Mechanics: The Science of Machinery

by A. Russell Bond

CHAPTER XXI

ANIMATED MACHINERY

IN MARKED contrast to the massive machinery and apparatus described in the last chapter, and fully as wonderful, is a class of machinery to which we might apply the term “animated.” By this we do not mean manikins or toys, but certain higher types of machines which seem to be possessed of powers that we should expect to find only in living beings—machines that have a sense of touch, sight, and hearing—machines that will reason out a mathematical problem; that will talk; that have the equivalent of a memory. In this broad classification we may include such widely different machines as the motion-picture camera and projector, and that mysterious mechanism which seems animated with strange powers of its own—- the gyroscope.