May 26, 2018 • 22 mins
Today we revisit an episode on the technology of yesteryear. Long before Czech playwright Karel Capek coined the term "robot" in his 1920 play "R.U.R.," mechanized creations - automata - were being created without electronics or computers. Many were simple, but they paved the way for the robots of today.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
Hey, everybody Happy Saturday. Okay, Drew confession Uh. In part
because there is a new Star Wars movie, I have
droids on the brain really bad, So it seemed like
a good time to revisit an episode about mankind's early
attempts at automota. This episode from looks at five different
historical inventions that very loosely fall into the discussion of
(00:25):
early robotics. Welcome to Stuff you missed in History class
from house stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to
the podcast. I'm Holly Fry and I'm Tracy V. Wilson Fan.
(00:46):
I'm willing to bet Tracy that when you hear the
term or robot, uh, you think of things like Honda's
Asimo or the I Robot roomba that might tutor around
the house tidying up floors. I think of the bad
Robot TV placard Yeah from J. J. Abrams production Company. Um,
(01:06):
but there were actually way long before check playright. Carol
Kapok coined the term robot in his Are You Are,
which did for Rassam's Universal robots. Uh. There were mechanized
creations automata that were being created without electronics or computers,
and many were you know, fairly simple, but they really
paved the way for robots of today. So if you
(01:30):
do a search for first robot or earliest robot online,
you're probably going to find all kinds of different conflicting answers.
Some of them are philosophical, some of them are mythological,
and some of them are religious. Uh. We know that
clockwork devices go back many, many, many years, but most
historians on the subject are not really eager to pinpoint
(01:53):
which exact one was first. Yeah, there's there are too
many possible answers because there are some of the logical
ones that aren't necessarily supported with hard evidence. Those ones
are a little bit tricky. Some people even refer to
like the Biblical story of creation as kind of a
first um, almost robotics experiment sort of thing. Uh So there,
(02:17):
it's really hard. I mean, you get into a big
philosophical debate with people if you say this was the
first robot we know about for sure, because they're like,
there's some other options. Yeah, so you want to do that.
Some of them are so far back in history that
the substantiation for them is just not add percent clear, right,
And we're going to look back at the early history
of mechanized beings and clockworks and steampowered mini marvels. So
(02:42):
you're not gonna hear us talk about the DARPA Big
Dog or the Mars Curiosity rover. We're going incredibly old
school with this list, so nothing past the late seventeen hundreds,
and we have just selected five for the sake of
podcast length, But of course that means leaves out many
many others, because there really are many more examples of
this than I think many people realize. So think of
(03:02):
this as just a sampling of some of mankind's ventures
into automated beings. And really I'm telling a fib when
I say it's five, it's sort of five instances, but
some of them feature more than one automata. So it's
going to be fun. We're fludging our numbers, but we're
doing it with a good heart. Yes uh. And we're
going to start with one that is not easily substantiated.
(03:27):
We're going off of one text, but it's important, and
that's Yan Cheese Automated Man. So the first one is
in China. The reference to it can be found in
a third century b C. Taoist text, and the course
of this text a story is told of King Mu
of Chew, who reigned from b C. E. In it,
(03:49):
this so called artifice are presents an automated man. To
the king and his book Science and Civilization in China,
Volume two, writer Joseph Needham quotes a translate text about
this automa time, and in his quote he says, the
king stared at the figure in astonishment. It walked with
rapid strides, moving its head up and down, so that
(04:10):
anyone would have taken it for a live human being.
The artificer touched its chin, and it began singing perfectly
in tune. He touched its hand, and it began posturing,
keeping perfect time. As the performance was drawing to an end,
the robot winked its eye and made advances to the
ladies in attendance, whereupon the king became incensed and would
have had Yan she executed on the spot, had not.
(04:32):
The latter, in mortal fear, instantly taken the robot to
pieces to let him see what it really was, and
indeed it turned out to be only a construction of leather, wood, glue,
and lacquer variously colored white, black, red, and blue. Examining
it closely, the king found all the internal organs complete, liver,
gall heart, lungs, spleen, kidneys, stomach, and intestines. And over
(04:57):
these again muscles, bones, and limbs with their points, skin, teeth,
and hair, all of them artificial. The king tried the
effect of taking away the heart and found that the
mouth could no longer speak. He took away the liver,
and the eyes could no longer see. He took away
the kidneys, and the legs lost their power of locomotion.
The king was delighted. So, and that's an often referred
(05:19):
to text when people talk about the history of robots.
And we don't have evident, hard evidence of this automaton,
but it's significant that it would have been mentioned in
a historical Daoist text that refers back seven hundred years. Uh.
