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Presented in glorious Mech-O-Vision, Silentic Schematic |
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The subtle crackling polystyrene, Parting slowly as I tear it, Inside each soft round hard edged robot Like arrows shot from whisker biscuit Slowly I immerse its body Into my unsweetened coffee I realise That heaven lies In a Tin Pin Patented Silentic. |
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| Card 9 0f 600. Silentic. |
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| Late night ozone crepitates over yellow tube eyes, unmoving unless moved, like Adam, created from dust, the unshaped form of Silentic sits. Where do we place our inherited innocence? Certainly not in our ego, where sin is treasured, love is conditional and we wait for death whilst wishing death on all others. For to see a body is to see death, built with a phenomenalistic mind, encased in unconscious guilt. Surely the only place must be in the young, where the title innocent goes hand in hand. And when the young grow old we look to animals, our or others pets, we pat and love with no hesitation. And when their short lives are laid aside Silentic is there, non judging, a relic lit from within. Whose time with us will outlast, outlive, outside. Until the day we reclaim what is rightfully ours. |
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Schematic of the amazing Torchey! |
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Card Number 4 in Popular Mechanoids Premium Trading Cards, Red Series. |
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Some details about Cycloptoids classic power plant.
A good old fashioned 2800 cylinder radial engine, (1400 cylinders placed back to back), each row of pistons slightly offset from the previous, forming a semi-helical arrangement to facilitate efficient mercury flow cooling.A mechanical gear-driven triple stage variable speed centrifugal type supercharger provide forced induction, whilst some models have been fitted with 200 Gyro brand Turbo chargers. |
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| Card Number 5 in the Popular Mechanoid Premium Swap Card Series Cycloptoid! |
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| One of Cycloptoids most talked about mysteries is the overwhelming memory capacity provided. Upon initial inspection one might assume it is to complement the extremely robust, long life Rev/Rip Hull. But realisation how maintenance-intensive such a heavy duty suit is reawakens the debate immediately. The second justification may arise in the exceptional environments such a machine would find itself. Unmapped, unique, data intensive milieu needing minute clarification, then classification. A quantum of options to sift and decide, every moment...but.....this observation could all be done on a dinner plate, served up to as many hungry satellite drives as needed. To be digested at leisure by such smaller devices still, and just as accurately as an apparatus so large in quantity, and hungry in power ,that 75% of motivation available is used to simply move this memory around. And so we arrive back, a little late, slightly thirsty and certainly slighted, to this original quandary... why? Why so much, so long, and at such cost. Certainly a life form with these criteria would not last one generation, before buckling under its own weight, suffocated by its own corpulence. For it is this final, strange blade that cuts past every casual enquiry, and sits quivering inches from Cycloptoids very heart,.. entropy. That strange inevitability that ensures the very state of its organised, regimented memory will secure the eventual flight into chaos, as sure as a stars giant gravity will be the strength behind its collapse. Surely this was known to the engineers, building essentially into their own creation unnecessary, almost cruel, redundancy. How many Cycloptoids roam now, witness to the wonders of the Universe and time itself, unable to articulate even their own name. |
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| Number 2 from the Popular Mechanoids Red series: Carbo Cut-Away! |
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| Carbo Cut-Away card back |
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| The Popular Mechanoids Trading Card Series allowed some robots exposure they would otherwise never have experienced. This manifested in various manner, the most renowned being Ocular 7 (Red Series Card Number 742) Becoming Automaton magazine's Gear of the Year in 1952. Starring lead in the classic film, Attack of Contraptica. Finally, becoming the subject of avant garde artist Anti-Warp Hol-o-graph's acclaimed 'Fragmentions' series (sample seen above). Ocular 7 went on to blaze a trail of independence for Mechanoids everywhere. The first to patent his own chemical formula, (Silica Eye Lubricant) , the first to own his own electrical sovereignty, and perhaps most significantly, the first licensed mechanoid to register as a free citizen of the Earth. |
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| Third of 600 in Popular Mechanoids Red Series of Trading Cards. This robot is built with vision including a negative lens, positive cornea, and mono focusing (allowing each 'eye' precise focus and high magnification). To recreate stereoscopic vision, Torchey uses a geometrical system, tracing paraxial rays of light through his optical axis to conclude relative distance, much like a chameleon. This ability does away with the need to turn, and considering the dereliction of any functioning neck mechanism, suits Torchey just fine. |
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An experiment several years ago using interferometry saw eight Torcheys combining their amazing capacity to focus, cumulating in a picture of the known universe so beautiful that several scientists observing had to leave the room. |
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| Early one-sheet printing of Lampreys 33's Trading Card inserts. Many discrepancies are shown between these and the updated Popular Mechanoids Premium Swap Cards, including backgrounds, the robot's details on the card backs, and even some names of particular mechanoids. |
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| Lampreys common parent company, with Popular Mechanoids Publishing, Tin Pin Toys, licensed this set of cards essentially to promote their range of newly released domestic and industrial robots. Ambitious executives, eager for share growth, jumped the gun on many of the companies yet to be registered Mechs. Card 18, for example, Helidron, was still a military secret when the first nicotate stained fingers pulled from their highly addictive packet of Lampreys a card containing fully detailed specifications of what, at the time, was a Government sponsored, covert and arcane killing machine. |
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Tin Pins Trading Card strategy to segment, then target through promotion, was both a success and disaster for the company in the 1930s. Although much was known about the public's buying habits, their perception of consumerism in an age where up to 80% of sales were made face to face, 60% of household items were often hand made, or included hand made parts, and a disastrous 70% were a once in a lifetime purchase, little was understood about the unconscious guilt driven and pleasure seeking motives for non essential and luxury goods. For a company based on a six month 'concept to sales floor' time frame, and an even more radical two year product life span, this was an age that, to the Tin Pin Board of Directors, seemed mired in the languid quicksand of sensible, quality based trade. A nightmare for the intended 'buy now, buy later' philosophy they expected to drop surreptitiously into civilisation's Martini
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| On reflection, whilst Tin Pins greed based, military funded, technological thrust in the early half of the Twentieth Century can be seen as an amoral assault on all that is good and decent, it also provided many with the means for a quality of life hitherto undreamt of. Buying power increased, tools capable of phenomenal work were placed into the hands of the righteous, wrong doers and indifferent alike. Ecological disasters, now spawned by few, where once many would have had to have laboured, communities saved in the palm of a hand, or from the size of a suitcase. And armies laid low with the flick of a wrist, and the age of a child. All these events must be weighed by history, and judged in tomorrow, before we will truly know what to write on the headstone that is Tin Pin Toys Incorporated. |
