Speaker 1: Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio.
Speaker 1: Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host,
Speaker 1: Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with iHeart Radio and
Speaker 1: I love all things tech. And it is Monday, May
Speaker 1: Memorial Day, which means it's holiday here in the United States,
Speaker 1: and because of that, I am actually taking the day off,
Speaker 1: and so rather than having a new episode for you,
Speaker 1: this is an episode that originally aired on a different holiday,
Speaker 1: the fourth of July, back in two thousand eighteen, and
Speaker 1: it is titled tech Stuff Moments with Mr Lincoln because
Speaker 1: I think of Memorial Days being like the beginning of
Speaker 1: the summer season, and for me, summers were often coupled
Speaker 1: with trips to Disney World because I lived in Georgia,
Speaker 1: Florida was not that away, and my sister and I
Speaker 1: were fanatics. So sit back, enjoy this episode, and on Wednesday,
Speaker 1: We're going to continue our story about the very complicated
Speaker 1: evolution of Warner Medium, and I'll chat with you a
Speaker 1: little bit at the end of the episode. This episode
Speaker 1: is to publish on the fourth of July two thousand eighteen,
Speaker 1: and here in the United States that date is treated
Speaker 1: with some reverence as we consider it Independence Day. And
Speaker 1: back in seventeen seventy six, the Continental Congress representing the
Speaker 1: thirteen colonies of the America's declared those colonies a new
Speaker 1: nation called the United States of America. But that actually
Speaker 1: happened on July two, seventeen seventy six. John Adams was
Speaker 1: convinced that that was going to be the day we
Speaker 1: all celebrated. As it turned out, we decided to do
Speaker 1: it on July four, because that was the day the
Speaker 1: Declaration of Independence, that famous document outlining America's arguments for
Speaker 1: seceding on the British Empire was dated, was dated on
Speaker 1: July four, seventy six. Also, um, despite what popular musical
Speaker 1: numbers would have you believe, it's mostly likely that that
Speaker 1: most of the representatives did not sign the Declaration of
Speaker 1: Independence that day. They probably did it on August two,
Speaker 1: seventeen seventy six. But never mind all that, The fourth
Speaker 1: of July is when the US celebrates Independence Day. Whenever
Speaker 1: it happened doesn't matter. It just matters when we celebrate it.
Speaker 1: And in the past on tech stuff, I've tried to
Speaker 1: time vaguely related topics to that date. Whenever we've published
Speaker 1: on or around the fourth of July. We've talked about
Speaker 1: the tech of say Independence Day, the movie, or like Fireworks,
Speaker 1: and today I want to talk about a Disneyland attraction
Speaker 1: called Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln, because I feel that's
Speaker 1: sort of quintessentially American, even though Lincoln was our sixteenth
Speaker 1: president and governed in the nineteenth century, not the eighteenth century,
Speaker 1: but never America, right, And you know, they're talking about Disneyland,
Speaker 1: something that is truly a piece of Americana, and Great
Speaker 1: Moments with Mr Lincoln is located on Main Street, USA.
Speaker 1: That was Walt Disney's monument to the classic Americana, a
Speaker 1: small town almost like an America that never was an
Speaker 1: idealized America. So I figured it was a good topic
Speaker 1: to cover in this episode. Now I have done an
Speaker 1: episode about audio animatronics in the past, and I'm going
Speaker 1: to be covering some of that ground again here. But
Speaker 1: we're specifically looking at the development of the Mr. Lincoln
Speaker 1: attraction in this episode, so I'm not going to focus
Speaker 1: too much on the other stuff. I'll have some stuff
Speaker 1: to say about some of the predecessors, because that's important
Speaker 1: to understand in order to figure out how Mr Lincoln worked.
Speaker 1: So if you're unfamiliar with the attraction Great Moments with
Speaker 1: Mr Lincoln, here's kind of how it goes. You would
Speaker 1: go into a building, it's the Ground and Opera House
Speaker 1: on Main Street, USA and Disneyland, and you would see
Speaker 1: a little pre show piece before going into a theater,
Speaker 1: and you'd sit down. You get another little film, and
Speaker 1: then a screen would lift up and you would see
Speaker 1: seated center stage, the audio animatronic figure of Abraham Lincoln,
Speaker 1: and then Abraham Lincoln stands up out of his chair
Speaker 1: and speaks to the crowd. And the content and the
Speaker 1: technology of the attraction have changed several times throughout the years.
Speaker 1: In fact, these days you wouldn't call it audio animatronics
Speaker 1: at all. It's the only reason anyone would refer to
Speaker 1: it that way is just because that's what the technology
Speaker 1: had been called for years and years and years. But
Speaker 1: the current incarnation at Disneyland isn't really audio animatronic. It's
Speaker 1: not working on that same system. Now, before I talk
Speaker 1: about how it works, let's go into the history of
Speaker 1: audio animatronics and the development of this attraction in particular,
Speaker 1: because I think it's pretty fascinating to learn about not
Speaker 1: just the technology side, but the business side of this.
Speaker 1: So first we got to go back to nineteen That's
Speaker 1: when Walt Disney took his family on a vacation in Europe,
Speaker 1: and on that trip, Disney got enamored with some clockwork
Speaker 1: mechanical toys, including a mechanical little bird. You would wind
Speaker 1: it up and it with tweet and flap its wings
Speaker 1: and would move in a pretty convincing way. And he
Speaker 1: was inspired by that to take these toys back to
Speaker 1: his his folks over at Walt Disney Studios and say,
Speaker 1: you know, we've we've animated stuff on film. We've taken
Speaker 1: cells and we've drawn pictures on them, and we've taken
Speaker 1: photographs of that and turned it into a film where
Speaker 1: it looks like the inanimate is moving around. What if
Speaker 1: we did something similar, but we did it in the
Speaker 1: real world. We brought it into the three dimensions around us,
Speaker 1: and make make this idea sort of a grander scale.
Speaker 1: We're gonna take these little mechanical elements that I've seen
Speaker 1: here and make it something much bigger. So he returned
Speaker 1: to California, he brought ideas to his team of developers
Speaker 1: that we now today would call imagineers. That's a portmanteau
Speaker 1: of imagination and engineer, And he said, what if we
Speaker 1: were to make something like this but bigger? So in
Speaker 1: nineteen fifty one he gave an assignment to two of
Speaker 1: his employees, Roger Braggy and Wattle Rogers Uh. Roger Braggy
Speaker 1: was born in nineteen o eight in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, and
Speaker 1: he attended a vocational school and trained in machine shop work.
Speaker 1: He would relocate to Los Angeles and he found a
Speaker 1: lot of work in the film industry. He even developed
Speaker 1: technologies like a rear projection system for major movie studios,
Speaker 1: and in nineteen thirty nine he got an invitation to
Speaker 1: join the Walt Disney Studio as a precision machinist. One
Speaker 1: of his first jobs he had was to install the
Speaker 1: multiplane animation camera in the studio's brand new Burbank location. Now,
Speaker 1: this was a camera that consisted of not just a
Speaker 1: film camera, but also a massive frame, and that frame
Speaker 1: could hold multiple layers or planes of an animated cell.
Speaker 1: So you might have a foreground image, you might have
Speaker 1: a main image, you might have a couple of background images,
Speaker 1: and they would all be held at different heights relative
Speaker 1: to this camera lens, and then by moving the frames
Speaker 1: either closer to or further away from the camera, you
Speaker 1: can make elements within that animated scene appear to move
Speaker 1: at different speeds and give this illusion of depth. So
Speaker 1: it's almost like you're zooming in through an animated scene.
Speaker 1: And that was something that was really really innovative. Well, also,
Speaker 1: I should mention that Disney did not necessarily invent that
Speaker 1: one of his former employees more or less invented this
Speaker 1: approach of eyeworks, but that's a different story. Disney made
Speaker 1: extensive use of that technology when his studio made snow
Speaker 1: White in the Seven Dwarfs. By nine, Broggy had been
Speaker 1: promoted to the head of the studio machine shot, and
Speaker 1: when Walt started thinking about building a theme park, Braggy
Speaker 1: was one of his go to engineers for attractions. Rogers, meanwhile,
Speaker 1: was born in nineteen nineteen in Stratton, Colorado, and he
Speaker 1: studied art at an institute in Los Angeles. He became
Speaker 1: proficient in lots of different areas of art, including sculpting,
Speaker 1: so he joined the Walt Disney studio also in nineteen
Speaker 1: thirty nine, along with Braggy and Early on, he worked
Speaker 1: primarily as an animator on films like Pinocchio, Bambi, Cinderella,
Speaker 1: and Peter Pan. He also created props and managers for
Speaker 1: the studio's live action films, and like Braggy, he would
Speaker 1: be invited by Disney to work on attractions for the
Speaker 1: upcoming Disneyland theme park. So Walt Disney comes up to
Speaker 1: these two guys and he says, I want you to
Speaker 1: build me a figure approximately nine inches tall of a
Speaker 1: man that can move around like a human can, so
Speaker 1: sort of like a puppet, but not puppeteered by any
Speaker 1: person in real time. It would be an entire mechanical
Speaker 1: system that would be able to do this, and it
Speaker 1: was called Project little Man, so as to build a
Speaker 1: nine inch human figure that could move and and move
Speaker 1: its mouth as if it's talking, and be able to
Speaker 1: synchronize that with an actual voice track. And essentially he
Speaker 1: just wanted to bring that concept of animation into the
Speaker 1: real world. Buddy Ebsen, the actor who would become Jed
Speaker 1: Clampett in The Beverly Hillbillies, would come into the studio
Speaker 1: and he did this whole song and dance routine in
Speaker 1: front of a screen that was just a bunch of
Speaker 1: grid lines so that the animators had a reference they
Speaker 1: could work from. And Buddy would later say of Disney, quote,
Speaker 1: he took me to a room where there were these
Speaker 1: seven little guys with aprons and thick glasses working on
Speaker 1: a contrivance that pulled wires, and a little mechanical man
Speaker 1: that moved his arms, legs, head, and mouth end quote.
