Lore 298: Almost Alive

Sometimes the more terrifying creatures we encounter are the ones we created ourselves. Don't let their antiquity fool you, though; artificial life isn't always pleasant. Narrated and produced by Aaron Mahnke, with writing by GennaRose Nethercott, research by Cassandra de Alba, and music by Chad Lawson. ————————— PRE-ORDER EXHUMED TODAY: aaronmahnke.com/exhumed https://www.aaronmahnke.com/exhumed ————————— For the curious, here are some links to the various contraptions mentioned in today's episode. Seeing them in action is truly powerful! Mechanical Monk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kie96iRTq5M Tipoo's Tiger https://vimeo.com/8973957 The Writer https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ux2KW20nqHU The Draughtsman https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MvFnFJp3iw4 The English Execution https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aGTZpzuTTiA St. Dennistoun Mortuary https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nsqFuU2OFNQ Murder In The Museum https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-HCTi7zLWto The Abbot's Treasure https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VMpU-QTC3Kc&t=16s ————————— Lore Resources: Episode Music: lorepodcast.com/music https://www.lorepodcast.com/music Episode Sources: lorepodcast.com/sources https://www.lorepodcast.com/sources Official Lore Merchandise: lorepodcast.com/shop https://www.lorepodcast.com/shop ————————— Sponsors: Gusto: Online payroll and benefits software built for small businesses. Try Gusto today at Gusto.com/LORE https://www.gusto.com/lore, and get 3 months free when you run your first payroll. MeUndies: Slide into game changing comfort and get up to 50% off at MeUndies.com/lore https://www.meundies.com/lore with the promo code LORE. Warby Parker: Visit one of over 270 stores to find your next pair of glasses, or go to WarbyParker.com/LORE https://www.warbyparker.com/lore to try on any pair virtually! 1-800-Flowers: To get your Double Blooms offer, buy one dozen to get a total of two dozen roses FREE, at 1800Flowers.com/LORE https://www.1800flowers.com/lore. ————————— To report a concern regarding a radio-style, non-Aaron ad in this episode, reach out to ads @ lorepodcast.com with the name of the company or organization so we can look into it. To advertise on this podcast please email: [email protected]. Or go to: https://advertising.libsyn.com/lore ————————— ©2026 Aaron Mahnke. All rights reserved.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Aaron Mahnke?

  This episode is sponsored by Bram Stoker's Dracula from Audible. A new full cast audio thriller starring Ella Purnell from Fallout as Mina Harker, Jonathan Bailey from Wicked as Dracula, and an A-list cast including Maggie Gyllenhaal from The Dark Knight as Van Helsing, Amy Lou Wood from The White Lotus as Lucy, David Johnson from Industry as Dr. Seward, and many more. Mina and a small, fearless band race against time to stop this ancient terror. Using her intellect, her resolve, and a gift for drawing the unseen lines between clues, Mina just may hold the key to bring down the Count if he hasn't already found his way inside her mind.

• 0:41Aaron Mahnke?

  Featuring a haunting original score by Lilan Ashkari from Audible's 1984 and spatial Dolby Atmos sound design, Audible's Dracula invites you to welcome literature's most shadowy figure into your home. Feel the terror of being hunted and the thrill of the hunt. Don't miss this year's best new audio thriller. Bram Stoker's Dracula, Audible's new full cast original adaptation. Written by Robin Ahearn and directed by Mary Lambert. Now on Audible, listen to The Darkness. Go to audible.com/listen to Dracula.

• 1:13Speaker 01

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• 1:52Aaron Mahnke?

  Oscar was in love. It was 1912 when the Austrian painter met Alma Mahler, the widow of composer Gustav Mahler. And from the moment they met, their romance was a whirlwind of chaos and passion. Later Alma would say of those times, "They were a battle of love. Never before have I tasted so much hell and so much paradise." But all battles end sometime, and after three tumultuous years, Alma broke things off. Oscar was heartbroken, but hey, at least he handled the breakup in a totally normal, reasonable way, by commissioning a life-sized, anatomically correct doll of his girlfriend. "Please," he wrote to a puppet maker in Munich,

• 2:36Aaron Mahnke?

