AUTOMATA – A Fascination with Creation
 The Magician, Lambert, Paris, circa 1880
Courtesy of www.automatomania.com
A thread of fantasy is stitched through the histories of famous automata and their makers, as recorded both in scholarly journals and popular readings. A biography of Julius Caesar, for example, notes the use of an automaton by Mark Antony during Caesar's funeral, and its effect on the grieving Romans:
An unendurable anguish weighed upon the quivering crowd. Their nerves were strained to the breaking point. They seemed ready for anything. And now a vision of horror struck them in all its brutality. From the bier Caesar arose and began to turn around slowly, exposing to their terrified gaze his dreadfully livid face and his twenty-three wounds still bleeding. It was a wax model which Antony had ordered in the greatest secrecy and which automatically moved by means of a special mechanism hidden behind the bed.
The German scholastic philosopher and scientist Albertus Magnus (1193?-1280) is one of only several philosophers reputed to have made brazen heads which spoke – Magnus is also supposed to have created a mechanical man from metal, wax, leather, and glass.
The legendary character Bishop Virgilius of Naples is credited with the creation of a "large brass fly" which chased away all the other flies in the city so well that no meat spoiled in Naples for eight years.
The exaggerated quality of these tales is not simply evidence of the creative imagination of the tellers. It testifies to a willingness on the part of automata's "audiences" to entertain the notion of such things being possible, a willingness rooted in a fascination with creation. Part of automata's considerable attraction is the playful way they allow both their makers and their viewers to participate in the act of simulating life.
In this automata are part of a literary and imaginative tradition that encompasses such early legends as Pygmalion, a king of Cyprus and a sculptor, who fell in love with his statue of a maiden, later brought to life by Aphrodite at his behest. It includes the medieval Golem of Jewish folklore, and the homunculus created by Paracelsus (1493-1541), the Swiss physician and alchemist, from a mixture of blood and semen. It finds its most terrifying incarnation in Frankenstein's monster – it is almost certain that Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1797-1851) was familiar with various automatons of her time.
No such capacity for terror is evident in descriptions and images of automata from this period. Through the early 19th century it would remain the province of literature to explore the darker side of the creation impulse. In the mechanical simulation of life represented by automata, it seems that the more noble side of humanity is transferred. The most impressive automata were made to write, to draw, to play musical instruments, and in the case of The Turk, to engage the intellect, though as it turned out, the deck was stacked.
Originally constructed in 1769 for the Hungarian Empress Maria Therese by Baron Wolfgang von Kempelen, the automaton appeared as a lifelike, elaborately costumed Turk, holding a long pipe and seated at a chess table. The Turk compiled an impressive record, beating many of Europe's best chess players, as well as such notables as Napoleon, apparently concluding each successful match with a clearly spoken "Echec!" In truth the mechanical nature of The Turk was a facade. A human operator crouched in a cleverly concealed compartment was responsible for The Turk's impressive chess record.
While The Turk was capable of eliciting great feeling from its audience, it is the creations of Jacques de Vaucanson (1709-1782) and Pierre Jaquet-Droz (1721-1790) that were, and are, the most celebrated automata of this period.
Vaucanson is an example of those impressive men of the Enlightenment who combined a variety of talents and interests. A physician, factory owner, and inventor, Vaucanson was born in Grenoble, France, studied with the Jesuits, and entered religious training in 1725. While at the seminary, Vaucanson is reputed to have made flying mechanical angels in a makeshift workshop. After the head of the order closed his workshop, Vaucanson left the seminary and began his medical training, as well as studies of mechanics and music. Merging these interests, Vaucanson commenced work on a "moving anatomy" of the human body as an aid to medical training and research. Voltaire described Vaucanson's plan to:
...create an automatic figure whose motions will be an imitation of all animal operations, such as the circulation of blood, respiration, digestion, the movement of muscles, tendons, the nerves and so forth. He claims that by using this automation we shall be able to carry out experiments on animal functions and to draw conclusions from them which will enable us to recognize the different states of human health in order to remedy his ills. This ingenious invention, by representing a human body, will be able to be used eventually for demonstration purposes in anatomy courses.
The project was never completed, but Vaucanson went on to produce three automata which were enormously popular and whose exhibition was quite lucrative. The last of these would be a direct descendant of Vaucanson's dream of a "moving anatomy," though not based on the human body. He instead chose to simulate the life processes of a duck. His creation, which was produced full sized and made out of gilt brass, drank, ate, quacked, and swam. Observers were most amazed at the fowl's excretion of a fetid smelling pellet, the result of a seemingly natural digestive process.