It evidences this fascination with mechanical beings going away, way
way back in the ancient history, so early. Yeah, I
(05:40):
would be delighted too if I were the king, who
would not. Uh So that's our first one, and the
second one is a little more recent than that. This
one was a pigeon created by archiitis of tarentum and
archeitis was born around b C. In a Greek control
territory that's now part of southern Italy. He was a
(06:03):
very accomplished man. He was a philosopher, a mathematician, an astronomer,
a statesman, and a commander in chief. And sometimes he
gets called the father of mechanics. He's said to be
the most advanced of the Pythagorean mathematicians, and he classified
mathematics into four divisions geometry, arithmetic, astronomy, and music. He
(06:23):
was really influential in his time, and Architis also influenced
the work of Plato and Aristotle. In fact, he said
to have rescued Plato from Dionysius the second. But historians
are generally pretty quick to point out that the relationship
between Plato and Architis was a complex one. It was
pretty complicated. They had similar stances on many philosophical issues,
(06:45):
but they also had some pretty obvious disagreements. But for
today's interest, the accomplishment of Architis that's the most relevant
is a mechanical bird. This bird, which he called simply
the pigeon, was suspended at the end of a pivoting
ball are it moved in revolutions around the bar, either
using a jet of steam or compressed air. And while
(07:06):
the bird, which was created somewhere between four hundred and
three fifty b C. Is often listed as a footnote
to Archiitis's body of work, it's really important to remember
that he built this mechanism more than two thousand years ago.
So it was this very simple little robotic pigeon. Yes,
some people point to it is the first robot and
recorded history, but as we mentioned earlier, and it's a
(07:28):
claim that a lot of people are just not willing
to make for sure about any of these. And now
there's kind of a big jump to our next one
because we are getting to Da Vinci, who many people
know was really interested in mechanics. Uh. And so Leonardo
was born in April of two. He's one of history's
most famous men. So we all know his famous paintings
(07:51):
like the Last Supper and the Mona Lisa, and his
drawings of the Truvian Man. So he's not really a
mystery to anyone who has even a passing knowledge of history.
Late in his life, in fifteen fifteen, he created this
Automata Lion, allegedly to present to King France wid the
first the faux feline was said to have walked forward
toward the king, opened up its chest and revealed a
(08:13):
cluster of lilies. And while there's some lack of specificity
about the original lion, UH and Leonardo did not leave
any sketches of it, he did make detailed sketches of
the mechanisms that he likely used in its construction, and
he left some notes as well. And in two thousand nine,
Renato Boretto, a master builder of automata UH, used those
(08:35):
sketches and da Vinci's notes and he actually recreated the lion.
It's really really interesting to watch. You can find video
of it online and will link to some of it.
You know, it's kind of sobering to watch this sample
of robotics that's based on early fifteen hundreds ingenuity, because
it's still a pretty impressive piece today. To see this,
(08:57):
it almost looks like a giant toy. It's life size,
but it's you know, carved, so it doesn't look like
a real lion. But it just it moves along and
it kind of has wheels and its feet and it
rolls as its legs move along the floor, and it
tilts its head side to side, and it's kind of
mind blowing to me to think that that was designed
(09:17):
hundreds of years ago. Leonardo also designed a fully automated
man that was styled to look like an armored knight,
with a rope and gear mechanism to raise and move
the limbs, but there's no record of this one actually
(09:37):
being built. Italian robotics historians have also constructed a machine
based on these designs. Yeah it um. It can't do
quite the amount of moving on its own that the
lion can, which is why we focused on the lion
for this one. But I thought that the the armored
man should get at least to mention. And then we
get to a couple of entries that are really really
(09:59):
mind blowing. The first is Vokinson's flute player, and like
I said, this one is uh, kind of a two
for it's not really just the one. We're going to
talk about his famous duck automaton as well, which when
I have mentioned to our colleagues that we were working
on this podcast, everyone asked about the duck and I
just kind of shrug. We'll get there. So. Jacques de
(10:21):
Vokinson was born in Grenoble on February seventeen, o nine,
and he was the youngest child of ten born to
a glovemaker and a devout Catholic wife, and the story
goes that Jacques was obsessed with mechanical things at a
very young age. He studied with the Jesuits as a youngster.
He even entered a monastery but the age of sixteen
(10:42):
as a means of supporting his scientific studies because at
that point his father was gone and his mother couldn't
really just pay for him to play in his mechanized world.