Speaker 1: So the two engineers lead this team. They used cables
Speaker 1: and cams and hinged limbs to create sort of a
Speaker 1: rudimentary muscle and skeletal system for this little figure, and
Speaker 1: the machinery would end up being underneath this little figures stage,
Speaker 1: so the whole thing was actually quite large. The figure
Speaker 1: was only nine inches tall, but the whole system was
Speaker 1: really big, and it wasn't really that dissimilar to a puppet,
Speaker 1: except again, the puppeteer was mechanical, not a human, and
Speaker 1: it was it was. It kind of worked, but it
Speaker 1: wasn't practical. Later, when it came time to look into
Speaker 1: making audio animatronics for theme park attractions, Broggy would actually
Speaker 1: go to All Disney and say that we should really
Speaker 1: create larger life sized figures. It would actually make it
Speaker 1: easier because you could fit a lot of the elements
Speaker 1: inside the figure itself instead of having to find places
Speaker 1: in the environment to hide all the mechanisms that would
Speaker 1: make the figure move. So this would serve as the
Speaker 1: genesis for a new field of innovation in Disney, which
Speaker 1: was audio and animatronics. The term is defined as being
Speaker 1: or consisting of a lifelike electro mechanical figure of a
Speaker 1: person or animal that has synchronized movement and sound. Although
Speaker 1: to be fair with the audio animatronics, it's synchronized to
Speaker 1: sound and it's not the sound you hear. Ha ha.
Speaker 1: So Walt Disney has this idea. He says, you know,
Speaker 1: we've got Disneyland. We're opening that up. What have we
Speaker 1: created a restaurant. Let's make a Chinese restaurant. And in
Speaker 1: the lobby of this Chinese restaurant is a figure of
Speaker 1: a little, old wise Chinese man who will dispense words
Speaker 1: of wisdom like Confucius. But it's not an actor. It's
Speaker 1: actually gonna be a mechanical man. And the team got
Speaker 1: to work designing that kind of a figure. And according
Speaker 1: to Rogers, he said, quote you could always tell who
Speaker 1: was working on the job because they never looked at
Speaker 1: your eyes when you were talking to them. They were
Speaker 1: always looking at your mouth end quote. They did eventually
Speaker 1: build a mock up of a head for this figure,
Speaker 1: but they didn't get much further than that. Disney had
Speaker 1: decided to drop that idea for something else, and that
Speaker 1: idea would eventually be the Enchanted Teaking Room, which we
Speaker 1: will come back to in just a minute now. Disneyland
Speaker 1: open on July sev In nineteen fifty nine, Walt Disney
Speaker 1: was working on the design of a new land that
Speaker 1: would go in Disneyland. He was already thinking about how
Speaker 1: to build it out more and originally this was going
Speaker 1: to be called Liberty Street. It would run parallel to
Speaker 1: Main Street and would feature an attraction called One Nation
Speaker 1: Under God. In this attraction, the audience would be treated
Speaker 1: to a view of audio animatronic figures of every single
Speaker 1: president up on stage. Every president would be life sized,
Speaker 1: would have lifelike motions, and would be animated. So he
Speaker 1: tasked his engineers to get to work on that concept,
Speaker 1: and they had to start somewhere. So the team chose
Speaker 1: Abraham Lincoln as their first figure, and they were able
Speaker 1: to get a copy of a life mask that Lincoln
Speaker 1: had made back before he was president. They got a
Speaker 1: copy of this, and a sculptor named Blaine Gibson, who
Speaker 1: would go on to create most of the faces for
Speaker 1: Disney Animatronics, would use that as a guide to create
Speaker 1: the mask for the Lincoln animatronic. By nineteen sixty one,
Speaker 1: they had an early build of the Abraham Lincoln figure,
Speaker 1: and it had some limited mobility and expressions. It could
Speaker 1: be controlled or manipulated if you prefer, live, by an
Speaker 1: actual UH engineer, so it wasn't automated yet. So it
Speaker 1: was not the finished product, but it was apparently quite
Speaker 1: impressive even early on, because in nineteen sixty two the
Speaker 1: team received a visit from a guy named Robert Moses.
