![]() ![]() As of 2015, a version of the coin snatching black box is being sold as the "Black Box Money Trap Bank" or "Black Box Bank". Seuss") over copyright issues related to figurines.) īoth the plain black box and the bank version were widely sold by Spencer Gifts, and appeared in its mail-order catalogs through the 1960s and early 1970s. (Both companies were later to be co-defendants in landmark litigation initiated by Theodor Geisel ("Dr. Whiteman, owner and president of Liberty Library Corporation, also claims credit for developing "The Thing". He then added the coin snatching feature, dubbed his invention "The Thing", arranged licensing with the producers of the television show, The Addams Family, and later sold "Uncle Fester's Mystery Light Bulb" as another show spinoff product. It is claimed that Don Poynter, who graduated from the University of Cincinnati in 1949 and founded Poynter Products, Inc., first produced and sold the "Little Black Box", which simply switched itself off. In their conceptually purest form, these machines do nothing except switch themselves off. This version may have been inspired in part by " Thing", the disembodied hand featured in the television sitcom The Addams Family. In the 1960s, a novelty toy maker called "Captain Co." sold a "Monster Inside the Black Box", featuring a mechanical hand that emerged from a featureless plastic black box and flipped a toggle switch, turning itself off. ![]() Minsky also invented a "gravity machine" that would ring a bell if the gravitational constant were to change, a theoretical possibility that is not expected to occur in the foreseeable future. Clarke later wrote, "There is something unspeakably sinister about a machine that does nothing-absolutely nothing-except switch itself off", and he was fascinated by the concept. He kept one on his desk, where science fiction author Arthur C. Minsky's mentor at Bell Labs, information theory pioneer Claude Shannon (who later also became an MIT professor), made his own versions of the machine. The device has also been called the "Leave Me Alone Box". Minsky dubbed his invention the "ultimate machine", but that sense of the term did not catch on. The version of the useless machine that became famous in information theory (basically a box with a simple switch which, when turned "on", causes a hand or lever to appear from inside the box that switches the machine "off" before disappearing inside the box again ) appears to have been invented by MIT professor and artificial intelligence pioneer Marvin Minsky, while he was a graduate student at Bell Labs in 1952.
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