And then later in seventy eight, he left the monastery
to study medicine and anatomy in Paris, and throughout his
life Wolkinson was inspired by medical science, and his passion
for an insight into the workings of anatomy garnered him
(11:06):
several patrons that supported his work through the years. His
most famous automaton was a gold plated copper duck. And
what a duck it was. It could do many of
the things real ducks could do. It could it could
quack and drink water and flap its wings and mimic
the digestive process, reminding me of many novelty items owned
(11:28):
by my grandfather. So yes, it's the famous pooping robot. Duck.
Everybody knows about. Uh, you know, it's one of those
like when you go, oh, ancient robots, they go pooping
robot duck right. Yes. In a letter written to the
Abbey Defontaine, he wrote, my second machine or automaton is
(11:50):
a duck in which I represent the mechanism of the
intestines which are employed in the operations of eating, drinking,
and digestion, where in the working of all the parts
necessary for these actions is exactly imitated. The duck stretches
out its neck to take corn out of your hand.
It swallows, it, digests it, and discharges it digested by
the usual passage. And I feel compelled to know it
(12:12):
didn't actually digested it. There was no chemical breakdown of
whatever you handed it. You could hand it buttons and
it would those would pass through its automated little system.
And I think when modern ears here they think of
it as this cookie novelty thing. But really he was
trying to represent a full um anatomical being. Like to him,
(12:33):
it was more about the science of and study of,
you know, biology, than it was like, Look, my duck poops, right,
not so much to be something you would buy in
the back of a spencer gift, but that duck was
actually created to boost attendance at an exhibit of another
of Vokinson's works, which was his Automatic Flute Player. The
flute Player was allegedly conceived in a fevered state while
(12:56):
he was ill. A famous marble statue by sculpt or
Antoine Koiservo was the inspiration for the shape of the figure,
although Kanson's version was made of wood and then painted
to look like marble, and this figure was five point
five feet tall, which is about one point seven meters
uh and in the modern book Living Dolls The Magical
(13:17):
History of the Question Mechanical Life Gabby Wood rights of
the Mechanical Flute Player, nine bellows were attached to three
separate pipes that led into the chest of the figure.
Each set of three bellows was attached to a different
weight to give out varying degrees of air, and then
all pipes joined into a single one equivalent to a trachea,
continuing up through the throat and widening to form the
(13:39):
cavity of the mouth. The lips, which bore upon the
whole of the flute, could open and close and move
backwards or forwards. Inside the mouth was a movable metal
tongue which governed the airflow and created pauses. This automaton breathed,
which is cool. It's really cool. Um. It's an incredibly
(14:00):
complex design. And of course, uh, you know, the flute
is a hard instrument to play when you're an actual human,
so he had to do something tricky, yes, So, borrowing
from his family's roots, he gave the flute player's hands
a skin covering to mimic the soft touch that you
need to play a flute. That's a tricky instrumental master
(14:21):
even for people, and his macanoid minstrel could play twelve
different tunes. And this flute player went on display on
February eleventh of seventy eight, and the cost of entry
to see this marvel was roughly equivalent to a week's
worth of wages for the average manual laborer. So this
was a serious money maker because people were paying that
(14:42):
to go see it. I mean it was too fantastical
to skip, uh, which is why when the attendants fell off,
Volkinson added the duck to the exhibit, as well as
another piece called the Tambourine Player, in an effort to
bring audiences back and keep the money flowing. He sold
off his mechanical aations in seventeen forty one and at
(15:02):
that point became France's inspector of silk manufacturer. His adventures
in that job could really be their own podcast, they
really could. He really sort of revolutionized looms. Um. But
the flute player and the other automata changed hands several times,
and the flute player was last seen in the possession
of Gottfried Christoph Barres, doctor to the Duke of Brunswick,
(15:22):
and then he disappeared from history after the doctor's death.
The duck turned up a couple more times, and uh,
there are allegedly there are pictures of it or something
that's very much like it that you can find online.
But the flute player, we don't. We don't know where
it landed. Just a pity because I would really love
to see how that works. And then for our final
(15:43):
entry in our list of five instances, there are actually
three pieces in this but uh, they're quite marvelous. Yes,
they're the work of Pierre Jacquedras, who was born on
July seventy one in Switzerland. His family was primarily involved
in two modes of employment, farming and watchmaking, and In
(16:04):
seventeen thirty eight, Jacque Edras opened up his own watch
shop in le Cha Defont, and initially he specialized in
pendulum clocks, but eventually he turned his attention to automated
mechanisms and eventually began to sell small automeda to a
special clients. I also feel like we should mentioned that
he is It's kind of a side note, but he's
(16:25):
often credited with creating the wristwatch, so he was very
much into shrinking mechanisms down, which plays into his work
in Automeda. In seventeen seventy four, he and his son
Henri Louis, and a clockmaker Jean Frederic les Show presented
their three creations, which are still considered to be marvels
of mechanical engineering. The musician is the first one, and
(16:45):
it's a female and um, she plays an organ, and
it's not an actual organ, it's a custom instrument that
looks like an organ, and she will bow at the
end of her performances. Uh. And she plays five different
tunes and the mechanical works are actually all concealed neath
her gown. But her fingers move super briskly and they
tap along at the instrument's keys, and it's really quite
(17:07):
something to watch. The draftsman can draw floor pictures, and
he'll also blow dust and graphite off of his page.
