Automata Old and New

by Conrad William Cooke

The last of the fifteen levers is the cleverest of all, for it has the power of controlling the tongue, an accomplishment which I think everyone (unless he be an Odd Volume) will agree with me is a very difficult one to acquire.

The barrel worked upon a screwed bearing (similar to that of the cylinder of a phonograph), so that in its revolution all the levers described a spiral line sixty-four inches long, and, as the barrel during the performance made twelve revolutions it followed that the levers passed over a distance of no less than 768 inches in going through its performance of twelve tunes.

In a Memoir read before the Académie des Sciences, M. Vaucanson described the very beautiful methods by which the barrel was set out, and by which the positions of the bars were determined on its surface so as to regulate the supply of air and to control the actions of the fingers, the motion of the lips and the movements of the tongue; and he gave a most interesting analysis of the acoustics of wind instruments; but time will not permit me to make more than this passing reference to them.

The picture on the screen ([Fig. 21]) is a photographic reproduction of the plate attached to M. Vaucanson’s Memoir (a somewhat rare little tract published in 1738) in which his three automata are shown, and I hold in my hand a copy of the translation by Dr. Desaguliers, published in London in 1742, which, the imprint tells us, was “sold at the long room at the Opera House in the Haymarket, where the mechanical figures are to be seen at 1, 2, 5, and 7 o’clock in the afternoon.”

Fig. 21.

The second of Vaucanson’s automata was his celebrated model of a duck, which he himself described in a letter to the Abbé de la Fontaine in 1738. This extraordinary automaton (according to the inventor’s own account of it), exhibited a considerable amount of physiological and anatomical knowledge and the most profound mechanical skill, for in it the operation of eating, drinking, and digestion, were very closely imitated. The duck stretched out its neck to take corn from the hand, it swallowed it and discharged it in a digested condition, the digestion being effected not by trituration, but by dissolution, and (to quote the quaint expressions of the inventor), “The matter digested in the stomach is conducted by pipes (as in an animal by the guts), quite to the anus, where there is a sphincter that lets it out. I don’t pretend,” he says, “to give this as a perfect digestion, capable of producing blood and nutritive particles for the support of the animal. I hope nobody will be so unkind as to upbraid me with pretending to any such thing. I only pretend to imitate the mechanism of their action in these things, i.e., first, to swallow the corn; secondly, macerate or dissolve it; thirdly, to make it come out sensibly changed from what it was.” But (on the same authority), besides being furnished with a digestive system, the wings were anatomical imitations of nature; not only was every bone imitated, but all the processes and eminences of each bone, and the joints were articulated as in a real animal.

After having been wound up, the duck ate and drank, played in the water with his bill, making what is described as a “gugling” sound, rose up on its legs and sat down, flapped its wings, dressed its feathers with its bill, and performed all these different operations without requiring to be touched again.

It is important, however, to point out that this digestion story can only be “digested” cum grano salis, and this is supplied in the sequel which furnishes the explanation. In the year 1840 the automaton was found hidden away in a garret in Berlin; it was very much out of order, and a mechanician of the name of Georges Tiets undertook to repair it. It was taken to Paris, and in the year 1844 was exhibited in the Place du Palais Royal. In the course of this exhibition one of the wings became deranged, and it was put into the hands of Robert-Houdin for repairs. Robert-Houdin took advantage of this opportunity for examining the so-called digestive system of the automaton, and he thus describes its action: