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Petunia Power. For example, the Forget-Me-Not computer, which will next appear at the Ontario Science Center in Toronto, was financed, with extraordinary largesse, by Honeywell, the for-real computer manufacturer—and is a hilarious sendup of the whole electronic-brain industry. It comes in three parts —"like Henry IV, or whoever it was," according to its creator—all of them visibly risible. It is shaped like an elephant, in accordance, says Emett, with Livingstone's Law: "Memory may hold the door, but elephants never forget." Among its components are an eeny-meeny-miney-mo unit (random selection) and a card-punch system run by electrified woodpeckers.
The Vintage Car, sponsored by Borg-Warner, is equipped with cut-glass liqueur-decanter fog lamps, a crystal ball to predict traffic conditions ahead, a petunia-powered antipollution catalyst and a speedometer that registers from Nought, through Gently, to AWFUL. In fact, Emett notes, the machine "has a great safety factor: it doesn't move." His Far Tottering Railway was a hot ticket at the 1951 Festival of Britain at which it transported more than 2 million passengers; it is now the puffing pride of Toronto, installed at the Ontario Science Center. The Gentleman's Flying Machine is powered by a Wandering Hot Air Brazier and "a swarm of underslung butterflies providing a trivial lift to the nose section."
Rowland Emett has had more than trivial genetic lift. His grandfather was Queen Victoria's court engraver, his father an amateur inventor. Emett himself has put wires together and lines on paper since early childhood. At 13 he devised a novel gramophone windup mechanism—just as gramophones succumbed to electricity. Undeterred, he became a stellar and sometimes lunar cartoonist. During World War II, some equally dotty boffin at the Air Ministry decided from Emett's complicated cartoons that the artist—a man as mild as Lewis Carroll's Dormouse—should be commandeered to help build nongentle-manly aircraft for the R.A.F.
Emett, now 70, says he does not want to make any more Things. Even a Hush-a-Bye Hot Air Rocking Chair, with all its crumpeted and cushioned comforts, can take months to complete, demand the services of 15 artisans and put his 200-year-old blacksmith's forge on 24-hour duty. The antic Edison of Wild Goose Cottage plans to paint and draw lithographs, wallpaper, cartoons and other whatsits that may yet make Emettiana an American household word. Mary, his loving wife and canny business brains of 35 years, concurs. Emett will nonetheless retain his wry, sly urge to celebrate and spoof humanity. At the trade fair in Philadelphia last week, an onlooker buttonholed the creator of the Forget-Me-Not computer and demanded: "But what's the end product?" Emett's considered answer: "To bring the smallest smile to the eye of the beholder."