  "make it possible that my sense of touch will be able to take pleasure in those parts where the layers of fat and muscle suddenly give way to a sinuous covering of skin. The skin must be peach-like in its feel. There mustn't be seams in any places where you have reason to believe it will offend me, reminding me that the fetish is nothing but a wretched ragbag." Yeah, uh, let's just say this isn't even the creepiest soundbite from those letters. I will let you imagine the rest. And so Oscar waited eagerly for his doll to arrive, but when it did, he was horrified. Instead of peach-like skin, the dollmaker had fashioned the woman out of swan pelts, complete with feathers.

• 3:19Aaron Mahnke?

  Now, it's hard to quite capture how horrendous this thing was. I highly recommend looking up the photo, but basically imagine a fully-feathered, glaring, lady-shaped punching bag with blank, angry eyes, embedded in sagging bird flesh. It's claimed the Alma doll was so horrifying that Oscar's butler suffered a stroke when he first laid eyes on it, but still, none of that stopped Oscar from making more than 80 paintings and drawings of the thing before he eventually decided that the doll had, and I quote, "managed to cure him entirely of his passion." Yes, the Alma doll had done its work, and now it was time to send her off in style.

• 3:59Aaron Mahnke?

  Oscar threw a lavish house party, complete with champagne and chamber music. The guest of honor? Why, the doll, of course, dressed in her finest clothes. The party raged all night, and when dawn finally broke, Oscar Kakashka took his doll out into the garden, broke a bottle of wine over her head, and then decapitated her. There is no question the Alma Maller doll was a monstrosity, but if it makes you feel any better, it did have one saving grace. At least it didn't move on its own, which is more than I can say for the friends that you're about to meet. I'm Aaron Mahnke, and this is Lore.

• 4:59Aaron Mahnke?

  Five days after Julius Caesar's assassination, Mark Antony ascended to the podium, took a breath, and proceeded to deliver the fallen statesman's funeral speech. And while the true nature of this eulogy is lost to history, legend says that he didn't deliver it alone. No, some say that Mark Antony set a coffin out upon the stage, stood back and watched as the lid lifted to reveal a wax figure of Caesar himself, who slowly turned like a demonic music box ballerina, displaying all 23 of his bleeding stab wounds, to the terrified crowd. That's right, move over aye, because humans have been inventing freaky, seemingly sentient

• 5:42Aaron Mahnke?

  machines for a very long time. Welcome to the marvelous and eerie world of automata. Put simply, automata are mechanical devices, usually shaped like people or animals, built to seem like they're moving all by themselves. In fact, the word automata tells you all you need to know. It comes from a Greek word meaning "acting of one's own will." And people have been obsessed with these wriggly robotics since ancient times. In fact, if the myths are to be believed, the first automata weren't built by humans at all, but by the gods. According to Homer's writings from the 8th century BCE, the Greek god of metalsmithing, Hephaestus, crafted two handmaidens from pure gold.

• 6:26Aaron Mahnke?

  And then, as a gift to the gods on Mount Olympus, he built 20 golden servants, each perched on three golden wheels. And on top of all of that, he was also said to have made a giant bronze sentry named Tellus, who patrolled the coastline of Crete, throwing boulders at enemy ships. Later, after a few hundred years of passing these myths around, Alexander and scientists started to wonder, hey, what if we tried to actually build some of these things? Which, somewhere around the third century BCE, is exactly what they did. Ancient inventors created clocks and organs powered by water. They built a fountain covered in songbirds that would chirp and fall silent in turn, depending on whether a metal owl was facing them or turned away.

• 7:12Aaron Mahnke?

  They even wrote how-to manuals for duplicating their processes. Three centuries after that, Hero of Alexandria saw this technology and thought, you know, I could play some real mind games on people with this stuff. By which I mean, he drew designs for automata that would look like regular statues, until they woke up and started to move, that is. Basically, you can think of Hero as a first-century version of Aston Kutcher in Punkt. He intended to install these guys in temples where they would jump scare nonbelievers into thinking they had witnessed a divine act of God. Which, honestly, not a bad recruitment idea. If you've never seen a machine move on its own before, and suddenly the angel statue in your church started pouring a goblet of wine, you'd probably be ready to convert too.

• 7:58Aaron Mahnke?