The Draftsman looks more like a little boy, and he
looks almost identical to the third one, which is an
automaton that people sort of hold in this extremely high
(17:32):
regard because it's really quite a marvel. It's called the Writer,
and it's um to my mind and I think the
mind of many other others that study this subject. It's
the most impressive of the three because he can write
as many as forty letters in sequence, and because he
has built with a series of coded gears in his
back that can be moved, he can actually be programmed
(17:56):
to write new sequences. His messages aren't static, uh, and
he'll dip his pen in an ink well so that
ink needs to be refreshed whenever he writes, and he
carefully scrawls out the program message onto paper, and his
eyes actually follow his pen as he's working, which is
sort of amazing and wonderful. The fact that this one
can be programmed to do different things would probably put
(18:17):
him higher on the list in like the Nitpickers list
of robots, because one of in terms of today's terminology,
one of the hallmarks of robotics is that these are
programmable things, not just things that work on like a
remote control or some kind of tether. Yeah. Uh and
Jacket Drows would take these automoda around with him on
(18:39):
tour while he was visiting wealthy families and he would,
you know, have them do their little activities and show off,
and then he would use those charms to sell his
high end watches and smaller automoda to his elite clientele.
And he would also book them into hotel rooms and
then charge admission for people just come and see them.
And the Jaquet Draws name is still famous for its watches. Um.
(19:02):
Just as Paul Party, who we discussed in a previous podcast,
brought branding into fashion houses, Jacque Drows did a similar thing,
and he understood the idea of building a brand in
his industry, and his touring automata were part of that brand. Today,
this trio lives in the Museum of Art and History
in Switzerland and they all still work, which is a
testament to the extraordinary engineering and skill that went into
(19:25):
their creation. Yeah, those are other ones that you can
see lots of video footage of online you know, people
carefully programming them, and I've noticed in some of them
the writer he's a little um squeaky. In some points
they had to scoot the paper along form a little
bit because the paper actually gets kind of moved on
(19:46):
this little um carrier that goes back and forth underneath
his hands. But generally he's still I mean, they're all
still in great working order and pretty amazing, and I
feel like, um, we should mention as we wrap up,
we're not going to talk about this one, but uh,
I know people will ask why we didn't include it,
which is the katakui Ningio, which are Japanese automeda uh
(20:08):
that are generally referenced from like sixteenth through early nineteenth century,
and I really think they deserve their own podcasts, so
stay tuned. It would be weird to talk about robots
and not mentioned Japan at Also I wanted to make
sure we at least pointed those out. Uh. They also
kind of go past the point in history where we
wanted to do the cut off so much the early
it's a little later than early. Some of it's in
(20:31):
this realm that I was talking about, but it goes
on a little bit further, and there are many different types,
and I feel like they just they deserve their own
whole little discussion because they're really quite amazing. But uh,
those are, like I said, a little sampling of historical
robotics and automoeda that I just I think it's sort
of beautiful and wonderful that going back these thousands of years,
(20:53):
we've always been obsessed with creating sort of mechanized versions
of ourselves and other natural elements of world, right, and
a lot of these to remind me of stuff that
happened much later, or things that that later would not
have been quite so impressive, like the Um you look
at the movie Hugo and the book that it was
based off of, like that was a much more recent
(21:15):
era of of clockworks and steam based things and automata
that could write things. Um, and this predates those sort
of things by some hundreds of years. Yeah, it's very
very cool. So that's historical robots will hopefully do more
perhaps in the future, in addition of the Japanese ones,
(21:36):
because robots are awesome, They're really cool. I also, as
as we're reading this, I just like every description sort
of could have ended with the sentence, and then they
all came to life and the doctor had to come
and save us. Thank you so much for joining us
for this Saturday classic. Since this is out of the archive,
(21:58):
if you heard an email address at Facebook, U r
L or something similar during the course of the show,
that may be obsolete now, so here is our current
contact information. We are at history Podcasts at how stuff
works dot com, and then we're at Missed in the History.
