Hi all, back at my
@tedium commissioned search thing. I ran into some serious writer’s block with this one, but worked my way through it. This one comes from Olivier Mével of the company multiplé. (thread)
This one was very difficult for me, in part because it has been written about heavily in the modern day. This may not have been the best question for this format—but I made it work.
(As a reminder, sources may be included in the alt-text of images for space and flow reasons.)
So, as you may or may not be aware, one of the most popular AI models is Anthropic’s Claude. If you’re into LLMs, it’s generally considered one of the best models for coding.
Claude is a very unusual name in 2025, which makes the branding stand out. But there’s a reason for it. See, it’s named for Claude Shannon, a legend in the field of information theory.
In the years before the device’s invention, Shannon became known for his interest in chess-playing machines, even writing an article for Scientific American about them in 1950.
https://www.paradise.caltech.edu/ist4/lectures/shannonchess1950.pdf
Shannon was a fun guy. Despite being a bigwig at Bell Labs, he would often ride a unicycle through the office. He also was famed for juggling.
Shannon didn’t invent the Useless Machine, as it came to be called, but it was built from one of his first interactions with a fellow AI legend, Marvin Minsky.
Minsky, a Princeton grad student who worked at Bell Labs during the summer of 1952, would later go on to found MIT’s AI labs.
While there, Minsky developed a variety of machines—facilitated by a budding relationship with Shannon. “We hit it off because both Shannon and I were addicted to making interesting new mechanical devices,” Minsky said in an oral history.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ujtDHXnMQI4
Marvin Minsky - Why I got on so well with Claude Shannon (125/151)
Sounds like a pretty great internship. During that same oral history, he described the exact process of developing the machine.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C8kU3oZwVJA
But to be clear, while Minsky developed the concept, he was doing so in close association with a kindred spirit, Shannon. They called this unusual device the “Ultimate Machine”—though the name didn’t stick.
Minsky developed the idea; Shannon, who had access to a machine shop, turned it into an actual device. His collected papers make clear this was a regular activity for him.
This machine likely would have gone unnoticed, if not for Arthur C. Clarke, who did a tour of Bell Labs’ various inventions. He found this particular one epic. His immortal words, as published in Harper’s Magazine in 1958:
If you want to read the passage in full context, “Voice Across the Sea” is on the Internet Archive, in a chapter titled The Dream Factory:
https://archive.org/details/voiceacrosssea0000arth/page/148/mode/2upThe piece is notable because it highlights the climate that created it. Also mentioned in the piece is Shannon’s electronic mouse, and the maze he created for it.
Clarke was absolutely the right person to write about this. One sample passage:
Back to the Useless Machine. The simplicity of its design is such that you can find these devices pretty much anywhere online. Amazon sells hundreds of these.
https://amzn.to/4lfBWX2Who was first? The answer appears to be Spencer Gifts, the famed mall chain that started as a mail-order goods store. I found an example, sold as a “Little Black Box” in a 1959 issue of Flower and Garden Magazine.
This exact device, with no changes, was sold by Captain Company in an issue of Famous Monsters of Filmland in 1962, surrounded by dozens of similar gimmicks.
(It makes sense Spencer Gifts sold it, by the way. My Amazon search for a useless machine also brought up fake poo, which is a pretty good signifier of the kind of crowds this device runs with.)
Spencer Gifts later sold a variant that actually made the useless device useful—it turned the device into a bank that grabbed your quarters and stored them.
Not bad.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KqeG5gHD_98
Thing Black Box Money Trap Coin Snatching Prop #halloween
Was there any prior art? This was the part that kind of held me up. I went a lot of directions with this, looking closely at machines with auto-off functions. I ultimately leaned into the work of Bruno Munari.
Munari, an Italian artist whose anti-tech POV would fit in great on Bluesky, doesn’t appear to have made any switches that turned themselves off. But he did make lots of useless machines.
There’s a book about him, in English, on Google Books, if you want to learn more. It’s called Making Air Visible or Air Made Visible.
https://www.google.com/books/edition/Air_Made_Visible/HdNo-x0-wmUC?hl=en&gbpv=0
Ernie Smith