Why was the duck the most celebrated of Vaucanson's mechanical achievements? It was probably the automaton's visualization of life's internal processes – the duck's body was pierced with openings to make visible its digestive functions – that made the duck so popular. In an age before X-rays, MRIs, and CAT scans, Vaucanson's duck showed, as if by magic, the secret workings of the body.
The Swiss craftsman Pierre Jaquet-Droz, along with his son Henri-Louis (1753-1791) and their associate, Jean-Frederic Leschott, produced three life-sized automata whose remarkable fidelity to life raised their work above all others. The Artist was capable of producing four portraits – George III and Charlotte of England, Louis the XV of France, a picture of Cupid, and one of a dog. The Writer was more complex than his brethren and was able to write any 40-character sequence of the Roman alphabet. The Harmonium Player played a small pipe organ by means of applying pressure with her fingers upon the keys.
The elder Jaquet-Droz, along with his son and associate, also produced a great number of exquisitely detailed watches and clocks, and it was by applying the precision technology of these devices to their automata that they achieved such remarkable results.
In the early 1800's, many automaton makers were magicians or creators inspired by the shows of illusionists that were very much in vogue at that time. Among the great magicians who built automata were Jean Eugène Robert-Houdin, the father of modern magic, and Stèvenard, a contemporary of Robert-Houdin and perhaps the most talented of all automaton creators. The Maillardet brothers were inspired by the theme of magic and thus created clocks with magician and soothsayer automata.
The Golden Age of Automata was from 1850 to 1914. With the industrial revolution, the creation of automata, like dolls, became industrialized. About ten artisans, living for the most part in the Marais section of Paris, made numerous performing automata. Admittedly, these creatures were less complex than those of the 18th century, but were perhaps more endearing since they were inspired by Parisian life and the world of entertainment – magic shows, circuses, and music halls. Among the most famous makers were Théroude, Phalibois, Lambert, Renou, Roullet & Decamps, Vichy, and Bontems.
At the outbreak of World War I, the industry went into decline and gradually disappeared.
What had previously distinguished automata – their life-like reproduction of the body, and their intriguing look into previously hidden life process – would be supplanted by new images produced by new technologies in the 19th century. Graphic recordings and photographic images would chart the body internally and externally in comprehensive detail. What the photographs would not replace, however, was the automaton's act of creation, often represented in fantastic ways – that would remain untapped until the Digital Revolution provided the technology not only to re-map the human body, but to create it anew.
Jacques de Vaucanson (1709-1782)
Jacques de Vaucanson was a French engineer and inventor who is credited with creating the world's first true robots, as well as for creating the first completely automated loom.
He was born in Grenoble, France in 1709 as Jacques Vaucanson (the "de" was later added to his name by the Académie des Sciences). The son of a glove-maker, he grew up poor, and in his youth he reportedly aspired to become a clockmaker. He studied under the Jesuits and later joined the Order of the Minims in Lyon. It was his intention at the time to follow a course of religious studies, but he regained his interest in mechanical devices after meeting the surgeon Le Cat, from whom he would learn the details of anatomy. This new knowledge allowed him to develop his first mechanical devices that mimicked biological functions such as circulation, respiration, and digestion.
In 1737, he built his first automaton, The Flute Player, a life-size figure of a shepherd that played the tabor and the pipe, and had a repertoire of twelve songs. The figure's fingers were not pliable enough to play the flute correctly, so Vaucanson had to glove the creation in skin. The following year, in early 1738, he presented his creation to the Académie des Sciences. At the time, mechanical creatures were somewhat a fad in Europe, but most could be classified as toys, and de Vaucanson's creations were recognized as being revolutionary in their life-like sophistication.
Later that year, he created two additional automatons, The Tambourine Player and The Duck, which is considered his masterpiece. The duck had over 400 moving parts, and could flap its wings, drink water, digest grain, and defecate. He is credited as having invented the world's first flexible rubber tube while in the process of building the duck's intestines. Despite the revolutionary nature of his automatons, he is said to have tired quickly of his creations and sold them in 1743.
His inventions brought him to the attention of Frederick II of Prussia, who sought to bring him to his court. Vaucanson refused, however, wishing to serve his own country.
