Founding Aladdin Autoengineering and arranging the company's operations

The founding of the Aladdin Autoengineering Corporation is Dan Davis’s second attempt to convert engineering into a durable business: this time he pairs his inventions with a trusted partner’s commercial and legal judgment. In a cramped rented loft, he builds working models of Drafting Dan and Protean Pete; John and Jenny Sutton take on the patent, corporate, and organizational work that Dan knows he cannot manage alone. The arrangement also reflects a lesson from his earlier company: a machine’s marketable promise depends not just on invention, but on production engineering, available technology, and the people who can bring it to market.

From a rented loft to working models

On Tuesday, May 5, 1970, Jenny drove Dan around, and he rented a small loft in the old commercial district. He furnished it with a drafting table, workbench, army cot, and little else. Though the space had electricity, gas, and running water, its toilet stopped up easily. Dan was short of money and intent on spending only what the work required.

He first built Drafting Dan, a drafting machine, because the conventional compass-and-T-square process was consuming time he could not spare. He then rebuilt Flexible Frank as Protean Pete, an all-purpose automaton linked to perform a broad range of human tasks when properly instructed through Thorsen tubes. Dan expected Protean Pete’s descendants eventually to divide into specialized machines, but wanted claims broad enough to cover the more general design. The work was aimed at both practical demonstration and future commercial reach.

Patent drawings and descriptions did not legally require working models, but Dan wanted models that would work reliably and could be demonstrated to prospective backers. Their practical operation and economical design, he reasoned, would show not merely that the inventions could function but that they might be worthwhile investments. That distinction mattered in a patent system crowded with devices that worked yet had no commercial value.

Engineering within the available state of the art

The new venture’s inventions grew from the recombination of existing techniques, not from wholly unprecedented components. Dan had earlier described Hired Girl as assembled from a prowl pattern drawn from the “Electric Turtles” discussed in Scientific American, a memory circuit taken from a guided missile, and cleaning mechanisms adapted from equipment including a hospital floor polisher, a soft-drink dispenser, and remote “hands” used in atomic facilities. In his account, the distinctive achievement lay in how the parts were put together—and in securing a patent lawyer capable of protecting that combination.

Production engineering had been equally decisive. Hired Girl could be built largely from standard catalogue parts, with only two three-dimensional cams and a printed circuit requiring special work. Dan made the cams himself with war-surplus automated tools, while the circuit was subcontracted. The pilot model cost $4,317.09; the first hundred units cost a little over $39 each and went to a Los Angeles discount house for $60, where they sold for $85. Consignment sales, lack of money for promotion, and near-starvation preceded a two-page feature in Life that generated enough demand to require more assembly help. This earlier experience informed Dan’s insistence that the new prototypes demonstrate economy and manufacturability as well as function.

Dan’s work with automata also depended on the limits of the period’s available technology. Thorsen tubes could record an operation demonstrated under manual control and reproduce it later without supervision; additional hunting circuits could search for specified conditions and interrupt a stored routine when circumstances differed. For household work, that meant a machine could learn a task such as clearing and loading dirty dishes and repeat it without breaking them. But the technology still imposed practical constraints: when Dan first built Flexible Frank, he left out voice control because the analyzer and telephone exchange required would have outweighed, enlarged, and cost more than the rest of the machine. He recognized that engineering depended on the broader state of the art, not ingenuity alone. Drafting Dan and Protean Pete were built with catalogue-available standard components, while rented machine tools compensated for the lack of a proper shop; Dan even paid for speckled lacquer covers and chrome-plated moving parts, although he disliked spending money on custom finishing.

Delegating the business

By the time the two models worked properly, Dan understood that he needed help beyond the workshop. He described himself as a good engineer and a passable improvised mechanic, but not a businessman. Patent law, incorporation, and financing were all necessary, and he asked John whether he knew a capable, honest patent specialist. Dan was also pressed for time: he could not alter the schedule that would take him back to the time from which he had come.

Dan asked John to handle everything. John took over the business arrangements, Jenny typed descriptions, and John retained a patent attorney to help formulate the claims. Dan left the allocation of shares and other corporate decisions to John, explaining that it freed him for engineering and that he trusted John not to repeat the betrayal Dan associated with Miles Gentry. Dan said money itself did not matter to him so long as his confidence in John and Jenny was justified. The division of labor was therefore also a deliberate choice about trust: Dan retained responsibility for invention, while the Suttons organized the structure needed to protect and commercialize it.

Name, trademark, and location

Dan reserved two decisions for himself. The company had to be called the Aladdin Autoengineering Corporation, rather than John’s suggested Davis & Sutton. Its trademark, Dan specified, would show Aladdin rubbing his lamp with a genie appearing above him; he offered to make a rough sketch. The name and image gave the firm a recognizable identity tied to the familiar promise that a device might bring its user a useful, seemingly effortless service.

He also insisted that the home office be in Los Angeles. John objected that he expected to run the company and preferred Denver, asking what was wrong with it. Dan’s argument was practical and shaped by local conditions: a factory in Denver might be overtaken by an expanding federal enclave and forced to suspend operations while relocating. He also cited scarce labor, overland delivery of raw materials, and building materials available only on the gray market. Los Angeles, by contrast, had a deep and growing supply of skilled workers and seaport access. John raised smog as a counterargument; Dan predicted that it would be controlled and pointed out that Denver was developing smog of its own.

A second model of invention and enterprise

The episode contrasts Dan’s first industrial venture with the organization he now chooses. Hired Girl began when Dan and Miles Gentry supplied both labor and makeshift production capacity, and its launch depended on tight costs, consignment selling, and eventually publicity. For the new corporation, Dan still treats economical construction and demonstrable performance as essential, but he does not try to carry every business responsibility himself. He gives John control over the corporate details and protects his own limited time for building and documenting the machines.

The company’s origin is thus presented as a coordination of invention, standard components, patent expertise, financing, labor, and location. Dan’s broad conception of Protean Pete anticipates later specialization, while his insistence on workable prototypes and commercial economy connects that vision to what can actually be built and sold. The venture is not simply a declaration of engineering genius: it is an effort to make the surrounding business arrangements serve the invention, with trust in John and Jenny replacing the divided loyalties that had damaged Dan’s earlier enterprise.