Artificial Intelligence As Imagined by a PGS pupil in 1897

 by John Sadden

The following piece of creative writing, entitled "The Automatic Schoolmaster", published in the Portmuthian in 1897, imagines a practical application of AI in a Victorian classroom.  Please be aware that the pupil’s story reflects attitudes of the time it was written which would be considered unacceptable today. 

The original article in the 1897 Portmuthian

I am an inventor. The two inventions - destined to shed a lustre undying on the name of Jonkins - are my patent automatic schoolmaster and garden roller. Neither are at present on the trade, but the former will soon be in every college and school in the United Kingdom.  

The " schoolmaster " was devised to relieve masters of detention duty, which is always nauseous, and which an average idiot - much more a respectable automaton -is quite capable of undertaking. I sold a sample " master " to a Mr. Sanders, who keeps a private school, last year, and he would be using it still but for a slight mishap.  

The figure duly arrived, packed in straw, and Sanders unpacked it and gave it a private trial in his study. It was lifelike, and when rigged out in a cap and gown the effect was marvellous. He placed it near a desk, wound it up, and it worked so well that Sanders determined to leave it in charge of detention that afternoon. He let the boys out for a run and placed it in position, stick in hand, ready wound up for action. The figure moved its head from side to side, occasionally brought its stick down on the desk, and said at intervals, " Shut up that row " " Go on with your work," which is all a detention master has to do.

" Boys ! " said Mr. Sanders, " Mr McHinery is going to conduct detention this afternoon."

Here the figure began to work, and jerked its head about as though looking around the room.  

" Now I expect you boys to behave yourselves”  MrMcHinery will stand no nonsense, and I have asked him to...  

The Automaton - “Shut up that row!"  

" ... to report to me any breach of discipline. If you do not...”

The Automaton - jerking his head round to Sanders - "Go on with your work ! If you do not behave yourselves, you will regret it.”  

“Mr McHinery, I leave them in your charge."  

The Automaton replied with a click and brought his cane with a crash on the desk, and Mr. Sanders left the room highly delighted with his experiment. The boys were completely taken in, and not a soul imagined they were left in charge of an automaton.  

Victorian PGS pupils

A buzz of conversation was just starting, when McHinery jerked out "Shut up that row," and silence reigned supreme. They were pretty scared when the new master turned his head round and examined his collar stud, and then told them to go on with their work ; they felt aggrieved also when they were told to “Shut up that row,” when there wasn't so much as a fly buzzing.  

Sanders crept back in ten minutes time, and was pleased to hear absolute silence in the classroom. Unfortunately, some of the straw must have got down McHinery's neck, for in a few minutes matters began to get warm. Jones, minor, went up to get some paper, and got such a vicious blow from the cane, that he went to his seat in tears. Just then the straw affected the regulator, and the automaton jerked out,

 " Go-on-with-your-work-there " and " Shut-up-that-row," some six-hundred times to the minute, and the head flew round and round like a humming top, while the stick came down like a steam hammer at an awful rate. The boys looked at one another with scared faces while they listened to the deafening din. Then someone rushed to the study and told Mr. Sanders that Mr McHinery was having a fit. Meanwhile McHinery had tumbled off his seat, and in two minutes the master's desk was flying in splinters all over the room. When Sanders came in, the automaton was reeling out its commands under a seething mass of books, papers and fragments of desk, while the boys were all huddled up in the opposite corner of the room chucking books at it, with the exception of Edwards who had been stunned by a flying ink bottle. The confusion was awful, and Sanders sent all the boys home on the spot.  

Sanders says that I nearly ruined him and the school, but I protest that McHinery didn't receive fair treatment. None, not even an automaton, can be expected to work to advantage if straw is irritating the back ; but Sanders wouldn't take this fact into consideration. He buried my invention that night in the garden, and gave out that the new master had been seized with an epileptic fit, which would incapacitate him from work for weeks to come. My patent garden roller had still greater misfortune, but I must reserve an account of its adventures for a future paper.