A Ultimate machine is shown in the first part of Gene Searchinger’s “The Human Language Series” (PBS). It is a small wood box (I guess it is about 20 cm high x 30 x 40 - estimated from the hand size shown in the video). It fits James Crow description (above) better than the case shown at the beginning of this page (and it much nicier too…)

I found a video of the “Leave Me Alone Box” that, like these machines, turns itself off.

http://blogoscoped.com/archive/2008-04-24-n59.html

ivan illich wrote about the ultimate machine (the plastic toy version) in ‘deschooling society’

I have a memory of a friend (and floormate of Shannon’s at Bell Labs)who told me that Shannon had a similar sort of machine on his office door (?) that would whimsically change his “in” to “out” and vice versa for whether the great man was there or not. (Memory serves perhaps a little faulty here, but I have a very strong memory-sense of Joe Heller’s Major Major from Catch-22 regarding this In/Out sign.)

Here is a youtube video of the Coffin Bank: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9shV8GQEF34

I like how the mechanism keeps trying until it succeeds.

Thanks Ward. I posted your suggested link to the video. Very cool.

There is a link to a very short video on the bottom of the Wikipedia page about Claude Shannon. It is referenced as the “Most Beautiful Machine”.

This is the direct link: http://www.kugelbahn.ch/sesam_e.htm

Something very similar comes to mind, but I remember it as a money box that would whirr and clank and then shoot out a ghostly/skeletal hand to take your coin and then shut off.

Yes, there was a toy version - like “the thing” of the Adam’s Family. I bought one 24 years ago at Ripley’s Believe it or Not in San Francisco. It was a black box with a lever on top. A hand came out and pushed the lever “off” and then quickly retreated back into the box. There was a bank version as well, on which you could place a coin and the hand would come out and grab it and take it into the box.

I can confirm that the toy did exist. My only memory of it is trying it out in on a store shelf, probably some time in the mid to late 60s, so I’m sure the things were commercially produced — as soon as I started reading this post I remembered the one I’d seen.

This idea was a toy that, as I recall, was advertised in the back of comic-books. I guess now I know where they got the idea.

Maybe these people (or an earlier incarnation) sold it. Was it a bank? I seem to remember a brown box and a yellow arm. http://www.johnsonsmith.com/

I used to have one of those toys. It must have been about 1960-62. The box was black. The hand was ghoulish green.

There are a few more pics and a little animation of the human/machine hands in on/off action here:

http://www.kugelbahn.ch/sesam_e.htm

I like this concept and found the Ultimate Machine fascinating, but I’m not sure I get how it “does nothing”. I mean, correct me if I’m wrong, but it does a lot of things. It seems quite complex in the way that it produces sound, has mechanical triggers to open/close a box lid, has a mounted arm that is (I presume) operated by levers or pulleys, and so on ad infinitum. How could one rightly say that it does nothing? That’s a lot of operations working in harmony.

I think that the gripping psychological effect of the machine comes from the disappointment of observing the technical beauty of all these synchronized parts ultimately achieving no significant purpose. None. True, not many machines are built so elaborately for the single purpose of returning to state zero without doing something, however small, that is of worth to the universe. In that sense, the machine actually is pretty sinister.

Of course, we could all take off our geek engineer hats, and recognize this machine for what it really is: art. This Ultimate Machine certainly makes you think, and that’s surely worth something to the universe…right?

You jogged my aging memory Kevin. There was a plastic, toy version of this in this back in the first half of the 60’s. This was all I could find so far. But I plan on finding one of these for my collection.

http://books.google.com/books?id=NoEmqO1_f5MC&pg=PT3753&lpg=PT3753&dq=toy+box+hand+shuts+itself+off&source=web&ots=IVqyIWVtZS&sig=nk6RRv3ytgnYpGbHJXoif3mEF8c&hl=en

Reminds me of something you’d see on LOST.