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A PARTIAL AND CONJECTURAL HISTORY OF DR. MUELLER’S PANOPTICAL CARTOON ENGINE

My first contact with that fabled and archaic humour-generating contraption known as Dr. Mueller’s Panoptical Cartoon Engine occurred some years ago at a rural auction in Chepachet, Rhode Island. (The literary minded among my readers will surely recall that Chepachet particularly impressed the horror writer H. P. Lovecraft as redolent of the most “antient” New England vibes. But I make no explicit links between Lovecraft’s subjective characterization of the queer village and my discovery of Dr. Mueller’s device there.)

In the dim and dusty barn where the auction was taking place that autumn day, I began poking around among an odd lot of machinery: strange agricultural and household implements of another century. I could discern plausible uses for most of the equipment—save for one device.

An oblong, scuffed wooden case composed of several segments lovingly sealed and decorated with various brass fittings, and featuring three knurled wheels and a protruding crescent disc bearing raised letters and numbers and punctuation around its rim—all frozen with rust and age—and various slots and oval display windows (were those isinglass panels over nacre backdrops?).

The weird little device, resonant with some forgotten technological mana, called out to me, raising all sorts of curious feelings.

I felt I had to have this object, and so I bid for the whole lot, taking it at fairly high cost, forced to contend against the real collectors of old farm tools. The rest of the items meant nothing to me, and I have been selling them off sporadically ever since, trying to recoup my expenditure. (In fact, if any reader wishes to purchase a corn flail, breast plough, barley hummelor or sugar devil for a reasonable price, please write to me in care of this site.)

Over the weeks following my impulsive purchase, I carefully disassembled, cleaned and repaired the machine as best as I was able. Its innards were an unintelligible concatenation of gears, levers, springs, ratchets, pawls, padded balsa wood fingers, cylinder drums, and bellows. There was a central unit that resembled the archaic toy known as a “Jacob’s Ladder,” a series of re-conformable blocks connected by cloth panels, their faces hidden. And a component like the guts of a complex music box also featured vitally.

When I had finished, the three wheels could each turn independently with a satisfying click, bringing up printed words in an antique font in their associated windows, and the crescent protrusion revolved as well. But even after crafting a missing hand-crank to provide motive power and depressing a spring-loaded button labelled GENERATE, I could achieve no visible results. That is, until I got the notion of feeding a piece of paper through one of the slots.

This time after I pressed GENERATE, the machine sucked in the paper, ka-chunked and ka-chinged, and then extruded the altered foolscap.

There, impressed in the faintest of time-dried sepia inks, was a cartoon.

The densely scribed image, so far as I could unriddle it, depicted a pampered, contented cat and its mistress sitting on a couch, while a male suitor looked on jealously. A line of dialogue at the bottom delivered this import, after much perusal:

DISTRAUGHT BEAU BRUMMELL: How comes it that yon feline dines upon camembert and steak tartare, whilst I must contend with pigs-knuckles and ale?

After soberly pondering this dire output for a while, I happened to notice that the three windows of the machine displayed the words FURNITURE, PETS, JEALOUSY.

That’s when everything came together for me in a burst of revelation.

This was a machine designed to generate single-panel gags in a combinatorial manner. A cartoon engine, if you will.

Further experiments—especially after injecting fresh ink into an appropriate well—confirmed this theory, and launched me on a quest to learn all I could about this heretofore-unknown gadget.

I will not bore the reader with all the alternately frustrating and rewarding stages of my investigations. Suffice it to say that a long, tedious combination of internet prowling, library haunting, archive rifling and academic consulting resulted in the following partial and conjectural history of the device, now published for the first time for the edification and enlightenment of all scholars and fans of the single-panel cartoon.

Of course, any useful feedback from my readers will be vetted and incorporated into the history, with due credit given.

Now, on to the tale of Dr. Mueller’s Panoptical Cartoon Engine!

Little is known about the early life and career of Dr. Richard Mueller (?–1875). His birthplace is alternately given as Danielson, Connecticut; Medford, Oregon; Lincolnville, Maine; or Berkeley, Michigan. His early adulthood seems to have been occupied with a variety of low-status, low-paying jobs, including sawmill bucker, printing-press greaser, railroad-track walker, muskrat-trapline setter, and brewery-vat de-malter. Any formal schooling seems non-existent, and it is to be assumed that Mueller’s mechanical expertise, such as it was, was entirely picked up on the job. His sobriquet of “Doctor” seems purely honorary and self-assumed.

What is known with some degree of accuracy and precision, since Mueller committed the anecdote to paper more than once, in several abortive attempts at a memoir, is the moment when he became fixated on the single-panel cartoon, then called the “comic cut.”

Mueller was working as a dockhand in the Carolinas in the year 1841 when he received from a British sailor a discarded copy of the Odd Fellow magazine, a weekly satirical paper. The front page of that publication featured several “comic cuts,” and the powerful impact of their humour was not lost on Mueller. At that moment, he began to formulate his theories regarding what he called “panoptical comedy,” or visual and textual humour that could be encompassed in a single glance, without excessive tracking of the eyes across the page.

For the next decade, Mueller worked solely in the realm of the theoretical—during his spare time when not earning his living by the sweat of his furrowed brow. And during that period, “comic cuts” became a flourishing mode of humour, seen in such publications as The Original Comic Magazine, The Weekly Penny Comic Magazine, Cleave’s Comicalities, and, most famously, Punch.

But Mueller’s access to these pricey imported magazines was limited by his small income, and this factor was the goad and spur for the conceptualization of his Cartoon Engine.

Mueller wanted to mass-produce cartoons in an all-American democratic fashion, employing the cutting-edge technology of his era to bring this pleasure to every middle-class household and public schoolroom whose budget was similarly tight.

