This is the punishment device from Franz Kafka's "The Penal Colony". The operator would type in the crimes of the prisoner (I show the input on the back side of the device), the prisoner would be strapped down to the porcelain table (with little built-in troughs) and then the myriad needles would lower down and "write" the crimes into the prisoner's skin. The story was about cruel-and-unusual punishments and whether or not they are actual crime deterrents, moral, etc.
The upper image is of a DVD Player (the "the Light Disk Optical Reader") and the lower one is of a "Boom Box".
This is my revisioning for the HGWells Time Machine as first envisioned by the George Pal design team. If you had read my book "The Beatnik, The Gunslinger, and the Movie Star", this is the Master Chronometer George uses to flip back and forth through time.