Speaker 1: Robert Moses was a public official from New York City
Speaker 1: who held numerous positions, none of them publicly elected, and
Speaker 1: had become incredibly influential. He was responsible for massive projects
Speaker 1: in New York and some of them were controversial, and
Speaker 1: he was in charge of getting New York City ready
Speaker 1: for a World's Fair to be held there in nineteen
Speaker 1: sixty four. So Disney introduced Moses to the audio animatronic
Speaker 1: Abraham Lincoln. An engineer controlled Lincoln to make him stand
Speaker 1: up and reach out his arm to shake Moses hand,
Speaker 1: and Moses was so impressed they declared the World's Fair
Speaker 1: would absolutely have to feature this technology, which would require
Speaker 1: the team to step up their work if they were
Speaker 1: to meet that particular deadline. How did they do it, Well,
Speaker 1: I'll tell you in just a moment, but first let's
Speaker 1: take a quick break to thank our sponsor. So the
Speaker 1: team had a goal get a show featuring an audio
Speaker 1: animatronic Abraham Lincoln ready to go for the New York
Speaker 1: World's Fair in nineteen sixty four, that was thirteen months away.
Speaker 1: A few other components outside the technology fell into place
Speaker 1: to make this possible. Because the tech part was just
Speaker 1: one aspect, another part was where is the money going
Speaker 1: to come from? So part of that piece of the
Speaker 1: puzzle was from the Illinois Commission. They had decided that
Speaker 1: the theme for the Illinois pavilion at the World's Fair
Speaker 1: would be the Land of Lincoln. The provisional chairman for
Speaker 1: this commission was a guy named Fairfax Cone. So Moses
Speaker 1: tells Cone, you gotta go and see what Walt Disney
Speaker 1: is working on out in California. It's gonna make you
Speaker 1: flip your lid. And Cone goes out there and ends
Speaker 1: up meeting with Disney. He sees the Lincoln figure for himself,
Speaker 1: he too, is really impressed. He would then recommend to
Speaker 1: the Permanent Commission chairman, who was a Lincoln historian named
Speaker 1: Ralph Newman, that he incorporate the Abraham Lincoln figure in
Speaker 1: the Illinois Pavilion. So Newman would end up going out
Speaker 1: and meeting with Walt Disney and he would see the
Speaker 1: Abraham Lincoln figure and he too was blown away, and
Speaker 1: he said, yes, we have absolutely need this. So the
Speaker 1: next step was convincing the Governor of Illinois, Otto Kerner,
Speaker 1: that this, in fact was something that the state should
Speaker 1: sponsor in order to get that out to the New
Speaker 1: York World's Fair. So Otto Kerner met with Walt Disney
Speaker 1: and he was convinced that the Lincoln figure would be
Speaker 1: a great addition to the Illinois Pavilion. But the expense
Speaker 1: of the project was pretty high. Originally Disney said a
Speaker 1: million dollars and that was kind of a figure that
Speaker 1: was out of nowhere, but that was the point the
Speaker 1: starting point for negotiations. Eventually, the Disney company would say
Speaker 1: we can go as low as six hundred thousand dollars,
Speaker 1: and we could divide that up over two years, so
Speaker 1: the first year would be three fifty thousand dollars and
Speaker 1: the second year would be two hundred fifty thou dollars.
Speaker 1: But that was kind of putting Illinois in a tough position.
Speaker 1: Kerner was having to negotiate not just with Walt Disney,
Speaker 1: but with Moses as well in the World's Fair, because
Speaker 1: Moses was demanding that any exhibitor at the World's Fair
Speaker 1: had to go through him and his departments for things
Speaker 1: like power and set up and tear down and all
Speaker 1: these other things that had fees associated with them. So
Speaker 1: the state was going to have to pay two different
Speaker 1: groups an enormous amount of money in order for this
Speaker 1: to happen. But Newman knew that Moses was really impressed
Speaker 1: by this Lincoln figure, and Newman and Disney together met
Speaker 1: with Moses talked to him about this stuff. They were
Speaker 1: trying to convince him to uh to lower some of
Speaker 1: the World's Fair requirements in order to make this happen.
Speaker 1: And Newman in fact even let it slip that he
Speaker 1: was going off to meet with some people over the
Speaker 1: United Nations to make it sound like things were super
Speaker 1: important on his end, and eventually Moses decided to renegotiate,
Speaker 1: and so they gave several concessions to the state of Illinois, said,
Speaker 1: you're not gonna have to pay these fees. These fees,
Speaker 1: you're going to have a maximum amount of five thousand
Speaker 1: dollars for something that could have cost you ten times
Speaker 1: as much, and even agreed to a two hundred fifty
Speaker 1: thousand dollars stipend to help fund the Lincoln attraction, because
Speaker 1: that's how impressed Moses was of it. So Disney had
Speaker 1: cut that deal where the nineteen sixty four rental fee
Speaker 1: for Lincoln would be three fifty thousand dollars, and then
Speaker 1: there was the option for the state to extend that
Speaker 1: through nineteen six two hundred fifty thousand dollars. After Illinois
Speaker 1: got that two d fifty thousand dollars stipend from the fair,
Speaker 1: that men they got Lincoln for the low low price
Speaker 1: of a hundred grand for that first year, and it
Speaker 1: also marked the one and only time in the World's
Speaker 1: Fair history that the fair subsidized and exhibit. The state
Speaker 1: gave Disney the official news in August nineteen sixty three,
Speaker 1: so nineteen four World's Fair was right around the corner.