The subsequent ten years of the inventor’s life were devoted to crafting prototypes of the Cartoon Engine; sadly none of these early models survive. But ultimately, in 1863, fully twenty years after Mueller’s first encounter with “comic cuts,” the Cartoon Engine in its final form achieved its patent.

Here we should perhaps detail a bit more of the machine’s workings.

The component that resembled a Jacob’s Ladder was really a series of miniature printing plates, each of which bore some partial element of a full narrative composition. The mechanical logic unit that looked like the guts of a music box was responsible for concatenating in the proper order the overstrikes of the shifting plates upon the page, as determined by the knurled wheels. The crescent protrusion with its bas-relief alphabet struck the text, much like a modern DYMO label-maker. The initial configuration of each Cartoon Engine, as sold, was capable of producing a large number of unique “comic cuts,” thanks to the combinatorial power of its elements. But even more cartoons could be achieved when new units with fresh elements were swapped in.

Having secured the protection of a federal patent, Mueller next sought to interest a monied partner in the manufacture and distribution of the machine. He initially achieved limited production runs and sales through a fellow named Ezekiel Bogardus of Winooski, Vermont, who ran a flourishing blacksmith shop and general store. But this strictly regional penetration did not satisfy Mueller’s grand ambitions, and he quested onward.

Mueller’s big break came in 1872, when he convinced famed author Mark Twain to invest some of the profits of his new bestseller Roughing It into the Cartoon Engine. Twain believed firmly in the utility and value of mass-dissemination of cartoon humour, and the two men became fast friends. Together, they succeeded in getting the Cartoon Engine accepted for the pages of the Montgomery Ward mail order catalogue. Success seemed imminent for Mueller and his dreams. Then, tragedy struck.

While visiting Twain in Hartford, Connecticut, Mueller was struck by a falling piano while strolling through the Acme Gardens neighbourhood and killed instantly.

Twain was greatly dispirited by this development, especially since he had relied on Mueller and his fine sense of panoptical humour to contrive the scenarios for the cartoons. While Twain himself was fully capable of such comedic invention, his prose-writing demanded all his creative time.

But luckily, somewhere along the way, Mueller had fathered a daughter and heir, Hetty, aged twenty-six at this date, and she now took over her father’s mission with zeal and ingenuity. (The name of Hetty’s mother is unrecorded, and the girl might very well have been illegitimate.)

Hetty began creating new “thaliatype” packs for inclusion in the Montgomery Ward line. These were the variable replacement elements, sold separately, that allowed the Engine to produce fresh output. Their name derived from Thalia, the Muse of Comedy. These add-on modules were the real source of profit, as sales of the perhaps over-sturdy machine itself were a once-in-a-lifetime deal.

Over the next fifteen years, till the turn of the century, sales of the Cartoon Engine were steady and profitable to all parties, with Montgomery Ward controlling exclusive retail rights. Although the number of units shifted was never as high as the figures for other, competing entertainment technology, such as stereopticons and magic lanterns and gramophones, the Mueller device found its way into many thousands of parlours and classrooms. Hetty Mueller’s prolific creativity, equal to or even greater than her father’s, insured a steady stream of thaliatype packs that could often capitalize on topical events and personages. Best-sellers included “Ragtime Romances”; “Spanish-American War Follies”; “John L. Sullivan’s Peachy Punch-outs”; “Tammany Hall Titters”; “Coney Island Capers”; and so forth.

Cheap and inferior rivals to the Mueller product sprang up, such as the Kneeslapping Kinetikon; the Professor Wogglebug Waggery Widget; and the Charalambus Charade-o-graph. But they made little advance against the high-quality hardware and software provided by Mueller.

More disturbing was the proliferation of off-colour or outright obscene thaliatype packs created by unscrupulous third-party vendors and sold under the counter at drugstores and soda fountains and bar rooms, mostly to male customers. Children, naturally, were frequent users of the Cartoon Engine, and when an adult inadvertently left a filthy thaliatype pack in place and let the machine fall into juvenile hands, the resulting scandal aroused public condemnation of the device by bluestockings and Mrs. Grundys and Carry Nations and Anthony Comstocks everywhere.

But these minor scandals could not kill the Cartoon Engine. It took mass media to do that. As the twentieth century dawned, magazines became cheaper and cheaper and more numerous. Publications like Argosy and Munsey’s and The Saturday Evening Post and the original Life and Judge humour zines offered the same thrills as the Cartoon Engine, without any of the work, at cheaper prices.

By 1905, sales of Mueller’s brainchild had plummeted almost to zero, despite the desperate introduction of such racy official thaliatype packs as “Evelyn Nesbit’s Barebum Boffs.” Twain’s death in 1910 was the final nail in the coffin of the Cartoon Engine. Montgomery Ward discontinued carrying the item, and Hetty retired at age sixty-one.

During the Depression years, when entertainment budgets were once again strained, an elderly Hetty Mueller re-emerged briefly, and managed to convince Sears, Roebuck to stock a new version of the engine, cheaply constructed out of tin and celluloid. But sales were so disappointing—in large part due to the ancient nature of Hetty’s jokes—that after the catalogue of 1933 even this cheapjack successor was put to rest, with Hetty Mueller vanishing once more into obscurity.

The relatively brief heyday of Dr. Mueller’s Panoptical Cartoon Engine—the thirty years from 1875 to 1905—represented a golden time when every citizen of the globe with a small sum of cash could personally generate his or her own “comic cuts,” experiencing the dual pleasures of artist and audience. And thanks to the site you are now visiting, such delights are once again available to the masses, albeit only in virtual, cybernetic form.