“An Electric Man”

https://archive.org/details/strand-1900-v-20/page/587/mode/2up?view=theater

In 1900, Louis Philip Perew of Tonawanda, New York, built a “gigantic man” of wood, rubber, and metal that “walks, talks, runs, jumps, [and] rolls its eyes.”

Standing 7 foot 5 in size 13 1/2 shoes and clothed in white duck, the nameless man “walked smoothly, and almost noiselessly” at an exhibition for the Strand, circling the hall twice without stopping. Perew was cagey as to its inner workings, saying only that its aluminum skin concealed a steel framework.

When a large block of wood was placed in its path, “it stopped, rolled its eyes in the direction of the obstacle, as if calculating how it could surmount it. It then deliberately raised the right foot, placed it upon the object, and stepped down on the other side. The motion seemed uncannily realistic. You almost feel like shrinking from before those rolling eyes. The visionless orbs are operated by means of clock-work situated within the head.”

https://archive.org/details/strand-1900-v-20/page/589/mode/2up?view=theater

When the robot announced, “I am going to walk from New York to San Francisco,” Perew acknowledged that the team planned to send it across the continent drawing a light wagon bearing two men. He claimed it could cover 20 miles in an hour.

I don’t know any more about it. This isn’t the first mechanical man we’ve encountered — a steam-powered robot had been proposed as early as 1868. But neither seems to have gone anywhere.

03/23/2025 UPDATE: Readers Kendra Colman, Justin Hilyard, and Hans Havermann point out that Cybernetic Zoo has a whole summary on the “Electric Man” and its history, including Perew’s original 1894 patent and various news articles (with additional photos) from 1895 up to 1914. Apparently the effect is deceiving — the man doesn’t actually pull the wagon, the wagon pushes the man. Many thanks to everyone who’s written in about this.

Missing the Mark

“The Holy Roman Empire was neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire.” — Voltaire

“It has been said that this Minister [the Lord Privy Seal] is neither a Lord, nor a privy, nor a seal.” — Sydney D. Bailey

“Television is a medium, so called because it is neither rare nor well done.” — Ernie Kovacs

Rapid Transit

https://archive.org/details/strand-1899-v-17/page/492/mode/2up?view=theater

A striking technology described in Strand, April 1899: The speck is a bundle of hay descending along a wire over a lake in Western Norway.

The Norwegians, who live for weeks and months in the summer on the great heights on either side of their beautiful valleys, send down milk, cheese, hay, etc. to the farms below by suspending them on inclined wires fastened at one end firmly to the ground and at the other to some point on the rocks above.

The snap-shot shows a bundle of hay on its way from a great height on one side of the lake to the farm on the other side. It sped along, the friction causing it to shed sparks in all directions, and was timed to take forty-four seconds.

The editors add: “If the bundle be closely examined the constriction caused by the cord holding it together is distinctly visible.”

Variations

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Mona_Lisa_face_hybrid_image.jpg

Illusion Diffusion uses Stable Diffusion to produce illusion artwork.

The image above was produced by uploading an image of the Mona Lisa and specifying the prompt “colour photograph of an Italian city in the Renaissance” (illusion strength 1 and seed 0).

Below is Vermeer’s Girl With a Pearl Earring modified with the prompt “Amsterdam canals in 17th century” (illusion strength 1.8 and seed 0).

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Girl_with_a_pearl_earring_hybrid_image.jpg#filelinks

Alternating Tread Stairs

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Alternating_tread_stairs.svg
Image: Wikimedia Commons

Conventional stairs are somewhat extravagant: Because users alternate their steps (1), half of each tread goes unused. In close quarters, floor space can be conserved by omitting these unused portions (3), permitting a slope as high as 65 degrees without sacrificing the depth of the treads (2).

Because each tread “overlaps” those that precede and follow it, an alternating staircase might require only half the horizontal space of conventional stairs, and users can face forward when descending, where a ladder would require them to turn. The disadvantage is that they’re steep, and users must take care to begin each traverse with the correct foot. For that reason these stairs may not be safe for children or the elderly.