Speaker 1: It was super fast for them to get this turned around. Meanwhile,
Speaker 1: the team was really hard at work to try and
Speaker 1: put the show together. Much of the groundwork for audio
Speaker 1: animatronics had already been laid by an electrician named Lee Adams,
Speaker 1: who created the giant squid featured in the film twenty
Speaker 1: Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. A lot of people point
Speaker 1: at that as being the first true animatronic figure under Disney,
Speaker 1: although of course that wasn't used as an attraction. It
Speaker 1: was used in a movie. The tentacles of the massive
Speaker 1: squid in that film were actually kind of like balloons,
Speaker 1: so you would use a pneumatic system to pump air
Speaker 1: into the tentacles. That would cause them to unfold, and
Speaker 1: allowing the air to escape would cause the tentacles to
Speaker 1: curl back up, so controlling the airflow would allow you
Speaker 1: to puppeteer this giant squid. Disney Imagineers had also already
Speaker 1: created a theme park attraction used audio animatronic technology at
Speaker 1: that point. The Enchanted Tiki Room, which I mentioned earlier,
Speaker 1: was the first attraction to feature audio animatronics, and it
Speaker 1: opened at Disneyland in nineteen sixty three. It was originally
Speaker 1: going to be that Chinese restaurant, then they decided to
Speaker 1: change it to a Polynesian themed restaurant, and then they
Speaker 1: decided to eventually drop the restaurant angle entirely and just
Speaker 1: making an attraction. So how does it actually work well?
Speaker 1: With the Tiki birds, everything was pretty much binary. Every
Speaker 1: single element, every moving element had a neutral position. So
Speaker 1: let's say that we're looking at one of the four
Speaker 1: hosts that are macaus, and you're looking at the beaks
Speaker 1: of those macaus. The neutral position would be a closed beak.
Speaker 1: So if nothing is going to the the that particular bird,
Speaker 1: it's beak should be closed. A pneumatic system, which is
Speaker 1: one that uses compressed air to do work, would activate
Speaker 1: a solenoid would actually act fate and allow compressed air
Speaker 1: to move through to force the mouth to an open position.
Speaker 1: So if you were to do that manually, you would
Speaker 1: pull a trigger and that would open up a valve
Speaker 1: and that would cause air to flow through the system
Speaker 1: to the appropriate element, causing the beak to open. But
Speaker 1: how was this done automatically, not with an actual human
Speaker 1: operating the thing? Well, the secret was an ultrasonic tones
Speaker 1: recorded onto magnetic tape, like like the kind of tape
Speaker 1: you would use in a real too real tape machine
Speaker 1: or even a cassette player. Disney used tape that was
Speaker 1: an inch wide when it was first doing this, and
Speaker 1: that inch wide tape that they used in in the
Speaker 1: Enchantiqui room had fourteen tracks that you could lay on
Speaker 1: that one inch of tape, and you could put up
Speaker 1: to sixteen signals on a single track. So you would
Speaker 1: record these ultrasonic frequencies on the tape and when played back,
Speaker 1: they would cause metallic reads to vibrate in various relays.
Speaker 1: When the reds vibrated, they would close a circuit. That
Speaker 1: circuit would send an electric current to a solenoid valve
Speaker 1: that would allow air to flow to the appropriate feature
Speaker 1: like that mccause beak, causing it to open. And because
Speaker 1: the system worked off these audio cues, Disney called the
Speaker 1: tech audio animatronics. Even though the audio in question is
Speaker 1: inaudible to humans, right, we don't hear in those ultrasonic frequencies,
Speaker 1: So you could record an audible track that's within human
Speaker 1: hearing on that same tape, and that way you synchronize
Speaker 1: the ultrasonic frequencies that give the commands to the various
Speaker 1: elements in the animatronic figure with the audio track, and
Speaker 1: that way you can have the birds sort of. I
Speaker 1: was gonna say lip sync, but I guess it's more
Speaker 1: like beak sinc to the audio track you recorded. Some
Speaker 1: of the audio animatronic technology Mr. Lincoln dependent upon was similar.
Speaker 1: They had the pneumatic switches for certain parts of the
Speaker 1: Lincoln animatronic, but only for the smaller features, because pneumatics
Speaker 1: would not supply the power needed to move some of
Speaker 1: the larger elements, like arms. A person's arms are pretty
Speaker 1: big and the the air would not be sufficiently powered
Speaker 1: to move them. Also, if you did use air and
Speaker 1: you did use enough compression to make the arms move,
Speaker 1: they would shoot around like like like Lincoln was some
Speaker 1: sort of crazy karate monster. That would not work very
Speaker 1: well for the attraction. So instead they put hydraulic systems
Speaker 1: in place for some of the larger elements. Hydraulics use
Speaker 1: liquids and they use pressure to move the liquids around,
Speaker 1: and the liquids act as a source of mechanical force.
