The Penfield Mk IV is licensed

The Turing Registry today licensed the Penfield Mk IV for consumer mood regulation, filing TR-11215. The instrument goes on sale today, at $6,400 with servicing for life, and the first instruments leave the Penfield Works at Everett this afternoon.

The Mk IV is the fourth mark of an instrument the house has made since 1979, and the first to remember. Its Almanac, a drum with a pin for every hour of the week, lets a keeper arrange registers in advance: Application in the morning, Conviviality at dinner, Settling at bedtime. Its anticipation learns the keeper’s habits and proposes arrangements, which the keeper accepts or declines with a touch. That capacity makes it an autonomous system in the Registry’s terms, and so the Mk IV is the first Penfield to need a license.

The license carries two conditions, both of which the house proposed. Settings below a defined wellbeing threshold require confirmation, which the Mk IV meets with the brass confirmation key introduced in the Mk III in 2006: registers V.5 to V.8 cannot be engaged without it. And usage data may not be sold or shared, which the house meets by never collecting it; an instrument’s settings history is kept on the instrument and nowhere else.

The dial has forty-eight registers in six families, engraved from a master cut by hand by Tobiah Wren in 2022. Each instrument is assembled at the Penfield Works and tuned by hand in one of its nine tuning rooms, which were built as copies of the Penfield Room at the House, where the first instrument was tuned forty-five years ago.

Keepers of earlier marks may continue to use and have serviced their instruments exactly as before. The house does not intend to ask anyone to exchange an older instrument for a new one.