"The Museum department contains 100,000 curiosities, including Professor Faber's wonderful talking machine, costing me $20,000 for its use for six months; also the National Portrait Gallery of one hundred life-size paintings, including all the Presidents of the United States, etc.; John Rogers' groups of historic statuary; almost an endless variety of curiosities, including numberless automaton musicians, mechanicians, and moving scenes, etc., etc., made in Paris and Geneva." It can be imagined how wonderful this talking machine must have been when Barnum gave it special emphasis, selecting it from the hundreds of curios he had on exhibition. As this talking machine is probably forgotten, I will reproduce the bill used at the time of its appearance in London, England. When Barnum was in London in 1844, with Gen. Tom Thumb, who was then performing at the Egyptian Hall, he first saw the automatic talking machine and engaged it to strengthen his show. Thirty years later Prof. Faber's nephew was the lecturer who explained to the American public the automaton's mechanism and also the performer who manipulated the machine. Barnum always speaks of the talking automaton as being a life-size figure, but the pictures used for advertising purposes show that it was only a head. The fate of both the talking automaton and the writing and drawing figure is shrouded in mystery. If they were in the Barnum Museum when the latter was swept by fire in 1865, they were destroyed. If they had been taken back to Europe, they may now be lying in some cellar or loft, moth-eaten and dust-covered, ignominious end for such ingenious brain-work and handicraft. So much for the claims of Robert-Houdin. Now to disprove them. The earliest record of a writing figure I have found is in the "Dictionary of Arts, Manufactures, and Mines," compiled by Andrew Ure, M.D., and published in New York in 1842 by Le Roy Sunderland, 126 Fulton Street. On page 83, under the heading of "Automaton," is this statement: "Frederick Von Knauss completed a writing machine at Vienna in the year 1760. It is now in the model cabinet of the Polytechnic Institute, and consists of a globe two feet in diameter, containing the mechanism, upon which sits a figure seven inches high and writes, upon a sheet of paper fixed to a frame, whatever has been placed beforehand upon a regulating cylinder. At the end of each line it raises and moves its hand sideways, in order to begin a new line." [Illustration: Portrait and autograph of Pierre Jacquet-Droz. Born 1721, died 1790. From the brochure issued by the Society of History and Archæology, Canton of Neuchâtel, Switzerland.] This does not answer the description of the figure which Robert-Houdin claims, but it is interesting as showing that mechanical genius ran along such lines almost a hundred years before Robert-Houdin claims to have invented the famous automaton.