Speaker 1: So it's similar to pneumatics, but With hydraulics, you can
Speaker 1: do a lot more. You can move much heavier things,
Speaker 1: and you can do so in a controlled way with
Speaker 1: the right amount of pressure. So in theory, Mr Lincoln
Speaker 1: would move according to the ultrasonic recordings on that magnetic tape,
Speaker 1: and the playback would cause the reeds to vibrate, completing
Speaker 1: circuits and forcing either air or liquid through the relevant
Speaker 1: tubes to make Lincoln move in the appropriate way in theory.
Speaker 1: Oh and um, let's talk about solenoids really quickly. I
Speaker 1: mentioned it before. A solenoid valve. A solenoid is a
Speaker 1: cylindrical coil of conductive wire, and when you pass a
Speaker 1: current through the wire, it generates a magnetic field. You know,
Speaker 1: this is a basic principle of electromagnetism. A solenoid valve
Speaker 1: has a solenoid with a movable ferromagnetic core in the
Speaker 1: center of this coil, so the core can move uh
Speaker 1: laterally through this coil. The core is typically called a plunger,
Speaker 1: so when there's no current running through the coil, the
Speaker 1: plunger is in a rest position. Typically that means it's
Speaker 1: closing off an opening that's otherwise inside this valve. So
Speaker 1: the valve is closed. When you run a current through
Speaker 1: the coil, it creates a magnetic field that pulls the
Speaker 1: core out of its rest position. It lifts the plunger,
Speaker 1: it opens the valve, so the solenoid valve acts as
Speaker 1: the switch for the pneumatic and hydraulic elements. In addition,
Speaker 1: the team began to develop a technology to make movements
Speaker 1: more smooth and natural and less just on off or jerky.
Speaker 1: You know, you didn't want your your positions to all
Speaker 1: be one or two. You wanted to have a range,
Speaker 1: especially once you started to get too larger figures, human
Speaker 1: sized figures. So to do that, they need to create
Speaker 1: systems that could respond to variable voltage. Increasing or decreasing
Speaker 1: the voltage would activate the complex movements. So instead of
Speaker 1: going from one to two, you could adjust the voltage slightly,
Speaker 1: make it move from one to one point three or
Speaker 1: one point seven, and you're not going all the way
Speaker 1: to your final possible position. And that ended up creating
Speaker 1: a much greater range of movements. Performers would use either
Speaker 1: a potentiometer joystick for every single joint to send varying
Speaker 1: voltages to the control system for that joint, or later
Speaker 1: on they created harnesses, and the harnesses were able to
Speaker 1: capture more complicated, coordinated movements by measuring voltage changes at
Speaker 1: all of the different various joints. Otherwise, doing something seemingly
Speaker 1: as simple as making the figure lifting arm and point
Speaker 1: with its hand would be incredibly difficult because every single
Speaker 1: joint needed its own control system under the potentiometer joystick approach,
Speaker 1: and you had to coordinate all of that correctly, right.
Speaker 1: You couldn't just have one person move the arm and
Speaker 1: then rewind it back, and then try and move the
Speaker 1: wrist and then try and move the hand. All of
Speaker 1: that was really complicated. So once you rehearse all this,
Speaker 1: whether it was with the potentiometer joysticks or with the harness,
Speaker 1: you would then record this in the form of audio
Speaker 1: tones overlaid on thirty five millimeter film stock, and each
Speaker 1: joint would take up a real film and then all
Speaker 1: the reels would be recorded to a master tape. Lincoln
Speaker 1: would use both the potentiometer approach and the harness approach.
Speaker 1: They got an actor named Royal Dano to provide the
Speaker 1: voice for Abraham Lincoln. That would actually get some criticism
Speaker 1: later on, where people said that his voice was not
Speaker 1: appropriate for President Lincoln because Lincoln's voice was said to
Speaker 1: have kind of a high tenor pitch to it and
Speaker 1: Royal Dano's voice had a lower pitch to it. But
Speaker 1: you know, some people argue that that was a show stopper,
Speaker 1: and other people say it wasn't such a big deal.
Speaker 1: Near mileage berries. One story does say that during an
Speaker 1: early trial run of the show, one of the hydraulic
Speaker 1: hoses inside the Lincoln figure ruptured. The valve itself actually broke,
Speaker 1: and that red hydraulic fluid began to leak out and
Speaker 1: staying Lincoln's shirt, prompting one of the guests to joke
Speaker 1: that perhaps they were commemorating Lincoln's assassination, which did not
Speaker 1: may Walt Disney laugh. He then told his team to
Speaker 1: switch to clear hydraulic fluid, which they did from that
Speaker 1: point forward. Then there were times when the valves didn't
Speaker 1: operate properly. They would cause the figure to jerk around unpredictably,
Speaker 1: which put more pressure on the rest of the system.
Speaker 1: The technical issues forced the team to delay the opening
Speaker 1: of the Lincoln exhibit at the New York World's Fair
Speaker 1: for about two weeks while they worked out all the bugs.
