Barack Obama’s autopen does not sleep. So, unlike the President, who was roused from a hotel bed recently at 5:45 a.m. in a French resort town to approve a last-minute extension of the Patriot Act, the machine never missed a wink. As the minutes ticked toward midnight on May 26 in Washington, Obama wrote a document authorizing an immediate phone call from the hotel hallway to the White House, where, in an undisclosed room in the building next door, the contraption whirred into motion. Pen touched legislation, and history was made: a robot signed a bill into law. As a legal matter, this extraordinary act was not so controversial. Common law has long held that what matters in signing is intent, not the manual dexterity or personal attention of the signer. Just as wax seals held the power of law in 17th century Britain, U.S. banks accept rubber stamps on checks, even if they’re imprinted by a subordinate. In 2005 the Bush Administration drafted a 29-page opinion laying out the legal case for the untested idea of legislative autopen signatures. In contrast to a number of other opinions from the Bush years, Obama’s attorneys agreed completely.
What was remarkable, however, about the President’s transatlantic scribble was its violation of the first rule of autopens: you do not talk about the autopen. “It really kind of messes with the myth,” explains Automated Signature Technology’s Lindsay De Shazo, the son of Robert De Shazo Jr., who first sold the autopen in the U.S. in 1944 and held a monopoly on the business, selling thousands of the things until his death 50 years later. The third U.S. President, Thomas Jefferson, was the first to use a machine to record his signature. His device, a pantograph, held a pen that matched the movements of Jefferson’s hand on a duplicate piece of paper. The first President to use a machine to sign a document in his absence was Dwight Eisenhower, who employed De Shazo’s device when he ran Columbia University in 1949. It looked like a small table with mechanical arms, which followed a mold made from the signature that could be repeated at great speed with just about any type of pen. By the time John Kennedy took office, the autopen had made it into the White House as a time-saving way of handling routine correspondence.
Stephen Koschal, an autograph dealer in Florida who has written three books on presidential autopen signatures, began collecting copies decades ago, amassing a giant file that he has used to identify, among other curiosities, 26 different autopen signatures employed by Richard Nixon, including three that used just his initials. Ronald Reagan created at least 22 autopen versions of his name, including Dutch and Ron for more personal correspondence. “The White House doesn’t like people talking about the autopen,” Koschal confirms. But for dealers like him, the autopen matters a great deal: a handwritten signature can easily fetch 10 times more at auction than an automated one.
