Automata Old and New

by Conrad William Cooke

Fig. 19.

When Kircher’s book was published Louis XIV. was a child, and it is stated by several authorities that both Père Truchet and Camus made the most elaborate automata for his boyish amusement, but as Louis XIV. was forty years old when Truchet came of age and fifty-five When Camus was twenty-one it is difficult to reconcile these statements with facts.

Putting aside, however, the question of the period of life when the king amused himself with such things, it is well authenticated that Père Truchet, towards the end of the seventeenth century, constructed for him moving pictures which exhibited extraordinary mechanical skill. One of these was the representation of a five-act opera, the scenery of which was automatically changed between the acts. The actors came on and went off, and performed their parts in pantomime. The proscenium was about sixteen inches in breadth and thirteen in height, and the whole of the machinery with the scenery occupied a space only an inch and a quarter in depth.[8]

The account given by Camus of a toy he constructed for this baby king of fifty summers is very wonderful. This elaborate automaton consisted of a small coach drawn by two horses and which contained the figure of a lady with a footman and a page behind. When this little coach was placed on the edge of a suitable table the coachman smacked his whip and the horses immediately started, moving their legs in a most natural manner; when they reached the opposite edge of the table they turned sharply at right angles and proceeded along that edge. As soon as the carriage arrived opposite the king it stopped and both the footman and page got down and opened the door, the lady alighted, and, curtseying to the king, presented a petition. After waiting a few minutes she bowed again to the king and re-entered the carriage, the page got up again behind, the coachman whipped up his horses and drove on, and the footman running after the carriage jumped up into his former place. In the account given by M. de Camus he does not attempt to describe the mechanism of the machine and we have his word alone for the account of its performance.

The great philosopher Descartes formed the theory that all animals are merely automata of a high degree of perfection, and, to prove his notion, he is said to have constructed an automaton in the form of a young girl to which he gave the name of “Ma fille Francine.” This figure came unhappily to a watery grave, for during a voyage by sea the captain of the vessel in which it was travelling had the curiosity to open the case in which Francine was packed and, in his astonishment at the movements of the automaton, which were so wonderfully natural, he threw the whole thing overboard, believing it to be the work of the devil.

I now come to what are, if not the most extraordinary pieces of mechanism, certainly the most wonderful automata the world has ever seen. In the year 1738 that great mechanical genius M. Vaucanson, a member of the Académie des Sciences exhibited at Paris three very remarkable automata which were, a flute-player, a figure which played the shepherd’s pipe of Provence and the drum, and an artificial duck. The first of these, the flute-player, he described in a Memoir read before the Académie on the 30th of April, 1738. This automaton was a wooden figure six feet six inches in height, representing a well-known antique statue of a Faun, sitting on a rock and mounted on a square pedestal four feet six from the ground. It was capable of performing twelve pieces of music on a German flute, the instrument being really played as a man would play it by blowing across the embouchure and projecting the air with variable force by movable lips, which imitated in their action those of a living player, employing a tongue to regulate the opening, and producing the notes by the tips of the fingers closing or opening the holes.

The mechanical devices in this automaton are so beautiful and so scientifically thought out, that I am only sorry that time will not permit me to describe them in detail, but I will try and make its general principles clear.

Within the pedestal was a train of wheel-work driven by a weight, which set into motion a small shaft on which were six cranks disposed at equal angular distances around it; to these six cranks as many pairs of bellows were attached (their inlet valves being mechanically opened and closed so as to make them silent in action). The air supplied by these bellows was conveyed to three different wind chests, one loaded with a weight of four pounds, one with a weight of two pounds, and the last having only the weight of its upper board. These wind chests communicated with three little chambers in the body of the figure, and these chambers were all connected with the windpipe which passed up the throat to the cavity of the mouth and terminated in the two movable lips which, between them, formed an orifice that could be protruded or drawn back, and might be further modified by the action of the tongue.

The train of wheels also set into motion a cylinder twenty inches in diameter and two feet six inches long; on this were fixed a number of brass bars of different lengths and thicknesses which in their revolution acted upon a row of fifteen keys or levers; three of these corresponded to the three little wind chambers containing air at different pressures, and, by means of little chains, operated their respective valves. There were seven levers set apart for operating the fingers, their respective chains making bends at the shoulders and elbows of the automaton, and terminated at the wrist in the ends of what I may call metacarpal levers attached to the fingers which were armed at their tips with leather to imitate the flesh of the natural hand.

The motion of the mouth was controlled by four of the levers, one to open the lips so as to give to the wind a greater issue, one to bring them closer together, and so contract the passage, a third to draw the lips backward and away from the flute, and the fourth to push them forward over the edge of the embouchure.