By any reasonable measure, a wind-up toy is worse than a battery toy. It’s slower, it quits sooner, and it tends to wander off in whatever direction its spring prefers. A battery toy asks nothing of you. You flip a switch and it just gets on with its life. It’s all very efficient, but it skips the best part: the fiddly little key, turn after turn, click after click, and the faint worry that one more will break it. The difference all comes down to fuel. A battery toy runs on batteries, but a wind-up toy runs on you.
Consider, as Exhibit A, Sparkling Mike, the walking robot. He’s solid tin, square-shouldered, and built like a robot who has read the manual and possibly written it. He has one job, and an unshakable belief that he’s doing it. (Nobody here has the heart to tell him.)
Clocking In
There’s no obtrusive stem with a plastic crown sticking out of Sparkling Mike’s back. Instead, the key is tucked under one arm, with a hinged tab that flips out to wind, and folds flat against his body afterward, as if he’d rather not draw attention to the fact that he needs help.
But he does. He looks like a professional robot, as if there were any other kind. Still, he can’t do a thing without me. Fortunately, I work cheap. All my twisting and turning tightens his internal metal spring, and my energy becomes his. I’m his battery. (Rechargeable, with coffee.)
Standing By
Unlike most wind-up toys, Sparkling Mike doesn’t take off the moment you stop winding. He’s not some crazed set of chattering teeth. He waits for instructions. There’s a lever on his back, with on/off printed in a red that suggests this is important, and while it’s off, all that energy stays coiled up inside him until I give the word. He holds it all in while I decide exactly where to put him. He doesn’t fidget or complain. He just waits.
If a battery toy’s button is just a transaction, this lever is a promise that something is about to happen. Like most promises made in a professional setting, it’s a little vague on the details. I’ve done my part, and now I’m trusting him to do his. The tension is palpable. It’s also literal, since he’s basically a spring in a suit.
On the Job
Flipping the lever from off to on is the closest I’ll get to Dr. Frankenstein’s great “It’s alive!” moment. (No grave-robbing necessary.) Sparkling Mike moves with tremendous purpose and goes… absolutely nowhere. One arm pumps up and down, as if that might help. The other does nothing. He’s not broken, he’s committed.
It’s not exactly the “walking” the box promises. He doesn’t use any of the space I’ve given him. Instead, his feet slide back and forth in place, like a very earnest “moonwalk” on the dance floor. (Doing “the robot” would be such a cliché.) If this is the robot uprising, it’s going well for us.
References
In fairness, Sparkling Mike is a reproduction of a 1950s Japanese tin robot, which makes him a copy of a toy imitating a future that never quite showed up. He comes from a long line of automatons built to show off. People have been building machines that imitate life for more than two thousand years. Along the way, these mechanical marvels have danced, played music, served tea, and even pooped.
Really. In 1739, Jacques de Vaucanson unveiled the Canard Digérateur, or Digesting Duck, which would “eat” grain from your hand and then, after a suitable pause, poop it out, apparently digested. The droppings were actually breadcrumbs dyed green and loaded in advance, but it was still a crowd-pleaser. Centuries of precision engineering, and we built a duck that pooped. (Humanity has always known its audience.)
Performance Review
Sparkling Mike doesn’t have to resort to scatological trickery to impress anyone. It’s all right there in his name, or at least the name on his box, where he’s listed as Sparkling “Mike,” in quotation marks, like an alias. (Sure, “Mike.”) Whatever he’s really called, “Sparkling” isn’t just a reference to his personality. It’s a job title. Because in addition to the feet-sliding, all that winding drives a mechanical flint-and-wheel assembly inside his torso, creating sparks that shoot out of a tiny window in his chest. The shower of sparks is small, but the box makes it clear that Sparkling Mike is “not a toy.” (He’s all business.)
His stoic expression never lets on how he feels about the fireworks coming from his chest. His mouth is an embossed outline framing a painted rectangle, so depending on how the light hits him, he’s either smiling with pride or cringing in professional disappointment. The Mona Lisa of robots. As with the energy, the meaning is my department. That technically makes us collaborators, though I’m doing most of the work. And since it’s all up to me, I’ve decided he’s smiling.