All over social media that is our name on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Pinterest,
and Instagram. Thanks again for listening. For more on this
(22:22):
and thousands of other topics, visit how stuff works dot com.
Hey, everybody Happy Saturday. Okay, Drew confession Uh. In part
because there is a new Star Wars movie, I have
droids on the brain really bad, So it seemed like
a good time to revisit an episode about mankind's early
attempts at automota. This episode from looks at five different
historical inventions that very loosely fall into the discussion of
(00:25):
early robotics. Welcome to Stuff you missed in History class
from house stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to
the podcast. I'm Holly Fry and I'm Tracy V. Wilson Fan.
(00:46):
I'm willing to bet Tracy that when you hear the
term or robot, uh, you think of things like Honda's
Asimo or the I Robot roomba that might tutor around
the house tidying up floors. I think of the bad
Robot TV placard Yeah from J. J. Abrams production Company. Um,
(01:06):
but there were actually way long before check playright. Carol
Kapok coined the term robot in his Are You Are,
which did for Rassam's Universal robots. Uh. There were mechanized
creations automata that were being created without electronics or computers,
and many were you know, fairly simple, but they really
paved the way for robots of today. So if you
(01:30):
do a search for first robot or earliest robot online,
you're probably going to find all kinds of different conflicting answers.
Some of them are philosophical, some of them are mythological,
and some of them are religious. Uh. We know that
clockwork devices go back many, many, many years, but most
historians on the subject are not really eager to pinpoint
(01:53):
which exact one was first. Yeah, there's there are too
many possible answers because there are some of the logical
ones that aren't necessarily supported with hard evidence. Those ones
are a little bit tricky. Some people even refer to
like the Biblical story of creation as kind of a
first um, almost robotics experiment sort of thing. Uh So there,
(02:17):
it's really hard. I mean, you get into a big
philosophical debate with people if you say this was the
first robot we know about for sure, because they're like,
there's some other options. Yeah, so you want to do that.
Some of them are so far back in history that
the substantiation for them is just not add percent clear, right,
And we're going to look back at the early history
of mechanized beings and clockworks and steampowered mini marvels. So
(02:42):
you're not gonna hear us talk about the DARPA Big
Dog or the Mars Curiosity rover. We're going incredibly old
school with this list, so nothing past the late seventeen hundreds,
and we have just selected five for the sake of
podcast length, But of course that means leaves out many
many others, because there really are many more examples of
this than I think many people realize. So think of
(03:02):
this as just a sampling of some of mankind's ventures
into automated beings. And really I'm telling a fib when
I say it's five, it's sort of five instances, but
some of them feature more than one automata. So it's
going to be fun. We're fludging our numbers, but we're
doing it with a good heart. Yes uh. And we're
going to start with one that is not easily substantiated.
(03:27):
We're going off of one text, but it's important, and
that's Yan Cheese Automated Man. So the first one is
in China. The reference to it can be found in
a third century b C. Taoist text, and the course
of this text a story is told of King Mu
of Chew, who reigned from b C. E. In it,
(03:49):
this so called artifice are presents an automated man. To
the king and his book Science and Civilization in China,
Volume two, writer Joseph Needham quotes a translate text about
this automa time, and in his quote he says, the
king stared at the figure in astonishment. It walked with
rapid strides, moving its head up and down, so that
(04:10):
anyone would have taken it for a live human being.
The artificer touched its chin, and it began singing perfectly
in tune. He touched its hand, and it began posturing,
keeping perfect time. As the performance was drawing to an end,
the robot winked its eye and made advances to the
ladies in attendance, whereupon the king became incensed and would
have had Yan she executed on the spot, had not.
(04:32):
The latter, in mortal fear, instantly taken the robot to
pieces to let him see what it really was, and
indeed it turned out to be only a construction of leather, wood, glue,
and lacquer variously colored white, black, red, and blue. Examining
it closely, the king found all the internal organs complete, liver,
gall heart, lungs, spleen, kidneys, stomach, and intestines. And over
(04:57):
these again muscles, bones, and limbs with their points, skin, teeth,
and hair, all of them artificial. The king tried the
effect of taking away the heart and found that the
mouth could no longer speak. He took away the liver,
and the eyes could no longer see. He took away
the kidneys, and the legs lost their power of locomotion.
The king was delighted. So, and that's an often referred
(05:19):
to text when people talk about the history of robots.
And we don't have evident, hard evidence of this automaton,
but it's significant that it would have been mentioned in
a historical Daoist text that refers back seven hundred years. Uh.
