Inventor & Visionary | Creator of LEACHIM (AI Before AI) | Owner of the Astolat Miniature Art Creation | Holder of 42+ Patents
New York, USA
Joined September 2026
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What hosting Astolat takes: 9 feet of height, 800 pounds, four days and about a dozen people to assemble, and a promise to keep its documentation with it.
What the public gets: 29 rooms of pure awe.
In 2014, a music teacher wrote me: “For over 35 years, I have wanted to say thank you.”
He teaches elementary-school music, and he wrote that he infuses elements of 2-XL into his teaching, which I invented (and voiced the robot).
We have never turned Astolat’s elevator on. Too risky for not much gain.
Some of the best conservation decisions are leaving a switch alone. Preservation is mostly restraint, documentation and knowing how it goes back together.
Nobody steals a 200-pound custom robot to resell it. Someone took LEACHIM in 1975 for what was inside: the voice, the student records, the branching logic.
Hardware can be stolen. A documented, patented method can be defended.
Inside Astolat: tiny bottles holding real liquor. Jewelry set with genuine gemstones. A readable 1811 Bible, thumb-sized, in early American leather. Hundreds of original 1-inch paintings.
No dolls. Just 29 rooms of the real thing, in miniature.
In May of 1974, LEACHIM, my teaching robot, appeared on The Mike Douglas Show and shook hands with Sly Stone.
The hosts kept looking for a person hidden inside the robot. In 2026, we ask the reverse: is there a person anywhere near it?
Yes, I patented the idea behind “press 1 for sales.”
1982: a phone keypad as input to a branching decision tree.
1984: it goes commercial.
It started in a classroom robot. The idea was fine. What companies built with it is another matter.
Best deal in New York real estate: 29 rooms, a grand piano, an elevator, no roommates. The catch: it’s 25.8 square feet. At $329,000 per square foot, the @nypost calls it the most valuable real estate anywhere.
When I was younger, I rewired my apartment building’s elevator so it would wait on my floor. It worked for a year. Then my father found out and ordered me to take it out. Best safety review I ever received: someone who wasn’t in love with the design. medium.com/authority-magazin…
LEACHIM goes to public auction in late 2026, with its prototypes, patents and my inventor notes.
I would rather it went to an institution than into private collections. Institutional inquiries: [email protected]
The current conversation about intelligence is almost entirely about speed.
The 1974 answer to personalized learning was not a faster machine. It was a machine that would wait.
No machine can build a relationship with a struggling student or notice something is wrong at home.
AI's job is to take the impossible arithmetic off teachers' shoulders so they can do the work only people can do.
Read more in @DA_magazine: districtadministration.com/i…
The history of technology is badly preserved. We keep the products and lose the process: the prototypes, the sketches, the reasoning.
A collection intact for fifty years can be broken up in an afternoon, and the record does not survive the split.
Elaine Diehl spent thirteen years building one object.
Including a miniature grand piano that cost $7,000 and a portrait painted with a single-bristle brush, it reads as a sculpture rather than a toy because of the time, not the money.
Start with a human problem, not a technology looking for employment.
That's the principle behind LEACHIM, a precursor to today's #AI.
New interview with @CeoValiant on invention, honesty, and why temperament outlasts talent: valiantceo.com/interviews/dr…
In 1974, two people set out to build a vertical dollhouse with working mechanical parts.
One took a year and reached millions of homes. The other took thirteen years and now holds the @GWR at $8.5 million, the Astolat Dollhouse Castle.
In 1975, someone stole my robot out of the back of a truck. Lloyd’s of London posted a reward against an insured value of $75,000. Corporate espionage was suspected.
Nobody steals a 200-lb custom robot to resell it. Someone wanted what was inside.
1974: a robot teaches fourth grade in the Bronx.
2002: the same idea wins best educational toy of the year. LEACHIM, 2-XL, Talk’n Play, View-Master, Kasey the Kinderbot.
Five commercial generations of one insight across four decades.
