmetic mill of Charles Babbage’s proposed Analytical Engine into a machine capable of teaching grammar and arithmetic by rote. Dacey envisioned it not as a replacement for human instruction, but as a labor-saving device to be used by schoolteachers and governesses.

For years, Dacey worked diligently on his teaching engine, and even the death of his wife, Emily, in childbirth in 1894 did little to slow his efforts.

What changed the direction of his research was his discovery, several years later, of how his son, Lionel, was being treated by the nanny, a woman known as Nanny Gibson. Dacey himself had been raised by an affectionate nanny, and for years assumed that the woman he’d hired was treating his son in the same way, occasionally reminding her not to be too lenient. He was shocked to learn that Nanny Gibson routinely beat the boy and administered Gregory’s Powder (a potent and vile-tasting laxative) as punishment. Realizing that his son actually lived in terror of the woman, Dacey immediately fired her. He carefully interviewed several prospective nannies afterwards, and was surprised to learn of the vast range in their approaches to child-rearing. Some nannies showered their charges with affection, while others applied disciplinary measures worse than Nanny Gibson’s.

Dacey eventually hired a replacement nanny, but regularly had her bring Lionel to his workshop so he could keep her under close supervision. This must have seemed like paradise to the child, who demonstrated nothing but obedience in Dacey’s presence; the discrepancy between Nanny Gibson’s accounts of his son’s behavior and his own observations prompted Dacey to begin an investigation into optimal child-rearing practices. Given his mathematical inclination, he viewed a child’s emotional state as an example of a system in unstable equilibrium. His notebooks from the period include the following: “Indulgence leads to misbehavior, which angers the nanny and prompts her to deliver punishment more severe than is warranted. The nanny then feels regret, and subsequently overcompensates with further indulgence. It is an inverted pendulum, prone to oscillations of ever-increasing magnitude. If we can only keep the pendulum vertical, there is no need for subsequent correction.”

Dacey’s Patent Automatic Nanny in stand-by mode. In active mode, the arms meet so that the Automatic Nanny can rock the baby to sleep without the need for a cradle or even a blanket.