Exhalation : Stories (9781101947906) by Chiang Ted

Author:Chiang, Ted
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Digital
Published: 2019-05-07T04:00:00+00:00

Consider these testimonials from customers:

“Our child is now perfectly behaved and a delight to be near.” —Mrs. Menhenick, Colwyn Bay.

“An immeasurable improvement over the Irish girl we previously employed. It is a blessing for our household.”

—Mrs. Hastings, Eastbourne.

“I wish I had been raised by one myself.”

—Mrs. Godwin, Andoversford.

THOMAS BRADFORD & CO.

68, FLEET-STREET, LONDON;

AND MANCHESTER

It is worth noting that, rather than promoting the raising of rational children, the advertising preys on parents’ fears of untrustworthy nursemaids. This may have just been shrewd marketing on the part of Dacey’s partners at Thomas Bradford & Co., but some historians think it reveals Dacey’s actual motives for developing the Automatic Nanny. While Dacey always described his proposed teaching engine as an assistive tool for governesses, he positioned the Automatic Nanny as a complete replacement for a human nanny. Given that nannies came from the working class while governesses typically came from the upper class, this suggests an unconscious class prejudice on Dacey’s part.

Whatever the reasons for its appeal, the Automatic Nanny enjoyed a brief period of popularity, with more than one hundred and fifty being sold within six months. Dacey maintained that the families that used the Automatic Nanny were entirely satisfied with the quality of care provided by the machine, although there is no way to verify this; the testimonials used in the advertisements were likely invented, as was customary at the time.

What is known for certain is that in September 1901, an infant named Nigel Hawthorne was fatally thrown from an Automatic Nanny when its mainspring snapped. Word of the child’s death spread quickly, and Dacey was faced with a deluge of families returning their Automatic Nannies. He examined the Hawthornes’ Nanny and discovered that the mechanism had been tampered with in an attempt to enable the machine to operate longer before needing to be rewound. He published a full-page ad in which—while trying not to blame the Hawthorne parents—he insisted that the Automatic Nanny was entirely safe if operated properly, but his efforts were in vain. No one would entrust their child to the care of Dacey’s machine.

To demonstrate that the Automatic Nanny was safe, Dacey boldly announced that he would entrust his next child to the machine’s care. If he had successfully followed through with this, he might have restored public confidence in the machine, but Dacey never got the chance because of his habit of telling prospective wives of his plans for their offspring. The inventor framed his proposal as an invitation to partake in a grand scientific undertaking and was baffled that none of the women he courted found this an appealing prospect.

After several years of rejection, Dacey gave up on trying to sell the Automatic Nanny to a hostile public. Concluding that society was not sufficiently enlightened to appreciate the benefits of machine-based childcare, he likewise abandoned his plans to build a teaching engine, and resumed his work on pure mathematics. He published papers on number theory and lectured at Cambridge until his death in 1918, during the global influenza pandemic.

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