The Grey Machine

For over seventy years, the oeuvre of Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) had been considered a closed book in literary history. But in 1921, a previously unknown, untitled text reminiscent of Poe's writings was discovered in a Boston antiquarian bookshop. Most puzzling was the fact that the manuscript, approximately two hundred pages of fragments, was illustrated with technical drawings and long equations.

It took an interdisciplinary team of Harvard professors twenty years to interpret the text, which they called The Grey Machine. Their hypothesis was that it was not a lost Poe manuscript, but something much more disturbing. A half-finished design for an automaton: a machine that would attempt to model Poe's mind.

The unknown creators, perhaps a techno-spiritualist cult of enthusiasts, were not content only with Poe's existing texts, but sought to bestow electric immortality to the writer's spirit. The mechanism of the machine was not deciphered until 1994 when a Polish electrical engineer, Stefan Krol, presented the first and only prototype of the automaton at an international conference on artificial intelligence at the Technical University of Budapest. The machine was only activated for a few minutes on a total of five occasions.