Unpopular Science

“Archibald Slate was credited as the author, but in reality he seems to have retired to a life of idle inventing and occasional consulting work with the U.S. Army’s transportation research. Helped design the early armored vehicles. But by 1918 he was beginning to show signs of anxiety, and became senile. He wandered away from his convalescent home, here in Providence, and was never seen again.”

Mark looked at Sarah Slate, who seemed lost in memory. “Did I leave anything out?”

She laughed, briefly, an unhappy sound. “Yes.” Mark smiled encouragingly. Remo waited. Chiun’s eyes tightened, ever so slightly.

“In 1904,” she continued, “my great-grandfather began planning his World’s Fair exhibition, in which he would demonstrate the technology in Ironhand and display the diagrams of his technology on posters. He would give the technology away free to anyone who would make use of it. Surely, he thought, someone would see that what he had created was truly wonderful and ahead of its time. Somebody would surely take a chance on his inventions and see how successful they were.

“Three weeks before the Fair was to begin, the United States government illegally appropriated Ironhand from Archibald Slate. They gave him the choice of joining the government research project based on Ironhand automation technology, or being entirely excluded from the development. He had to join the government. He had no choice. The Ironhand exhibited at the Fair was a cheap tin copy—even that fake Ironhand was extremely advanced for its time. The books were a ploy by the government. They wanted the public to have no doubt that Ironhand was and had always been a cheap sideshow attraction. Victorian-era robots were a dime a dozen, all fakes, and Ironhand was cast as just one of the crowd.”

“You’re saying the government saw the advanced nature of Archibald’s engineering and appropriated it?” Mark Howard asked.

Sarah nodded. “With the Army, Archibald created a series of new robots but none had the capability to operate autonomously like Ironhand. When war broke out Archibald and Ironhand were sent to the front. This field testing proved disastrous. Ironhand disappeared in October 1918, after destroying a German gun that was causing massive destruction in France.

“Archibald came back from France a broken man. His efforts to recreate Ironhand failed as his mental faculties waned. The Army sacked him. Being in the family home seemed to aggravate his paranoia and agitation, so we bought a local nursing home to care for him. Then as you say, Mark, he walked out of his nursing home and vanished.”

Remo was grinding his gears. “Back up. What do you mean by autonomous?”

“Ironhand wasn’t computerized, but he did have what was probably the world’s first remote-control system. My great-grandfather, you see, was an acquaintance of an engineer named Jameson Davis. Over brandy in a British club in 1897, Davis began describing the extraordinary achievements of his cousin in the field of radio telegraphy.”

“Marconi?” Remo asked.

“Yes.” Sarah nodded.

Chiun stared at his protégé. “How could you know such a thing?”

“I have the test answers written on my arm.”

“Archibald Slate licensed the rights to radio telegraphy directly from Guglielmo Marconi. Slate and Marconi agreed to keep the license a secret to protect their mutual patents, and the Slate payments were made through Davis. As Ironhand was being built, between 1897 and 1899, Marconi’s radio telegraph was having its first field successes.”

“So Slate could send simple commands to Ironhand using electrical pulses?” Mark asked.

“A series of relays inside Ironhand received the radio telegraph signals. At first, my great-grandfather started with relays in series. Sending one pulse would snap the relay to switch position one, for example, which controls the right lower leg, sending two pulses activated the right upper leg, and so on. When he had activated the correct system, a longer pulse closed the relay in that position. The next set of pulses would move the selected system incrementally. One pulse would bend the lower leg five degrees, two would bend it ten degrees.”

“Sounds like it would work, but it would take an hour just to take a few steps,” Remo said.

“It did—at first. Then Archibald began designing some of the first logical, practical-use switch systems ever created. In other words, he programmed Ironhand.”

“Not with a computer?” Remo asked.

“With series of relays” Sarah said. “Electromechanical switches, using electrical coils, but no one had ever configured them like Archibald did. The switches turned certain functions on and off, one after another, in such a way that Ironhand could perform a complicated task, like take a step forward, with one simple command. Archibald even constructed interconnected relay strings, which made use of nested routines, looped the commands, even perform if/then operations.”

“Cripes,” Mark said. “He was doing analog programming—in 1899.”