Speaker 1: But when it did open, it was so convincing that
Speaker 1: some people were certain that the figure was a human
Speaker 1: actor in a costume and not an audio animatronic figure. Now,
Speaker 1: when we come back, I'll tell the rest of this
Speaker 1: story as well as what has happened since Mr Lincoln
Speaker 1: debut at Disneyland. But first let's take another quick break
Speaker 1: to thank our sponsor. So while the World's Fair was
Speaker 1: going on, Disneyland prepared its own identical attraction. The Great
Speaker 1: Moments with Mr. Lincoln attraction would open in the park
Speaker 1: on July eighth, nineteen sixty six, and it would use
Speaker 1: pretty much an exact copy of the World's Fair exhibit.
Speaker 1: Both would operate around at the same time for a while,
Speaker 1: so you had the same show happening on both coasts.
Speaker 1: And the Disneyland version was sponsored originally by Lincoln Savings
Speaker 1: and Loan, not the state of Illinois. It was housed
Speaker 1: in the Opera House on Main Street, USA. Disneyland never
Speaker 1: built Liberty Street, but they did decide to repurpose the
Speaker 1: Opera House that was one of the first, if not
Speaker 1: the very first building constructed for Disneyland, and during the
Speaker 1: construction phase for the park, it had served as sort
Speaker 1: of a carpentry shop and workshop. Back in those days,
Speaker 1: Disneyland attractions were divided up into various categories related to
Speaker 1: how elaborate the attraction was. And this is where you
Speaker 1: get terms like a ticket or a ticket attraction, and
Speaker 1: that just referred to the level, uh that that attraction
Speaker 1: belonged to. A ticket attractions were simple attractions, little bitty
Speaker 1: things you you know, weren't weren't huge crowd pleasers. Maybe
Speaker 1: it's a simple ride on Main Street, like a trolley ride.
Speaker 1: But if you wanted to write something a little more advanced,
Speaker 1: then you needed to be ticket or see ticket and
Speaker 1: the really big ticket items were e tickets. Great Moments
Speaker 1: with Mr Lincoln was different. It was absolutely free once
Speaker 1: you got into the Disneyland park. Ticket books did often
Speaker 1: contain a coupon for the attraction, but that was just
Speaker 1: meant to help encourage people to go see it. There
Speaker 1: was no need to actually have a coupon in order
Speaker 1: to see it. You could just walk right in. The
Speaker 1: original script for Great Moments with Mr Lincoln included snippets
Speaker 1: from various speeches Lincoln gave throughout his life. The general
Speaker 1: theme was freedom Liberty and Independence, and it would stay
Speaker 1: that way until January one, nineteen seventy three. At that point,
Speaker 1: Disneyland closed the attraction to convert it into a new
Speaker 1: exhibit called The Walt Disney Story that was to honor
Speaker 1: the life of Walt Disney himself, as he had passed
Speaker 1: away several years earlier from lung cancer. The Walt Disney
Speaker 1: Story was a twenty eight minute film about the life
Speaker 1: of Disney and his work, but guests were upset at
Speaker 1: the removal of Mr Lincoln, and so in nineteen seventy five,
Speaker 1: the attraction was revised as The Walt Disney Story featuring
Speaker 1: Great Moments with Mr Lincoln, and it became a combined exhibit.
Speaker 1: The pre show area was dedicated to Disney's life, and
Speaker 1: the theater was back to the Lincoln Show. In the
Speaker 1: late nineteen sixties, Disney Imagineers developed the Digital Animation Control System,
Speaker 1: also known as DAX D A c S. This system
Speaker 1: could record control commands onto a disk rather than on
Speaker 1: magnetic tape. That meant that programming could be done from
Speaker 1: a control board with various buttons, switches, and dials, rather
Speaker 1: than with a harness or a potentiometer. Joystick, and elements
Speaker 1: could easily be deleted or overwritten, so you didn't have
Speaker 1: to worry about doing endless takes to get just the
Speaker 1: right performance. You could just fix any mistakes you made
Speaker 1: as you went along. In the nineteen eighties, imagineers introduced
Speaker 1: in another system called compliance. Compliance was meant to reduce
Speaker 1: the wear and tear on animatronics as well as to
Speaker 1: make them more show worthy. If an animatronic has to
Speaker 1: do a quick move, let's say it's waving and it's
Speaker 1: moving its arm from left to right. Once it reached
Speaker 1: the end of its movement, it would frequently caused the
Speaker 1: entire figure to vibrate. Usually get that little robotic vibration
Speaker 1: at the end of a movement. If you ever see
Speaker 1: anyone dance the robot, you know what I'm talking about.