It evidences this fascination with mechanical beings going away, way
way back in the ancient history, so early. Yeah, I
(05:40):
would be delighted too if I were the king, who
would not. Uh So that's our first one, and the
second one is a little more recent than that. This
one was a pigeon created by archiitis of tarentum and
archeitis was born around b C. In a Greek control
territory that's now part of southern Italy. He was a
(06:03):
very accomplished man. He was a philosopher, a mathematician, an astronomer,
a statesman, and a commander in chief. And sometimes he
gets called the father of mechanics. He's said to be
the most advanced of the Pythagorean mathematicians, and he classified
mathematics into four divisions geometry, arithmetic, astronomy, and music. He
(06:23):
was really influential in his time, and Architis also influenced
the work of Plato and Aristotle. In fact, he said
to have rescued Plato from Dionysius the second. But historians
are generally pretty quick to point out that the relationship
between Plato and Architis was a complex one. It was
pretty complicated. They had similar stances on many philosophical issues,
(06:45):
but they also had some pretty obvious disagreements. But for
today's interest, the accomplishment of Architis that's the most relevant
is a mechanical bird. This bird, which he called simply
the pigeon, was suspended at the end of a pivoting
ball are it moved in revolutions around the bar, either
using a jet of steam or compressed air. And while
(07:06):
the bird, which was created somewhere between four hundred and
three fifty b C. Is often listed as a footnote
to Archiitis's body of work, it's really important to remember
that he built this mechanism more than two thousand years ago.
So it was this very simple little robotic pigeon. Yes,
some people point to it is the first robot and
recorded history, but as we mentioned earlier, and it's a
(07:28):
claim that a lot of people are just not willing
to make for sure about any of these. And now
there's kind of a big jump to our next one
because we are getting to Da Vinci, who many people
know was really interested in mechanics. Uh. And so Leonardo
was born in April of two. He's one of history's
most famous men. So we all know his famous paintings
(07:51):
like the Last Supper and the Mona Lisa, and his
drawings of the Truvian Man. So he's not really a
mystery to anyone who has even a passing knowledge of history.
Late in his life, in fifteen fifteen, he created this
Automata Lion, allegedly to present to King France wid the
first the faux feline was said to have walked forward
toward the king, opened up its chest and revealed a
(08:13):
cluster of lilies. And while there's some lack of specificity
about the original lion, UH and Leonardo did not leave
any sketches of it, he did make detailed sketches of
the mechanisms that he likely used in its construction, and
he left some notes as well. And in two thousand nine,
Renato Boretto, a master builder of automata UH, used those
(08:35):
sketches and da Vinci's notes and he actually recreated the lion.
It's really really interesting to watch. You can find video
of it online and will link to some of it.
You know, it's kind of sobering to watch this sample
of robotics that's based on early fifteen hundreds ingenuity, because
it's still a pretty impressive piece today. To see this,
(08:57):
it almost looks like a giant toy. It's life size,
but it's you know, carved, so it doesn't look like
a real lion. But it just it moves along and
it kind of has wheels and its feet and it
rolls as its legs move along the floor, and it
tilts its head side to side, and it's kind of
mind blowing to me to think that that was designed
(09:17):
hundreds of years ago. Leonardo also designed a fully automated
man that was styled to look like an armored knight,
with a rope and gear mechanism to raise and move
the limbs, but there's no record of this one actually
(09:37):
being built. Italian robotics historians have also constructed a machine
based on these designs. Yeah it um. It can't do
quite the amount of moving on its own that the
lion can, which is why we focused on the lion
for this one. But I thought that the the armored
man should get at least to mention. And then we
get to a couple of entries that are really really
(09:59):
mind blowing. The first is Vokinson's flute player, and like
I said, this one is uh, kind of a two
for it's not really just the one. We're going to
talk about his famous duck automaton as well, which when
I have mentioned to our colleagues that we were working
on this podcast, everyone asked about the duck and I
just kind of shrug. We'll get there. So. Jacques de
(10:21):
Vokinson was born in Grenoble on February seventeen, o nine,
and he was the youngest child of ten born to
a glovemaker and a devout Catholic wife, and the story
goes that Jacques was obsessed with mechanical things at a
very young age. He studied with the Jesuits as a youngster.
He even entered a monastery but the age of sixteen
(10:42):
as a means of supporting his scientific studies because at
that point his father was gone and his mother couldn't
really just pay for him to play in his mechanized world.
And then later in seventy eight, he left the monastery
to study medicine and anatomy in Paris, and throughout his
life Wolkinson was inspired by medical science, and his passion
for an insight into the workings of anatomy garnered him
(11:06):
several patrons that supported his work through the years. His
most famous automaton was a gold plated copper duck. And
what a duck it was. It could do many of
the things real ducks could do. It could it could
quack and drink water and flap its wings and mimic
the digestive process, reminding me of many novelty items owned
(11:28):
by my grandfather. So yes, it's the famous pooping robot. Duck.
