The Perpetual Storytelling Apparatus is a drawing machine, which uses technical drawings sourced from patents to create a never-ending story. The machine translates the words of a given text into archived patent illustrations. Its program connects word sequences from the text with patent drawings whose descriptions contain the same words. The visual vocabulary consists of over seven million patents stored in government databases, which are linked to one another through twenty- two million reference terms. Links and references to older patents enable the device to establish connections between random patents, forming a kind of subtext. The interweaving of the story with drawings of technical innovations generates new visual correlations and narrative layers.