In 1741 he was appointed by Cardinal Fleury, chief minister of Louis XV, as inspector of the manufacture of silk in France. He was charged with undertaking reforms of the silk manufacturing process. At the time, the French weaving industry had fallen behind that of England and Scotland. Vaucanson promoted wide-ranging changes for automation of the weaving process. In 1745, he created the world's first completely automated loom, drawing on the work of Basile Bouchon and Jean Falcon. Vaucanson was busy automating the French textile industry with punch cards – a technology that, as refined by Joseph-Marie Jacquard more than a half century later, would revolutionize weaving and, in the twentieth century, would be used to input data into computers and store information in binary form. His proposals were not well received by weavers, however, and many of the more revolutionary ones were largely ignored.
He invented several machine tools, such as the first fully-documented, all-metal slide rest lathe, around 1751 (though Derry & Williams, A Short History of Technology, place this invention around 1768). It was described in the Encyclopédie.
In 1746, he was made a member of the Acadé
mie des Sciences.
He died in Paris in 1782. Vaucanson left a collection of his work as a bequest to Louis XVI. The collection would become the foundation of the Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers in Paris. His original automatons have all been lost. The Flute Player and The Tambourine Player were reportedly destroyed in the Revolution. His proposals for the automation of the weaving process, although ignored during his lifetime, were later perfected and implemented by Joseph Marie Jacquard, the creator of the Jacquard loom.
Lycee Vaucanson in Grenoble is named in his honor, and trains students for careers in engineering and technical fields.
Pierre Jaquet-Droz (1721-1790)
Clockmaker Pierre Jaquet-Droz and his son, Henri, were well known in Europe, with their clocks and watches being sent to France, Switzerland, Spain, and other countries to satisfy the demands of the aristocrats of the period.
They also produced early automatons, life-sized, mechanical dolls that could perform a variety of functions. The most famous of these were The Artist, a male doll that drew several pictures; The Writer, a male doll that could write a set message of up to 40 characters; and The Harmonium Player, a female doll that played, by pressing with her fingers on the keys of a tiny pipe organ, five songs composed by Henri Jaquet-Droz. The still functional dolls are housed at the Musée d'Art et d'Histoire in Neuchâtel, Switzerland.
These dolls, especially The Writer completed in 1772, were forerunners of today's computers. The Writer had an input device to set tabs that formed a programmable memory; a series of 40 cams, each of which represented a letter, acted as the read-only program; and The Writer's quill pen was the output device.
The most complex of the three Jacquet-Droz automata at the Musée d'Art et d'Histoire, The Writer is programmable such that he can write out any line of text up to 40 letters long. The sentence to be written is coded on a wheel where characters are ordered individually in sequence. He writes with a real goose feather which he dips in ink. After dipping the quill, the automaton taps the quill over the inkwell to remove excess ink to prevent drips. His eyes follow the text as he writes, and his head moves when he dips the quill in the inkwell. According to some contemporary sources, Jacquet-Droz used to program his automaton to write the sentence "Cogito ergo sum" in order to make some fun of Descarte's contemporary theories.
Both Pierre and Henri Jaquet-Droz were born in Switzerland, probably Basel, but little else is recorded of their early lives. Pierre was already a very successful clockmaker in his own right when his son was born. The invention of Pierre's automata, however, would not begin until 1772, when they created these extraordinary devices over a 3-year period. The automata were designed and built to help his firm sell watches and mechanical birds, but several were ordered by monarchs of the day.
One of these was a clock. Upon the clock were a Negro, a dog, and a shepherd. When the clock struck, the shepherd played six tunes on his flute, and the dog approached and fawned upon him. This clock was exhibited to the King of Spain, who was delighted with it. "The gentleness of my dog," said Droz, "is his least merit; if your Majesty touch one of the apples, which you see in the shepherd's basket, you will admire the fidelity of this animal." The King took an apple, and the dog flew at his hand and barked so loud, that the King's own dog, which was in the room, began also to bark. At this the Courtiers, not doubting that it was an affair of witchcraft, hastily left the room, crossing themselves as they went out. The minister of Marine was the only one that ventured to stay. The king having desired him to ask the Negro what o'clock it was, the minister obeyed, but he obtained no reply. Droz then observed that the Negro had not yet learned Spanish.
Pierre and Henri Jaquet-Droz formed an alliance with another well-known clockmaker, Fredrik Leschot, who had connections in London and Geneva, Switzerland. The three established a business in London in 1782. Henri became ill in 1784 and the trio moved their operation to Geneva. Father and son both died a few years later.
|
