Zadoc Dederick, has improved the occasion of the Barnum fire excitement by hiring rooms in the opposite house, on Broadway, for the purpose of exhibiting this eighth wonder of the world. The inventor and exhibitor of the Newark steam man, Mr. He Arrives in New York and Astonishes the Metropolitans. But as the following article (excerpted by the Post from the New York Express on March 21, 1868) reveals, this young man showed the same kind of imagination and ambition that we still prize in the scientists and inventors of the 21st century. Sure, Zadoc Dederick’s steam-powered man (and his plans to build stallions) did not take off as he had hoped. While those who enjoy steampunk literature and fashion dwell in a world of “retro-futurism” - reimagining the steam-powered science fiction of the 19th century - they sometimes overlook the inventors of the time who attempted to turn fiction into fact.
The fancy duds and overall human shape, Dederick claimed, were camouflage to avoid frightening horses in the street. Beneath that fashionable exterior thrummed a steam-powered contraption designed to pull a carriage on a pair of mechanical iron “legs” - a sort of rickshaw-driving golem. Though the Steam Man wore a fancy mustache, gloves, and a vest and jacket, he was a man in only the loosest sense of the word. But in only a few short weeks, the fantastical returned to Broadway, led by a 22-year-old inventor named Zadoc Dederick and his Steam Man. Barnum’s American Museum burned to the ground on March 3, 1868, New York City’s residents might have worried that they had lost their primary source of the fantastical and extraordinary amid their everyday lives.