← A. Inventions, No. 8
Lenox Smallwood (1862–1960) and
Leonhard Smallwood (1862–1934)
Mollusk-Made Typewriters
1884
Trans-Oceanic Railroad Syndicate Trust, est. 1883, Edgecomb, Maine. Bisque porcelain with tin adjustment knobs and bail, celluloid accessories. 10⅜ × 26 × 5⅝". Collection of the author.
Venture capitalists have long been seduced by the lure of sustainability. In 1884, to an audience of prospective investors in Camden, Maine, the brothers Lenox and Leonhard Smallwood proposed that the future of American manufacturing lay not among the vast steel mills of the Great Lakes, but on the floor of the nearby Damariscotta River estuary, where oyster farms could be reorganized in order to organically produce machine parts through a naturally-occurring process called calcium carbonate deposit. In a spectacularly fraudulent demonstration, the Smallwoods presented a series of working typewriters that they claimed were 100% mollusk-made, inviting visions of a new century shaped by mollusk-made automobiles and locomotives, until a chipped piece of bisque porcelain revealed the metal structure within. Despite the hoax, many today see great potential in technologies that are a direct outgrowth of the Smallwood approach, and some of the major players in cryptocurrency and NFTs are mollusk-tech ‘shell companies’ that follow the Smallwood model.
Published December 10, 2022. Copyright © 2022 Jonathan Hoefler.
About
The objects in the Apocryphal Inventions series are technical chimeras, intentional misdirections coaxed from the generative AI platform Midjourney. Instead of iterating on the system’s early drafts to create ever more accurate renderings of real-world objects, creator Jonathan Hoefler subverted the system to refine and intensify its most intriguing misunderstandings, pushing the software to create beguiling, aestheticized nonsense. Some images have been retouched to make them more plausible; others have been left intact, appearing exactly as generated by the software. The accompanying descriptions, written by the author, offer fictitious backstories rooted in historical fact, which suggest how each of these inventions might have come to be.
These images represent some of AI’s most intriguing answers to confounding questions, an inversion of the more pressing debate in which it is humanity that must confront the difficult and existential questions posed by artificial intelligence.
Previously:
No. 7. Chromatic Telegraph
Next:
No. 9. Omnisymphonium
