The Mechanical Wonders of a Human Hand

Dr. Eugene Elliott and I were discussing the restoration of the world’s oldest tools the other day over lunch. About 40% of his surgical practice is devoted to repairing people’s hands because of functional breakdowns owing to disease or injury.

Although Elliott employs the most advanced electronic devices in his work, he was amused (and gratified) by the fact that he repairs those most ancient of mechanical devices--human hands.

“The art,” he said, “is putting the hand back together and making it work again.” He likened it to restoring some mechanical device of a century ago. “Yes, I’m still operating in the old, golden age of mechanics,” he chuckled.

The act of simply bending one’s forefinger into the palm, he said, is a “marvel of mechanical ingenuity.”

He explained that two tendons, which pass under two sets of pulleys to create a mechanical advantage, not to mention the complex articulation of the joints, are involved in bending the finger. Straightening the finger involves a separate intricate system, he pointed out.

“The whole system involved in a single finger is so finally balanced that if any part of the system, through injury or disease, breaks down, the whole finger becomes unbalanced,” he said.

And then we talked about that era when mechanisms reached their highest peak--the 19th Century, the Victorian era, when people actually flocked to theaters to be entertained by marvelous mechanical figures or dolls, called automata. These automata were chiefly constructed and exhibited by magicians, such as Jean Eugene Robert-Houdin of Paris, a former master clock maker, and John Nevil Maskelyne of London, an expert mechanic.

These men invented and manufactured automata that played musical instruments, wrote and drew pictures, played chess and card games--sometimes winning--with members of the audience, and performed acrobatic feats.

Elliott was particularly fascinated by an automaton named Psycho, made and exhibited by Maskelyne in 1875. Psycho, now in the collection of the Museum of London, played whist with human players. The ingenuity of the mechanical construction of the brass and wooden hand of the automaton, which deftly picked up and played playing cards, had astonished Elliott.

He said he dreams of adding such a skillful mechanical figure to a display in his Fountain Valley office, next to the beautifully crafted and articulated antique wooden hand, which he believes was owned by a glove manufacturer.

We speculated over the future of the human hand, now that it is becoming increasingly common in the workplace for our cerebral commands to order us merely to push a button in our computerized, electronic age.

“A lot of ancient skills are being taken from the hand,” he observed. “An artisan today is a specialist. You’ve got to seek him out. He’s certainly not on nearly every street as he was during the Industrial Age.”

I agreed to introduce him to a certain artisan named John Gaughan, a Los Angeles manufacturer of custom-built magic apparatus. Gaughan, whose skilled hands follow cerebral commands of the past century, is one of the few men in the world today who understands and can repair the Victorian magicians’ automata.

“At any rate, Gaughan’s hands as sophisticated mechanical tools are among the surviving artifacts that function properly as they used to,” he remarked.

“Yes, I’m sure we’ll never see it, but someday in the far future the hand may undergo changes genetically,” he said, “altering its capacity to function as a sophisticated tool because of its longtime limited use as a button pusher. It’s an interesting conjecture.”

Then he was silent for a moment, mulling a thought.

“You know,” he said, “it’s a medical fact that when the hand breaks down, or a finger is merely placed in a splint for a few days, the finger’s or the hand’s mechanical functions revert back to 40,000-year-old man.”

Could that be what future disuse will do to the world’s oldest tools? It was a chilling thought.