  Oh, and Hero is also credited with another invention, one that we still use today, in fact. The world's first vending machine. And what did it, uh, vend, you might ask? Why, holy water, of course. Now, while automata-making may have begun in Greece, it really flourished in China and the Islamic world. There were the Three Brothers in Baghdad, who, in the ninth century, created a steam-fueled automaton that played the flute. And in the tenth century, there was the ruler of Constantinople, who had a throne built for himself to mimic the legendary throne of Solomon, complete with singing silver birds and roaring lions that thumped their tails. And we certainly can't forget the 11th-century Egyptian vizier

• 8:41Aaron Mahnke?

  whose wine hall included eight mechanical young women built of dark camphor and pale amber, who bowed to him when he entered the room. And then, finally, in the ninth century, Baghdad's caliph sent Charlemagne a water clock with moving figures as a gift. And that was that. Automata mania moved to Europe. Now, sure, it would take another few hundred years for European inventors to really get the hang of things, but by the 13th century, European craftsmen finally had the skills to match their passions. I think you get the idea. By the time the Renaissance came around, the automata were all the rage. Going to a dinner party? You can expect a tabletop sailing ship with a clockwork crew, or maybe metal musicians playing their own instruments.

• 9:26Aaron Mahnke?

  And if you're heading to church, you can look for ambulatory monks delivering rattling sermons, or clockwork Jesuses who seep blood while silver Satans growl. Even today, in the age of cellphones and space travel, there's something that still feels technologically marvelous about automata. Heck, it's almost magic. Perhaps it's the uncanny valley of it all, these beings that seem alive yet are so clearly not, or perhaps it's their age. After all, it's no surprise to see robotics working in the 21st century, but to see a 2,000-year-old silver songbird wake up and trill a melody? If ancient automata could actually do that, then the more frightening question to ask might be: What else were they capable of?

• 10:25Aaron Mahnke?

  The year was 1560, and Don Carlos was dying. That's what everyone said, anyway. The 17-year-old son of Spain's King Philip II had fallen down a flight of stairs, and now he lay feverish, blind, and delirious in what the whole court believed would be his deathbed. Terrified, the king prayed for his son's recovery. He begged God to heal his heir. He even had the 100-year-old desiccated corpse of a particularly popular monk named Fray Diego laid in the boy's sickbed beside him for an extra spark of luck. If Don Carlos survived, the king swore that he promised an impossible offer in exchange: a miracle for a miracle.

• 11:09Aaron Mahnke?

  And I am pleased to tell you, the boy did survive. And so it was time for the king to uphold his end of the bargain. He had pledged a miracle after all. And so he commissioned the creation of a bizarre walking automaton in the chilling form of the dead Fray Diego himself. A mechanical monk with sallow silver skin and a snapping jaw who clattered around in a square while slapping its chest and raising a rosary to the heavens. At least, that's the legend surrounding the machine's origin. It's hard to say whether this was indeed what brought the little friar into being. But one thing's for sure, the mechanical monk definitely exists, and he is definitely super creepy.

• 11:51Aaron Mahnke?

  But strap in, because the metal monk is among the least disturbing automata that you'll be meeting on today's tour. Close your eyes and imagine a cherubic doll of a little boy. His cheeks are rosy as rouged porcelain, his hair falling in golden curls. He wears a luxurious red velvet coat, and at just over two feet tall, he sits at a writing desk hard at work. At first, he may seem like an ordinary doll, but then he awakens. The boy's glassy eyes flit from side to side, his head turns, he dips his quill into an inkwell, brings it down on his parchment, and then? The boy begins to write. Yes, you heard me correctly, he actually writes.

• 12:35Aaron Mahnke?

  Built by a famous father-son watchmaking trio, the writer, as it's called, contains a programmable memory that allows him to scrawl custom text up to forty characters long. Oh, and one other little detail, he was built in the mid-1700s. It's kind of unfathomable, isn't it? The writer has a companion too, a second automaton called the draftsman. And this guy is no less impressive. He uses a mechanical pencil to sketch four different images on a piece of paper. The first is a portrait of King Louis XV. The second, the royal couple believed to be Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI. The third, a little dog accompanied by the phrase "mon tutu," or "my dog."

• 13:18Aaron Mahnke?

