The quest to create mechanical creatures goes back to the ancient Greeks, but the concept experienced a revival at the end of the Renaissance. Around 1640, Descartes put forth the idea that the human body works like a machine and could be understood as such. The idea that nature can be viewed as a mechanical process was solidified in 1687 when Newton published his Principia. In it, he describes in detail how nature follows mathematical rules. Indeed, Newton viewed the universe as a massive clock built by God and set into motion. These ideas were a precursor to the Industrial Revolution and also made clockwork automata a fad in Europe in the early 18th century.
Jacques Vaucanson [1709-1782] was an unsung hero of the Industrial Revolution. The invention of the mechanical loom is usually credited to Joseph Jacquard, but it was Vaucanson who first came up with the idea of using punchcards to store textile patterns, a technology that would be used in the first computers 200 years later. Vaucanson also build the first functioning automaton, a mechanical flute player that emulated a human being. The lips and fingers of the player moved naturally on the flute, and he painstakingly copied the musculature and breathing of a human. Its breath could be felt emanating from the mouth as it played.
After the success of the flute player, Vaucanson built an automated tambourine player, and finally his most famous work, a mechanical duck in 1738. The duck was made of gilded copper and contained over 400 moving parts hidden from view. The duck could drink, eat, quack, splash about and even defecate. Vaucanson used a new high-tech material, rubber, to design the ducks digestive system, and thus developed the world’s first flexible rubber tube. It was later discovered that the duck did not actually defecate as the “feces” were stored in a separate compartment, but this did not diminish the magnitude of his masterpiece.
Vaucanson was a showman and toured througout Europe with his duck, charging admission and wowing audiences with his creation. No-one had ever before seen a mechanism which appeared so alive. He eventually caught the attention of the French government who hired him as inspector of the manufacture of silk. It was during this time he invented the first fully automated loom which used punch cards, the machine later improved upon by Jacquard. The silk workers of Lyon rebelled against Vaucanson’s automatic loom by pelting him with stones in the street, insisting that no machine could replace them. This foreshadowed the later anti-industrial sentiment of the Luddite movement in Britain. Vaucanson’s original automata were lost to history, but a replica of the duck is now kept in the Musee des Automates in Grenoble, France.
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