Release women from domestic automation

Dan Davis’s idea of a “Second Emancipation Proclamation” gives his household inventions a social purpose: to relieve women of repetitive domestic labor by making machines do the work. His vision is both expansive and deliberately practical. It challenges the assumption that housework is women’s natural, inexhaustible responsibility, yet it takes shape through devices designed for particular chores, affordable manufacture, and the engineering knowledge available at the time.

A domestic problem treated as an engineering one

Davis regards the home as a conspicuous holdout from automation. Factories and infrastructure are adopting machines, while housework remains organized around cleaning, cooking, and childcare. He argues that women’s magazines’ language about labor-saving homes has not produced a genuine transformation: the kitchens and living spaces they celebrate still reflect arrangements little changed from earlier centuries. The contrast is not simply between modern machinery and old-fashioned rooms. In Davis’s account, technological progress has bypassed a large body of repetitive work because domestic life is treated as a private sphere rather than an engineering problem.

His diagnosis carries an uncomfortable gendered edge. Davis describes housewives as attached to the fantasy of domestic servants who would perform long hours of poorly paid work, and says the name Hired Girl was meant to evoke the exploited immigrant girl whom his grandmother bullied. The machine’s name therefore preserves the social history it is supposed to displace: household convenience had often depended on another woman’s labor. His answer is not to restore that labor in mechanical form as an unquestioned servant, but to make the work itself a target for automation.

From Hired Girl to a larger ambition

Hired Girl, Mark One, makes the proposal tangible on a limited scale. It is essentially an improved vacuum cleaner, but its decisive feature is that it cleans without supervision. It can sweep, mop, vacuum, or polish, selecting among those routines with memory tapes; it picks up objects larger than a BB shot and puts them in a tray for a person to sort. Moving in search curves through rooms, it avoids occupied spaces unless someone signals that it may enter. The early model must return to its stall for a quick charge around dinner time. This is not yet a mechanical housekeeper capable of managing a household, but it makes one recurring chore less dependent on a person’s attention.

The device’s novelty lies less in any single component than in how Davis combines existing ones. He adapts a basic roaming pattern from “Electric Turtles,” uses a memory circuit taken from a guided missile, and assembles cleaning mechanisms and linkages from equipment including a hospital floor polisher, a soft-drink dispenser, and remote-handling devices used in atomic facilities. Standard parts make the design buildable; two three-dimensional cams and a printed circuit are exceptions, and Davis makes the cams himself in a shed used as a factory. The account makes invention a matter of recombination and production engineering as well as individual ingenuity.

The first production figures show why a liberating idea had to survive the economics of an ordinary appliance. The pilot Hired Girl cost $4,317.09; the first hundred cost a little over $39 each. Davis and Miles Gentry sold them to a Los Angeles discount house for $60, where they retailed for $85. They could not afford promotion and accepted consignment terms; receipts began to arrive only after Life published a two-page feature. Commercial success allowed Davis to move from improving Hired Girl and organizing an assembly line to imagining a more general-purpose domestic machine.

The general-purpose servant and its limits

Davis’s next ambition is Flexible Frank: one machine that can perform the range of work otherwise divided among specialized household devices and human helpers. He imagines a couple buying a single machine for roughly the price of a good automobile, able to clean and cook but also change a baby’s diaper or replace a typewriter ribbon. He calls the prospect a “Second Emancipation Proclamation,” explicitly connecting household automation to women’s freedom from what he calls age-old domestic slavery. The phrase gives practical engineering an unusually broad social claim: the object is not only to save time on one chore, but to make the endlessly recurring burden of housework less compulsory.

The proposed scope is ambitious but not limitless. Frank need not eat, sleep, play cards, or answer the telephone; Davis notes that a telephone device is already available for rent. Nor must it answer the door, since new houses are being equipped with door-answering devices. It must, however, handle the housework after a card game, prepare food, make beds, and tend babies by monitoring their breathing and summoning someone if it changes. Davis describes the machine as needing hands, eyes, ears, and a sufficiently capable brain, while making clear that it is not meant to be a human being. He wants a docile, limited system for repetitive tasks, not a mechanical person.

That distinction shapes his use of Thorsen memory tubes. A machine can be guided through an operation once, with the tube retaining the procedure so it can be repeated without a human supervisor. Side circuits search for conditions within set limits and interrupt the stored routine when circumstances do not match it. Davis calls this functional “judgment” rather than judgment in a human sense: the machine can follow and adjust a programmed cycle, but he does not regard it as possessing human judgment. His example is dishwashing. After being shown how to clear a table, scrape dishes, and load a dishwasher, a machine could repeat the procedure; with a duplicated memory tube, it could handle dirty dishes on its first encounter without breaking one.

The promise is consequently tied to the limits of the art as much as to Davis’s ambition. Flexible Frank must be built largely from standard parts and require no new scientific principles; basic research, he acknowledges, is beyond the reach of one engineer. When he first constructs the machine, it has no voice control: buttons on its control board are more practicable because the analyzer and telephone exchange needed for voice commands would outweigh and cost more than the rest of the machine. Davis delays that feature rather than treating a desired capability as if it were already technically or economically available. Automation advances, in his formulation, when the supporting technologies are ready.

Inventions, adaptation, and the promise of release

Davis later returns to the project under changed circumstances. In 1970, after renting a small loft and equipping it with a drafting table, workbench, and army cot, he builds Drafting Dan first because designing by compass and T-square wastes time. He then rebuilds Flexible Frank as Protean Pete, an all-purpose automaton capable of many human tasks if properly instructed through Thorsen tubes. He expects later descendants to divide into specialized devices but wants the patent claims to cover the broader design. Working models matter to him not merely as illustrations: they must function convincingly and demonstrate that the inventions can be produced economically. By September, after working largely without help and renting machine tools, he has both models operating properly.

The names and successive forms mark a tension in the emancipatory project. Hired Girl borrows the language of domestic service; Flexible Frank imagines a single versatile substitute for a stable of specialized helpers; Protean Pete extends that general-purpose idea, even as Davis expects future specialization. Across these designs, the repeated objective is to remove the human worker from drudgery, but the machines do not abolish domestic tasks themselves. They reorganize who—or what—performs them, and their usefulness depends on reliable mechanisms, suitable components, affordable production, and the ability to repair them.

Davis’s promise is therefore neither a fully realized social transformation nor merely a slogan attached to appliances. It is an engineering program directed at work that he believes has been neglected, and an argument that domestic labor should not be treated as women’s inevitable lot. Its force comes from holding the large claim beside the specific design choices: a machine that can clean without supervision, a memory tube that repeats a routine, an unbuilt voice feature deferred until miniaturization makes it practical. The “proclamation” begins not with the disappearance of housework, but with the insistence that its burdens are reducible by design.