The Extraordinary Life And Death of Alexander Groats, part one

At the age of four, Alexander Groats (1882–1906) learned learned to speak and write perfect Greek and Latin, but when he was sent to Mrs Henderson's school for gifted children a year later he had already abandoned languages for mechanics, and for the rest of his short but glorious life he would only communicate with grunts and obscene hand gestures.

He built his first steam engine during his first term in Mrs Hendersons school and spent the second term in detention. He left the school shortly thereafter and moved into his parents’ attic, where he would spend most of the following seven years. Here. he built working scale models of steamships and locomotives, some of which featured improvements of his own invention that have only recently been discovered by the scientific community and which even now are considered significantly better than the current design. He also built steam-powered clocks and household appliances, including a prototype of the revolving umbrella stand which was recently introduced on the market by Cornelius Finch, Ltd.

We do not know when his restless mind first turned to automation, but even some of his earliest miniature trains and ships display unsettling details like ears, fingers or, in one case, a pair of fully formed breasts on the prow of a six-foot steamship. It is commonly believed that at the age of ten young Alexander had already built several mechanical statues, which could move forwards and backwards, and a small brass monkey which could eat and digest small fruits and nuts and write letters from dictation. This item is of special significance not only for its high level of detail, but also because it seems to suggest something of a return towards language, if he intended to use it himself, or towards interaction with other people if he intended it for others. This return, however, must have been of relatively short duration, because his oldest sister Catherine, who is our best source for information about this period of Alexander’s life, only mentions that he sometimes did not seem to use quite as many rude gestures as usual when she brought him his food (she confirms that from the day he left school and for the rest of his life he only ate raisins and only drank almond milk).

His parents appear to have taken no notice of their son’s activities during this period, and it is reported that his father was sometimes uncertain how many children he had. This has made some scholars suggest that Alexander had begun to build his more life-like human automatons and that they were already so well made that it was difficult to tell them apart from real children. Such a conclusion seems highly unlikely, however, seeing that his sister saved all receipts from this period and they show no purchases of silk, plaster and oil paint, the materials he would use for his early androids, nor of any of the more esoteric materials he favoured when he had all but perfected his art.

It is commonly believed that these were the happiest years of young Alexander's life, and we can only speculate about how his future — and dare we say our future? – had turned out had it not been for the intervention of fate.