If you go to see Wes Anderson’s Asteroid City (and why the wouldn’t you?), you’ll notice the presence of the Martini dispensing machine.
It’s a not a terrible idea and it’s certainly not a new one, and here of course it's fictional, but in the real world there have been all kinds of cocktail making machines and robotic bartenders, to serve different purposes, the Drinkomatic was obviously for small scale domestic use,
while the “Cocktailmatic” introduced by Auto-Bar Systems in the early sixties was for large-scale commercial ventures, “where dispensing of drinks in a hurry is a problem”
And so we come to George Jean Nathan – 1882 -1958 - drama critic and editor of The Smart Set and The American Mercury, the man who apparently said, ‘ I drink to make other people interesting.’
There is a story, apocryphal I imagine, that Nathan had a system or device or some Rube Goldberg-style contraption in his home that sprang to life when he put his key in the front door of his apartment building, so that by the time he got into his own apartment a martini had been mechanically and magically prepared. If this is true I haven’t been able to find any visual evidence of such a machine.
But leaving aside whether the story’s true, I can’t help thinking that the real problem is that although making a martini certainly involves mechanical processes it also somehow requires some human intervention and intervention to make it live (though this obviously does not apply to, for instance, the Pina Colada).
It would obviously be ideal to have a loved one waiting at the door with a martini when you got home, possible a butler,
or just conceivably Vincent Price.
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