Everybody knows about. Uh, you know, it's one of those
like when you go, oh, ancient robots, they go pooping
robot duck right. Yes. In a letter written to the
Abbey Defontaine, he wrote, my second machine or automaton is
(11:50):
a duck in which I represent the mechanism of the
intestines which are employed in the operations of eating, drinking,
and digestion, where in the working of all the parts
necessary for these actions is exactly imitated. The duck stretches
out its neck to take corn out of your hand.
It swallows, it, digests it, and discharges it digested by
the usual passage. And I feel compelled to know it
(12:12):
didn't actually digested it. There was no chemical breakdown of
whatever you handed it. You could hand it buttons and
it would those would pass through its automated little system.
And I think when modern ears here they think of
it as this cookie novelty thing. But really he was
trying to represent a full um anatomical being. Like to him,
(12:33):
it was more about the science of and study of,
you know, biology, than it was like, Look, my duck poops, right,
not so much to be something you would buy in
the back of a spencer gift, but that duck was
actually created to boost attendance at an exhibit of another
of Vokinson's works, which was his Automatic Flute Player. The
flute Player was allegedly conceived in a fevered state while
(12:56):
he was ill. A famous marble statue by sculpt or
Antoine Koiservo was the inspiration for the shape of the figure,
although Kanson's version was made of wood and then painted
to look like marble, and this figure was five point
five feet tall, which is about one point seven meters
uh and in the modern book Living Dolls The Magical
(13:17):
History of the Question Mechanical Life Gabby Wood rights of
the Mechanical Flute Player, nine bellows were attached to three
separate pipes that led into the chest of the figure.
Each set of three bellows was attached to a different
weight to give out varying degrees of air, and then
all pipes joined into a single one equivalent to a trachea,
continuing up through the throat and widening to form the
(13:39):
cavity of the mouth. The lips, which bore upon the
whole of the flute, could open and close and move
backwards or forwards. Inside the mouth was a movable metal
tongue which governed the airflow and created pauses. This automaton breathed,
which is cool. It's really cool. Um. It's an incredibly
(14:00):
complex design. And of course, uh, you know, the flute
is a hard instrument to play when you're an actual human,
so he had to do something tricky, yes, So, borrowing
from his family's roots, he gave the flute player's hands
a skin covering to mimic the soft touch that you
need to play a flute. That's a tricky instrumental master
(14:21):
even for people, and his macanoid minstrel could play twelve
different tunes. And this flute player went on display on
February eleventh of seventy eight, and the cost of entry
to see this marvel was roughly equivalent to a week's
worth of wages for the average manual laborer. So this
was a serious money maker because people were paying that
(14:42):
to go see it. I mean it was too fantastical
to skip, uh, which is why when the attendants fell off,
Volkinson added the duck to the exhibit, as well as
another piece called the Tambourine Player, in an effort to
bring audiences back and keep the money flowing. He sold
off his mechanical aations in seventeen forty one and at
(15:02):
that point became France's inspector of silk manufacturer. His adventures
in that job could really be their own podcast, they
really could. He really sort of revolutionized looms. Um. But
the flute player and the other automata changed hands several times,
and the flute player was last seen in the possession
of Gottfried Christoph Barres, doctor to the Duke of Brunswick,
(15:22):
and then he disappeared from history after the doctor's death.
The duck turned up a couple more times, and uh,
there are allegedly there are pictures of it or something
that's very much like it that you can find online.
But the flute player, we don't. We don't know where
it landed. Just a pity because I would really love
to see how that works. And then for our final
(15:43):
entry in our list of five instances, there are actually
three pieces in this but uh, they're quite marvelous. Yes,
they're the work of Pierre Jacquedras, who was born on
July seventy one in Switzerland. His family was primarily involved
in two modes of employment, farming and watchmaking, and In
(16:04):
seventeen thirty eight, Jacque Edras opened up his own watch
shop in le Cha Defont, and initially he specialized in
pendulum clocks, but eventually he turned his attention to automated
mechanisms and eventually began to sell small automeda to a
special clients. I also feel like we should mentioned that
he is It's kind of a side note, but he's
(16:25):
often credited with creating the wristwatch, so he was very
much into shrinking mechanisms down, which plays into his work
in Automeda. In seventeen seventy four, he and his son
Henri Louis, and a clockmaker Jean Frederic les Show presented
their three creations, which are still considered to be marvels
of mechanical engineering. The musician is the first one, and
(16:45):
it's a female and um, she plays an organ, and
it's not an actual organ, it's a custom instrument that
looks like an organ, and she will bow at the
end of her performances. Uh. And she plays five different
tunes and the mechanical works are actually all concealed neath
her gown. But her fingers move super briskly and they
tap along at the instrument's keys, and it's really quite
(17:07):
something to watch. The draftsman can draw floor pictures, and
he'll also blow dust and graphite off of his page.
