The founding of Aladdin Autoengineering Corporation is Dan Davis’s attempt to build a new future through engineering after returning to 1970. With John and Jenny Sutton, he develops practical automata and a company designed to commercialize them, carrying forward the technical ideas behind Hired Girl while changing how he shares responsibility and control. The venture’s origin lies as much in standard components, patent strategy, and the limits of available technology as in Dan’s inventiveness.

From household automation to a new venture

Dan’s earlier work on Hired Girl had taught him that an automaton did not need a humanlike mind to perform useful work. Its Thorsen tubes could record an operation demonstrated by hand and repeat it; hunting circuits could help a machine respond to changing conditions. The system’s apparent judgment remained a programmed search and response, not human understanding. For repetitive work, that distinction was no obstacle: a machine could learn a household routine and carry it out without constant supervision.

The first Hired Girl also showed how technical novelty became a product. Dan assembled existing devices and control ideas into a working system, drawing on an “Electric Turtles” pattern, a memory circuit from a guided missile, and cleaning mechanisms from equipment including an army-hospital floor polisher. He argued that the invention lay in how the parts were combined, while the legally required “spark of genius” depended on obtaining a good patent lawyer. The earlier business had made the lesson tangible: a capable invention still needed an arrangement that could be built and sold.

That lesson informs the new company’s approach to automation. Dan explains that Thorsen tubes can store a manually guided procedure so the machine can repeat it, while additional circuits interrupt or redirect the basic routine when conditions differ from the recorded cycle. This makes the machine’s flexibility a product of programmed operations and control circuits, rather than a human mind. The approach is especially suited to tasks that can be taught and repeated, even as Dan recognizes that some jobs require more intricate choices.

Building the machines

After settling into a small loft in the old commercial district, Dan chooses to make Drafting Dan before rebuilding Flexible Frank. The immediate problem is time: designing with a compass and T-square would consume too much of it. His revised all-purpose automaton becomes Protean Pete, a machine linked to perform a wide range of human tasks when properly instructed through its Thorsen tubes. Dan expects that this general-purpose design will eventually give way to specialized descendants, but he wants the patent claims to be as broad as possible.

Dan does not treat a patent as sufficient proof of commercial value. Although working models are not required for patent applications, he wants models that function reliably and can demonstrate their usefulness and economy in production. The work is slow as well as fast: he knows what he intends to build, but initially lacks both a proper machine shop and assistance. He eventually rents machine tools; by September, both models work properly, and he is ready to prepare drawings and descriptions. He uses standard catalogue components wherever possible, while arranging custom speckle-lacquer covers and chrome-plated external moving parts. Those finishing jobs are the only work he sends out, and their cost matters because his cash is limited.

The earlier Hired Girl provides a concrete precedent for this emphasis on manufacturability. Its production engineering reduced a machine assembled from diverse technologies to standard parts ordered from a catalogue, except for two three-dimensional cams and one printed circuit. Dan subcontracted the circuit and made the cams in a shed using war-surplus automated tools. He and Miles Gentry initially formed the whole assembly line, fitting, filing, and painting parts by hand. The pilot model cost $4,317.09; the first hundred units cost just over $39 each and were sold to a Los Angeles discount house for $60, before retailing at $85. Consignment sales and the near-starvation of the fledgling business preceded a two-page feature in Life that brought the orders—and the need for more assembly help.

The contrast between that first operation and Aladdin is not simply one of scale. Hired Girl had demonstrated that a machine could sell if it worked without supervision, but it also exposed the financial strain between prototype and receipts. Dan now insists on models that can show not only that the machines work, but that their design makes them plausible investments to manufacture. The practical demonstration is part of the business case.

Partners, patents, and company identity

John takes over much of the work that can free Dan to concentrate on engineering. Jenny types descriptions, and John retains a patent attorney to help frame the claims. Dan leaves the details of the shares to John, including how the partners divide ownership. That choice contrasts with Dan’s earlier insistence on keeping majority control of Hired Girl: he had supplied most of the savings and all of its inventiveness and engineering, while recognizing that Miles brought business ability. With John, Dan says he does not want to be occupied by business decisions and trusts him to make them; he also believes that giving John that responsibility will guard against a recurrence of the temptation that damaged the former partnership.

Dan does, however, set two conditions. The firm must be called Aladdin Autoengineering Corporation, rather than Davis & Sutton, and its home office must be in Los Angeles. He imagines an Aladdin rubbing his lamp, with a genie appearing above him, as the company trademark. The name and image frame engineering as the practical conjuring of useful mechanisms, but the choice of headquarters is grounded in industrial conditions rather than symbolism.

John challenges the Los Angeles decision because he expects to run the company and asks why it should not be based in Denver. Dan argues that a factory in the Denver area could be overtaken by an expanding federal enclave, forcing the firm out of business until it could re-establish itself elsewhere. He also cites scarce labor, overland transport for raw materials, and the gray-market status of building materials. Los Angeles, by contrast, offers skilled workers, a seaport, and a growing supply of labor. His proposed location is a production strategy: the machines’ success will depend on access to workers and materials as well as on their design.

Jenny’s contribution shifts the discussion from industrial logistics to the life the move might make possible. She has been quietly knitting while the others talk, and when she puts it down, Dan recognizes that she has something to add. She does not insist that she would never return to Boulder; instead, she says that moving would allow them to join the Oakdale Club, where they could swim outdoors throughout the year. Her recollection of seeing ice on the pool at Boulder makes the proposed relocation a question of everyday life as well as business.

Timing, cost, and the venture’s significance

Dan’s account repeatedly makes technological timing part of the engineering problem. At a later stage in his work, he explains that he had not voice-coded the first Flexible Frank because the analyzer and telephone exchange needed for speech recognition would have outweighed, enlarged, and cost more than the rest of the machine. He sees Eager Beaver as evidence of new possibilities, but understands that he must learn further techniques of miniaturization and simplification before attempting them. The example of Professor Langley, whose flying machine lacked the supporting technology of its time, and Leonardo da Vinci, whose concepts could not be built, gives a historical frame to Dan’s rule: engineering depends on the state of the art, not genius in isolation.

Aladdin’s beginnings are therefore connected to both ambition and restraint. Dan wants broad patent claims and a general-purpose automaton, yet he knows that the future will bring specialized machines and that engineering projects must wait for the enabling technology. He also grounds the company in standardized components, demonstrable working models, and a location chosen for labor and transport. The venture translates an inventor’s ideas into a coordinated system of designs, patents, production, and commercial judgment.

The partnership is tested by the cost of getting that system underway. Dan stays with John and Jenny until the evening of December 2, 1970, the last possible moment, and must borrow $3,000 from John after paying scandalously high prices for components. He offers a stock mortgage as security. John lets him sign it, then tears it up and drops it into a wastebasket, telling him to pay when he can. Dan says repayment will take thirty years. The gesture does not erase the company’s financial pressure; it shows the trust on which its launch also depends.

In retrospect, Dan’s return to the past does not simply restore his former life or reproduce his first company. Aladdin gives him another chance to build, now with John and Jenny’s practical support and with a clearer account of the conditions that turn invention into a viable enterprise. Its founding joins technical ingenuity to labor, materials, patents, commercial demonstration, domestic choices, and friendship. The result is a new beginning whose promise rests not on a miraculous machine alone, but on the people and production system capable of bringing it into the world.