  And lastly, my personal favorite, a drawing of a whip-wielding cupid riding a chariot pulled by a butterfly. And I think it needs to be said that while this delightful duo is pretty eerie to watch in action, they weren't intended to be frightening. Some automatons, though, were built to be a straight-up threat. A couple of decades later and across the globe, Tipu Sultan, the ruler of Mysore in southern India, was fighting tooth and nail against an encroaching British East India Company. And sure, resisting with military might is one thing, but you know what else is pretty intimidating? A life-sized mechanical tiger mauling a British soldier. Tipu's Tiger, as the massive automaton was called,

• 14:02Aaron Mahnke?

  was built by Indian and French engineers and depicted a gruesome scene. When activated via turning a crank, a mechanical soldier moved his arm to cover his screaming mouth. An organ within the tiger produced the dying man's moans as well as the tiger's roar. Yeah, not exactly subtle. Sadly for Mysore, the British were victorious. And along with other spoils of war, they dragged Tipu's Tiger to London, where it became a popular tourist attraction. Apparently, it sat in the library, and university students wrote all sorts of angry letters complaining about the fact that the soldier kept screaming while they were trying to study. But when it came to terrifying toy-making, the English really should have cast their judgment inward,

• 14:48Aaron Mahnke?

  because no one excelled at mechanical horrors quite like the Brits. To visit one of my favorite English automatons, let's teleport to the Musée Mechanique, a currently operating arcade in San Francisco's Fisherman's Wharf. As you wander through the room, over 300 machines rattle and chime, sing, and hiss. But these aren't your typical Pac-Man and Street Fighter machines. Know that Musée Mechanique contains hundreds of 20th-century coin-operated mechanicals. Although stuffed with mutoscopes and fortune tellers, it's a diorama on the far-left wall that catches your eye first. A dollhouse-sized castle labeled, quite welcomingly, "An English Execution."

• 15:29Aaron Mahnke?

  Here's how it works: You slide a coin into the slot, and watch as the palace doors swing open, revealing a figure in a dark hood. There is a noose around his neck. A tiny friar tolls a bell, the prisoner's last rites, you realize, and suddenly the floor falls away. The sorry, hooded soul plummets out of sight, snapping tight at the end of the noose. And with that, the castle doors swing shut again. The English execution is representative of a particularly macabre moment in automata-making, when grisly scenes like this were downright trendy among British toy makers. This one was made in 1920 by a guy named Charles Arons, but he wasn't the only tinkerer

• 16:13Aaron Mahnke?

  bringing abominations into being. John Dennison and his three daughters were a whole family of automata makers in Leeds, England, who, during the 20th century, created a slew of macabre little scenes: dioramas with names like "The Dying Child", "Supper with Death", and "Midnight at the Haunted Churchyard". In a 1934 machine called "Murder in the Museum", a gun-toting man emerges from behind a gaudy Egyptian sarcophagus and kills another man, before a detective shoots the killer dead in turn, all as miniature museum-goers gawk in horror. Another, 1939's "The Abbot's Treasure", features two shady characters robbing a graveyard while a multitude of skeletons

• 16:57Aaron Mahnke?

  pop out of the tombs and fountains. Oh, and to save the worst for last, let me introduce you to the St. Dennistoun Mortuary. Made sometime around 1900, it's been attributed to a number of English toy makers, the Dennisons included, although it's not actually certain who created the thing. Honestly, I'm not sure that I'd like to lay claim to it if it was me, because this display is truly something else. When you insert a coin into this machine, the St. Dennistoun Mortuary opens its doors to reveal a morgue. Inside, four corpses lie on slabs. Their skins are pale, nearly blue, and their ribs are visible through thinning flesh. One's mouth gapes open in a silent scream, while others are stained with blood.

• 17:42Aaron Mahnke?

  Above the bodies hangs a sign that reads "believed murdered" and "found stabbed." Meanwhile, living people mull about the room. A policeman goes over evidence, an undertaker works on a body. Just outside, two mourners shudder in despair, one raising a handkerchief to her swollen eye. Yeah, pure nightmare fuel. It's bad enough that these things can move, but at least they can't think, right? Well, if the stories are to be believed, there's one mechanical marvel from history who might just prove that wrong.

• 18:36Aaron Mahnke?

