This is a color image of the gears and cams in Maillardet's Automaton in the Franklin Institute Science Museum in Philadelphia. Maillardet was a Swiss clock maker working in London in the early 1800s. P.T. Barnum may have brought the Automaton to Philadelphia. In 1851 the Automaton was damaged in a fire and was eventually donated to the Institute in 1928 where it was renovated . It wrote a poem on paper and used cams for it's memory. The cams were used to store the motions necessary to produce the written poem.