The Draftsman looks more like a little boy, and he
looks almost identical to the third one, which is an
automaton that people sort of hold in this extremely high
(17:32):
regard because it's really quite a marvel. It's called the Writer,
and it's um to my mind and I think the
mind of many other others that study this subject. It's
the most impressive of the three because he can write
as many as forty letters in sequence, and because he
has built with a series of coded gears in his
back that can be moved, he can actually be programmed
(17:56):
to write new sequences. His messages aren't static, uh, and
he'll dip his pen in an ink well so that
ink needs to be refreshed whenever he writes, and he
carefully scrawls out the program message onto paper, and his
eyes actually follow his pen as he's working, which is
sort of amazing and wonderful. The fact that this one
can be programmed to do different things would probably put
(18:17):
him higher on the list in like the Nitpickers list
of robots, because one of in terms of today's terminology,
one of the hallmarks of robotics is that these are
programmable things, not just things that work on like a
remote control or some kind of tether. Yeah. Uh and
Jacket Drows would take these automoda around with him on
(18:39):
tour while he was visiting wealthy families and he would,
you know, have them do their little activities and show off,
and then he would use those charms to sell his
high end watches and smaller automoda to his elite clientele.
And he would also book them into hotel rooms and
then charge admission for people just come and see them.
And the Jaquet Draws name is still famous for its watches. Um.
(19:02):
Just as Paul Party, who we discussed in a previous podcast,
brought branding into fashion houses, Jacque Drows did a similar thing,
and he understood the idea of building a brand in
his industry, and his touring automata were part of that brand. Today,
this trio lives in the Museum of Art and History
in Switzerland and they all still work, which is a
testament to the extraordinary engineering and skill that went into
(19:25):
their creation. Yeah, those are other ones that you can
see lots of video footage of online you know, people
carefully programming them, and I've noticed in some of them
the writer he's a little um squeaky. In some points
they had to scoot the paper along form a little
bit because the paper actually gets kind of moved on
(19:46):
this little um carrier that goes back and forth underneath
his hands. But generally he's still I mean, they're all
still in great working order and pretty amazing, and I
feel like, um, we should mention as we wrap up,
we're not going to talk about this one, but uh,
I know people will ask why we didn't include it,
which is the katakui Ningio, which are Japanese automeda uh
(20:08):
that are generally referenced from like sixteenth through early nineteenth century,
and I really think they deserve their own podcasts, so
stay tuned. It would be weird to talk about robots
and not mentioned Japan at Also I wanted to make
sure we at least pointed those out. Uh. They also
kind of go past the point in history where we
wanted to do the cut off so much the early
it's a little later than early. Some of it's in
(20:31):
this realm that I was talking about, but it goes
on a little bit further, and there are many different types,
and I feel like they just they deserve their own
whole little discussion because they're really quite amazing. But uh,
those are, like I said, a little sampling of historical
robotics and automoeda that I just I think it's sort
of beautiful and wonderful that going back these thousands of years,
(20:53):
we've always been obsessed with creating sort of mechanized versions
of ourselves and other natural elements of world, right, and
a lot of these to remind me of stuff that
happened much later, or things that that later would not
have been quite so impressive, like the Um you look
at the movie Hugo and the book that it was
based off of, like that was a much more recent
(21:15):
era of of clockworks and steam based things and automata
that could write things. Um, and this predates those sort
of things by some hundreds of years. Yeah, it's very
very cool. So that's historical robots will hopefully do more
perhaps in the future, in addition of the Japanese ones,
(21:36):
because robots are awesome, They're really cool. I also, as
as we're reading this, I just like every description sort
of could have ended with the sentence, and then they
all came to life and the doctor had to come
and save us. Thank you so much for joining us
for this Saturday classic. Since this is out of the archive,
(21:58):
if you heard an email address at Facebook, U r
L or something similar during the course of the show,
that may be obsolete now, so here is our current
contact information. We are at history Podcasts at how stuff
works dot com, and then we're at Missed in the History.
All over social media that is our name on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Pinterest,
and Instagram. Thanks again for listening. For more on this
(22:22):
and thousands of other topics, visit how stuff works dot com.
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