Speaker 1: There's that little jerky motion when you get to the end. Well,
Speaker 1: Compliance would allow limbs to move just a little past
Speaker 1: their normal end location, and that was in order to
Speaker 1: be a shock absorber. So think about where your wave
Speaker 1: would end and the the animatronic would start to slow down,
Speaker 1: but it would continue to allow itself to move past
Speaker 1: that point for just a little bit, so that it
Speaker 1: had more of a gradual slowing instead of just a
Speaker 1: sudden stop, and you wouldn't get that robotic shake great
Speaker 1: moments with this or Lincoln underwent a refurbishment and there
Speaker 1: was a new animatronic Lincoln installed that used more of
Speaker 1: this technology. It also had updated artificial skin, It had
Speaker 1: a new costume, it had more advanced digital electronics. But
Speaker 1: that one closed in two thousand for another refurbishment, and
Speaker 1: two thousand one it reopened and Lincoln now delivered the
Speaker 1: Gettysburg Address instead of this sort of sort of grouping
Speaker 1: of various clips from various speeches, so now he gave
Speaker 1: the Gettysburg Address, And that version closed again in two
Speaker 1: thousand five because Disneyland was celebrating its fiftieth anniversary and
Speaker 1: the theater was given over to a special attraction about
Speaker 1: the history of the park itself. That kept on going
Speaker 1: until two thousand nine, and then Lincoln came back again.
Speaker 1: The newest version is an electric animatronic figure. The speech
Speaker 1: Lincoln gives is more or less the original one from
Speaker 1: the nineteen sixty four World's Fair. Does have a few
Speaker 1: edits to it. It's not quite as long as the
Speaker 1: original speech was, so it's more like the version, though
Speaker 1: not exactly the same. In two thousand thirteen, Disney would
Speaker 1: shut down its internal division called MAPO M A p O.
Speaker 1: Some people say that stands for Mary Poppins because it
Speaker 1: was formed after the success of the movie Mary Poppins O.
Speaker 1: They say, no, it's manufacturing and production. That was where
Speaker 1: the name came from. But anyway, whether whatever its name
Speaker 1: came from, that was the division that was responsible for
Speaker 1: producing audio animatronics and then later electronic version of animatronics.
Speaker 1: All of them came out from there for the most part,
Speaker 1: and toward the end of its run, more and more
Speaker 1: of those projects we're getting outsourced to other companies. So
Speaker 1: in twenty thirteen the company decided, you know, we're just
Speaker 1: gonna go with this contract approach. We're not going to
Speaker 1: build them in house anymore. And the company that's mostly
Speaker 1: in charge of developing animatronics for Disney is Garner Holt Productions.
Speaker 1: That company is located out of California. It also makes
Speaker 1: animatronics for lots of other clients, not just Disney, but
Speaker 1: that's the company that's mostly responsible for them and has
Speaker 1: had incredible demonstrations of really complicated, sophisticated animatronic figures that
Speaker 1: are eerily realistic, like we're talking Uncanny Valley style realistic,
Speaker 1: including an Abraham Lincoln bust that makes faces that I
Speaker 1: would say start to lean toward the scary. But you
Speaker 1: have to see the videos to to understand what I'm
Speaker 1: talking about. Anyway, that wraps up the great moments with
Speaker 1: Mr Lincoln's story. It's fascinating to me to see how
Speaker 1: an idea could go from just hypothesis to an actual,
Speaker 1: working attraction. How do you go from I want this
Speaker 1: thing to exist to making it so. Walt Disney's imagineers
Speaker 1: have a reputation for doing that time and time again,
Speaker 1: and the attractions that Disney are are evidence of that fact,
Speaker 1: And as a lifelong Disney fan, I have a great
Speaker 1: appreciation for that, although I have seen comparable work at
Speaker 1: other parks. I mean, there are plenty of other places
Speaker 1: that have used that same philosophy to great effect, like
Speaker 1: Universal's Islands of Adventure, for example. But that wraps up
Speaker 1: this fourth of July episode. If you have any suggestions
Speaker 1: for future episodes of tech Stuff, let me know. Why
Speaker 1: don't you send me an email The addresses tech Stuff
Speaker 1: at how stuff works dot com. Or drop me a
Speaker 1: line on Facebook or Twitter. The handle of both of
Speaker 1: those is tech Stuff hs W. Don't forget to follow
Speaker 1: us on Instagram, and I'll talk to you again really soon. Well,
Speaker 1: I hope you enjoyed that Classic episode. I guess Classic
Speaker 1: is a little much right, came out in two thousand eighteen.
Speaker 1: I hope you enjoyed that episode from three years ago.
Speaker 1: And uh, I look forward chatting with you guys later
Speaker 1: this week about tech News and about Warner because that
Speaker 1: story continues to go into really interesting and weird places.
Speaker 1: A lot of different players involved in that Warner story.
Speaker 1: And if you thought the first two parts were complicated,
Speaker 1: well just wait to have part number three. And with that,
Speaker 1: I'm going to head off and enjoy the rest of
Speaker 1: the day. I hope you do too, whether you are
Speaker 1: in the United States and you know, observing Memorial Day
Speaker 1: or wherever in the world you may be. May you
Speaker 1: have a safe and pleasant day, and I'll talk to
Speaker 1: you again really soon. Text Stuff is an I Heart
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