Below: In the Orange Tower, built in Carpentras at the start of the 14th century, builders set alternate risers at a diagonal to achieve an ascending slope of 45 degrees. “We will recognize that it is never subtlety that our medieval architects lack. But these latter examples only provide service stairs.”

(Eugène Viollet-le-Duc, Dictionary of French Architecture from 11th to 16th Century, 1856.)

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Escalier.a.45.degres.png

The Engine

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:The_Engine_(Gulliver).png

Gulliver’s Travels describes a device by which “the most ignorant person, at a reasonable charge, and with a little bodily labour, might write books in philosophy, poetry, politics, laws, mathematics, and theology, without the least assistance from genius or study”:

He then led me to the frame, about the sides whereof all his pupils stood in ranks. It was twenty feet square, placed in the middle of the room. The superfices was composed of several bits of wood, about the bigness of a die, but some larger than others. They were all linked together by slender wires. These bits of wood were covered, on every square, with paper pasted on them; and on these papers were written all the words of their language, in their several moods, tenses, and declensions; but without any order. The professor then desired me ‘to observe; for he was going to set his engine at work.’ The pupils, at his command, took each of them hold of an iron handle, whereof there were forty fixed round the edges of the frame; and giving them a sudden turn, the whole disposition of the words was entirely changed. He then commanded six-and-thirty of the lads, to read the several lines softly, as they appeared upon the frame; and where they found three or four words together that might make part of a sentence, they dictated to the four remaining boys, who were scribes. This work was repeated three or four times, and at every turn, the engine was so contrived, that the words shifted into new places, as the square bits of wood moved upside down.

As it permutes sets of words, it’s arguably a forerunner of the modern computer.

The Toaster Project

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:The_Toaster_Project_by_Thomas_Thwaites,_V%26A_-_2022-09-04.jpg
Image: Wikimedia Commons

In a 1958 essay, economist Leonard Read argued that no one knows how to make a pencil. In a complex economy, the components of this simple implement — cedar, lacquer, graphite, ferrule, factice, pumice, wax, and glue — are contributed by a network of specialists who never meet. “There isn’t a single person … including the president of the pencil company, who contributes more than a tiny, infinitesimal bit of know-how.”

As if to disprove this idea, student Thomas Thwaites set out in 2009 to build a toaster from scratch. He bought a £3.94 consumer unit and reverse-engineered it, hoping to assemble his own model using original sources of steel, mica, plastic, copper, and nickel. He describes the project here:

Rolligon Tires

After watching Inuit drag a heavy boat out of the water on “rollers” of inflated seal hides, California inventor William Albee devised a baglike tire 5 to 9 feet long and 2.5 feet in diameter. Tires that size can gain traction on almost any terrain, and when inflated to a low pressure they’ll envelop large obstacles without suffering damage.

Strikingly, Life noted, “They will also envelop a man without damaging him, spreading the 3,000 pounds of weight over such an area that the running over gives him about the same sensation as a vigorous massage.”

The Navy and Army experimented with the tires in 1951; eventually they were adopted by the oil industry, which uses them to traverse the tundra of Canada and Alaska without getting stuck or damaging vulnerable plants.

A Beautiful Relic

https://www.reddit.com/r/ArtefactPorn/comments/1fpq2ru/trinity_bridge_is_a_unique_threeway_stone_arch/

The River Welland used to split into two channels in the heart of Crowland, Lincolnshire, and in 1360 the townspeople arranged to bridge it with this unique triple arch, which elegantly spanned the streams at the point of their divergence, allowing pedestrians to reach any of the three shores by a single structure. The alternative would have been to build three separate bridges.

The rivers were re-routed in the 1600s, so now the bridge stands in the center of town as a monument to the ingenuity of its inhabitants. It’s known as Trinity Bridge.

From the ArtefactPorn subreddit.