  One of the most famous personages of the last hundred years has passed away. He never smiled and was rarely heard to speak, though compelled to remain seated during many long years and though gifted by illiberal nature with the use of but one arm, he exhibited signs of a clear and precocious intellect. "That if you're curious" is an excerpt from an 1857 obituary of a great Hungarian chess player. "Perhaps," the obituary goes on to say, "no other man has ever checked the march of so many kings as he." Except, here's the thing: This chess player wasn't a man at all. He was... an automaton. But let's rewind. The year is 1770, and Wolfgang von Kempelen,

• 19:21Aaron Mahnke?

  advisor to the Austro-Hungarian throne, is about to present Habsburg Archduchess Maria Theresa with a truly spectacular gift. It takes the form of a desk-sized cabinet, but it isn't the contents of the cabinet that make the royals gasp in wonder. No, it's what sits behind it. Or, rather, who. Perched before the court is a lifeless figure clad in opulent fur-trimmed robes and a jeweled turban. He has a black beard and haunted gray eyes and holds a long ottoman smoking pipe in his left hand. His right hand rests upon the cabinet's surface, waiting. With a theatrical flourish, von Kempelin opens the cabinet's doors, revealing gleaming

• 20:05Aaron Mahnke?

  clockwork mechanisms within. With the wave of a candle, he shows the court that nothing and no one is hidden inside save for those elaborate whirring gears and levers. And then, he asks the audience for a volunteer with one caveat: Whoever steps forward, better be able to play chess. Because, you see, once von Kempelin winds a crank on the cabinet's side and the man in the robes springs to life, his head turning, his hands shuddering, he'll reach forward, lift a pawn from the red and ivory chess set on the cabinet's surface, and begin to play. And so it went that strange night in 18th-century Habsburg. Before the amazed eyes of the court, challenger after challenger came forward to play chess

• 20:50Aaron Mahnke?

  against von Keppelin's automaton, and challenger after human challenger, lost. The automaton appeared to consider each move thoughtfully. It was able to react to opponents' unpredictable behavior. Heck, when players tried to cheat, the mechanical man would angrily sweep their pieces onto the floor with its arm. Suffice to say, the automaton chess player, or as it's become more commonly known, the mechanical Turk, was an immediate sensation at the Austria-Hungarian court. It was lauded as an engineering marvel. After watching the Turk play, courtiers walked away debating the very nature of consciousness. Could machines truly compete with human intellect? What did it mean to be alive?

• 21:34Aaron Mahnke?

  And most of all, what was going on inside the mind of that eerie, lurching doll? But there were those who were less impressed. Everyone's a skeptic, they say. There were theories that the cabinet, or perhaps the Turk figure himself, must hide a little person or a child, controlling the game from within. Others, that its inventor was controlling the machine from several feet away via magnets, remote control, or invisible strings. And the famous magician Jean-Jacques Robert Houdin made a particularly kooky claim that Von Kempenin had invented the Turk to smuggle a legless Polish fugitive out of Russia who also happened to be a talented chess player. But that sounds like a story for another day.

• 22:18Aaron Mahnke?

  Despite the skepticism, though, the Turk remained the hottest thing since Wiener Schnitzel. And even when Maria Theresa Court tired of it after a few years, it didn't take long for her son Joseph II to dust it off and order Von Kempenin to take it on a grand European tour. So off the Turk went, taking the continent by storm and vanquishing many of the era's greatest chess players in the process. Chess master after chess master fell to the Turk's unbeatable prowess. Or, almost unbeatable. In a rare defeat, the Turk lost to Andre Philidor, generally considered the best chess player in the world at the time. But even in that case, Philidor later confessed that no human opponent had ever fatigued

• 23:01Aaron Mahnke?

  him as much as the mechanical Turk. The thing even played and beat none other than Benjamin Franklin. After Von Kempenin's death in 1804, the Turk was purchased by a fellow named Johann Meltzel, an inventor and showman in his own right. He took to tinkering with the chess player, poking around those miraculous metal gears, and added a brand-new feature: Now, the Turk could do more than play chess. He could also "speak." And sure, he couldn't say much, but he spoke when it mattered most. That is, when cornering an opponent's king, the mechanical Turk would now exclaim "Eschecki", the French word for "check." And so, back on the road they went, Meltzel and his automaton. This dynamic duo traveled the world, too.

• 23:45Aaron Mahnke?

