Automata Old and New

by Conrad William Cooke

I have here a couple of figures which I admit do not contain their motive power within themselves but they require so little aid from outside and do so much for themselves that I have been tempted to bring them in. Here is a monkey climbing a rope, and its progression is insured by the simplest possible device, the string passes over one pin and under another in his posterior hands while the anterior pair of hands grip the rope with a slight degree of friction: if the string be tightened the lower hands act as a lever which pushes the body up, but when it is slack it slips round the pins and does no work, in other words the grip of the hands is greater than that of the feet when the cord is slack but less when it is tight.

In this little animated skeleton, we have an immense effect produced by an extraordinarily small external motion. The squeeze that I give to this U shaped spring, by varying the tension of the twisted strings, on which the skeleton is suspended, is almost infinitesimal—but it gives to the skeleton considerably more energy than is usually to be found in skeletons.

Here we have a walking figure whose action depends upon gravity, but his progression is checked by the friction of his feet on the board on which he performs, first one foot catches and then another, and each time his inertia turns him round, which gives him an appearance of having been in the company of teetotallers, or can he have been dining with the Sette of Odd Volumes?

A familiar form of mechanical or automatic toys is in the form of a box or frame having a glass front, behind which figures of acrobats, rope-dancers and moving groups are set into motion by sand falling on a wheel within the case; and it is an ingenious feature of these toys that they are “wound up” by simply rolling the box over on its edge through one revolution, which has the effect of lifting the fallen sand back into the upper reservoir.

The last great class of mechanical figures, to which I shall refer, includes those which depend for their action upon the spinning of a top or fly-wheel, and some of them are particularly pretty and ingenious.

Here, for example, is a couple of figures, which the gentleman who sold it to me told me was “a Narry and a Narriet walking hout on ‘Ampstead ’Eath.” In this case the ruling spirit and go is as usual in the lady, and the man has to follow whither she leads, the legs of the man are connected together at the hips by a pair of cranks so disposed, that if one leg be pushed back, the other is thereby thrown forward. Now the heels are so cut that they catch in the ground when in a forward position and can slide forward when behind; in being urged along, the forward leg catching in the ground is relatively pushed back and the other leg comes forward, which in its turn catches, and the effect of walking is produced.

And here we have ([Fig. 25]) another on precisely the same principle, in which an ostrich appears to draw a cart, which in reality, is pushing him along, but the effect of the ostrich’s strut is delightfully reproduced.

Fig. 25.