  The Turk beat Napoleon Bonaparte in Vienna. It performed in the Americas before a skeptical young Edgar Allan Poe. For 30 whole years, Meltzel and the Turk sailed the seven seas, conquering them one chess game at a time. In 1838, the Turk's second owner died, and not one, not two, but 75 Philadelphians pooled their money to snag him for themselves. The charge was led by a mechanical professor named John K. Mitchell. Why? Well, they all just really wanted to see how the thing worked. But unbeknownst to them, Meltzel did not make uncovering the secrets easy. The automaton had been packed, with no instructions, mind you, into five wooden crates.

• 24:27Aaron Mahnke?

  And to make matters worse, Meltzel had apparently tossed pieces from other machines into those crates to confuse thieves and competitors. Basically, imagine the world's worst IKEA assembly. But Mitchell was determined, and after months, he finally got the Turk to work. Which was all well and good, for a while. Because, you see, fate had other plans. One muggy July day in 1854, as the Turk slumbered in a Philadelphia museum, a terrible fire broke out. First, a spark, but then a blaze. Mitchell's son Silas tried to run into the inferno and save the priceless machine, but alas, it was too late. After nearly a century of fame and fortune,

• 25:11Aaron Mahnke?

  the chess player succumbed to the flames. As Silas later wrote, "It might have been a sound from the crackling woodwork or the breaking window panes, but certain it is that we thought we heard through the struggling flames the last words of our departed friend, the sternly whispered, oft-repeated syllables: Esaki, esaki."

• 25:49Aaron Mahnke?

  It's the reality we live with today. With the rise of AI, the line between human and machine has become blurrier than ever. And just like those Habsburg nobles watching that very first robotic chess game in 1770, we find ourselves asking the same chilling question: Can machines rival, or even surpass, human consciousness?

• 26:10Aaron Mahnke?

  Well, in the case of the Mechanical Turk, that answer is a resounding "no." Because as it turns out, all those skeptics who thought the machine was too good to be true were absolutely right. In 1857, three years after that fatal museum fire, Silas Mitchell wrote an article for the magazine Chess Monthly, admitting to a nearly century-long hoax. It turns out, all those elaborate cogs and cranks in the Turk's cabinet, yeah, those were just for show. Behind them, you see, was a hidden crawl space, concealing a very human chess master. He would hold a single flickering candle to see by, and over his head, magnetic disks dangled from chess pieces, letting him see what moves were being played above.

• 26:53Aaron Mahnke?

  And all the while, he pulled a series of levers to make the Turk's arms and hands move. Now, let me just add here, credit where credit's due, right? The machine may have been a hoax, but just imagine the skill it would have taken to play and beat some of the world's finest chess players, all while stuck in a dark box and operating complex puppetry at the same time. And unlike the theories, the hidden chess players weren't tiny, in fact, one was over six feet tall. So, how did Von Kempen and Meltzel manage to sneak human chess players around the world with them for years of touring? Well, that's easy. While outside the box, the masters pretended to be the owner's personal secretaries. Not a bad ruse, really.

• 27:36Aaron Mahnke?

  At the end of the day, the most intelligent characters in this story turned out to be human, after all. Now, look, as a writer living in the age of AI, I obviously have some strong opinions on technology's ability to replace human intellect and creativity. Every day, the news is abuzz with articles about "humans in romantic relationships with AI," or "turning to chatbots instead of a trained human therapist." But here's the thing about AI models: They may seem human, but there's something crucial that's missing. Every word a human writes represents a thought behind it. Language is only a stand-in, a symbol born from and communicating an idea. But when a chatbot generates language, what's behind that? Why, nothing, of course.

• 28:21Aaron Mahnke?

  Emptiness. Just like the Turk chess player, AI intelligence is merely a clever trick, a mimicry of reality.

• 28:30Aaron Mahnke?

  Oh, and by the way, this past July, chess grandmaster Magnus Carlsen played ChatGPT in a game of chess. He beat it in only 53 moves without losing a single piece.

• 28:56Aaron Mahnke?

  I hope today's demonstration of clever automata got your gears turning. I feel like there's something magical about the passion and process behind building these amazing contraptions, and the stories they generate are absolutely stunning. But don't pull the plug just yet, because I have one last story in which a machine from the distant past might just see into the future. Stick around through this brief sponsor break to hear all about it.

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• 31:37Aaron Mahnke?

  The man was many things: a philosopher, a mathematician, a Franciscan friar, a scientist, a linguist, and if the whispers about him were true, at least, a wizard. Born in the early 1200s, medieval polymath Roger Bacon was pretty much ignored by his contemporaries. But by the Renaissance, he had transformed into somewhat of a mythical figure, considered the ultimate wise man. And as such, in addition to his very real accomplishments, people had begun to pad his biography with some rather fantastical tall tales. They said that he was a keeper of dark, forbidden knowledge, that he could consult with demons and solve alchemical secrets. But the most famous legend of all, why that would be the rumor that Roger Bacon had created?

• 32:22Aaron Mahnke?

  A brazen head. What exactly is a brazen head, you might ask? Well, it was a form of automaton that only existed in legends. They were mechanical heads made of brass, and according to the stories, could do far more than simply move their eyes and snap their jaws like their real-world counterparts. Brazen heads, you see, had the ability to speak, and they could answer any questions posed to them, including predictions of the future. In one story of a brazen head, Saint Albertus Magnus spent thirty years creating a brass man who could answer all of humanity's questions. And apparently Magnus was successful. Maybe a bit too successful, because once his automaton finally started talking, it refused

• 33:07Aaron Mahnke?

  to shut up. It kept on babbling until a super annoyed Thomas Aquinas basically beat it to death. Roman senator Boetius was said to have made one of his own, as did Faust. Everyone from Cervantes in Byron in Europe to Nathaniel Hawthorne in America made mention of the contraption in their writings. And the most famous brazen head of all, why, that would be the one believed to be created by Roger Bacon. Bacon's brazen head was said to have been a perfect replica of a living man's head, right down to the brain inside it. And speaking of Faust, who I mentioned a moment ago, Bacon was said to have made a Faustian deal of his own. For as the story goes, Bacon didn't create the head all by his lonesome. Oh no, he had a helper.

• 33:51Aaron Mahnke?

  In order to make the thing actually talk, he summoned none other than the devil himself. Impatient for his contraption to begin delivering prophecies, Bacon begged the devil to speed things up. But the devil basically told Bacon that he needed to chill out and give it some time. The head would speak after a few weeks, the devil promised, as long as he kept it properly fueled up with the fumes from a specific concoction of alchemical plants. And as the story goes, Bacon followed the devil's advice, and eventually it paid off. Sort of. According to the mid-1500s text, "The Famous History of Friar Bacon," the head spoke only once, but don't ask Bacon what it said, the poor sap slept right through it.

• 34:33Aaron Mahnke?

  Luckily though, his assistant managed to catch the head's little announcement, and I do mean little. It intoned a total of seven words: "Time is," "time was," and "time is past." Then the machine, and I quote, "therewith fell down and presently followed a terrible noise with strange flashes of fire." Or in other words, the head exploded. And thus ends the rather anticlimactic tale of Roger Bacon and his prophetic mechanical head. Oh, and by the way, if the concept of a brazen head sounds familiar to you, you may have encountered its closest modern counterpart, probably in the classic film Big, a beloved arcade feature called The Zoltar Machine.

• 35:28Aaron Mahnke?

  This episode of Lore was produced by me, Aaron Mahnke, with writing by Jenna Rose Nethercot, research by Cassandra DeAlba, and music by Chad Lawson. Just a reminder, I have a brand new history book coming out on August 4th called Exhumed, which explores the roots of the New England vampire panic through the lens of centuries of folklore, medical advancements, pseudoscience, and philosophy. It's available for preorder right now, and if you preorder the hardcover, my publisher has a cool webpage set up where you can submit your receipt and get a free gorgeous tote bag. Head over to aaronmahnke.com/exhumed to lock in your copy today. The link is in the description. Don't like hearing ads on Lore? Well, there's a paid version on Apple Podcasts and Patreon that is 100% ad-free.

• 36:12Aaron Mahnke?

  Subscribers also get weekly mini bonus episodes called Lore Bites, and Patreon members get discounts on Lore merch. Learn more over at lorepodcast.com/support. Follow the show on YouTube Threads, Blue Sky, and Instagram. Just search for Lore Podcast, all one word, and then click that follow button. And when you do, say hi. I like it when people say hi. And as always, thanks for listening.

• 36:48Speaker 04

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