Automata Old and New

by Conrad William Cooke

As mechanics, next to mathematics and astronomy, is the most ancient of sciences, and as the scientific knowledge of the ancients was ever shrouded in mystery to conceal it from the eyes of the vulgar, and to confer upon the initiated power and profit by working on the credulity of the ignorant, it was but only to be expected that mechanical science should be early applied in the ancient mysteries by which the philosophers and the priests of antiquity maintained so much of their supremacy.

One of the very earliest allusions to mysterious self-moving machines is to be found in the eighteenth book of the “Iliad,” wherein we are told of Vulcan that

“Full twenty tripods for his hall he fram’d, That, placed on living wheels of massy gold (Wondrous to tell) instinct with spirit roll’d From place to place, around the bless’d abodes, Self-mov’d, obedient to the beck of gods.”[1]

Several others of the ancient poets besides Homer have sung about the wonderful mechanical devices of Vulcan, among which were golden statues, the semblances of living maids, which not only appeared to be endued with life, but which walked by his side and bore him up as he walked. Aristotle also refers to self-moving tripods, and Philostratus states that Appolonius of Tyana saw similar pieces of mechanism among the Brahmins of India; but this must have been nearly four hundred years after Aristotle wrote, and some nine hundred years after the time of Homer.

Then again we hear of Dædalus making self-moving statues, small figures of the gods, of which Plato in his “Menos” says that unless they were fastened they would of themselves run away, and he puts this into the mouth of Socrates, who uses it as a figure to illustrate the importance of not only acquiring but of holding fast scientific truth that it may not fly away from us. Aristotle in referring to these statues affirms that Dædalus accomplished his object by putting into them quicksilver, but the learned mechanician Bishop Wilkins points out that “this would have been too grosse a way for so excellent an artificer; it is more likely that he did it with wheels and weights.”[2] We are moreover told by Macrobius[3] that in the temple of Hieropolis at Antium there were moving statues.

A contemporary of Plato and, it is said, his master, was Archytas of Tarentum, the celebrated Pythagorean philosopher, mathematician, cosmographer, and mechanician, to whom is accredited the invention of the screw and of the crane. Archytas is said to have constructed of wood a pigeon that could fly about, but which could not rise again after it had settled; and Aulus Gellius (who lived in the reigns of Trajan, Hadrian, Antoninus Pius, and Marcus Aurelius), tells us in his “Noctes Atticæ,” that “many men of eminence among the Greeks, and Favonius, the philosopher, a most vigilant searcher into antiquity, have in a most positive manner assured us that the model of a pigeon, formed in wood by Archytas, was so contrived as by a certain mechanical art and power to fly; so nicely was it balanced by weights and put in motion by hidden and inclosed air. In a matter so very improbable we may be allowed to add the words of Favonius himself: ‘Archytas of Tarentum, being both a philosopher and skilled in mechanics, made a wooden pigeon which had it ever settled would not have risen again till now.’”[4] And I am bound to admit that in this point I agree with him.

From the above description it would appear that a still greater invention than a flying automaton was made by Archytas, for in an apparatus “so nicely balanced by weights and put in motion by hidden and inclosed air,” we have a very fair forecast of the modern aërostat or balloon, filled with gas and balanced by ballast. There cannot be any doubt but that the accounts of these very early machines (if such ever existed at all), have been greatly exaggerated during the process of being handed down through long ages of ignorance and credulity; but we may now enter upon surer ground although still very ancient. In the reign of Ptolemy Euergetes II. (Ptolemy VII.), about 150 years b.c., there lived at Alexandria that great genius of mechanical science, Hero; and his remarkable book “Spiritalia,” of which I am able to show you several copies to-night, is itself a great storehouse of ingenuity in the construction of automata of very various forms and principles. This remarkable man was, if not the inventor, the first describer of the siphon in both its typical forms, the syringe, the well-known portable shower-bath, the clack valve, the fire engine, even with that mechanical refinement, an air vessel for insuring a continuous stream, a self-trimming lamp, the steam blowpipe, the pneumatic fountain called after his name, a steam engine, and last if not least, the penny-in-the-slot automatic machine for obtaining a drink, or, may be, a charge of scent.

I propose now to show you on the screen some photographic reproductions of pages in his book, some taken from the Latin edition of Commandinus, published at Urbino in 1575, and some from the Italian edition of Alessandro Georgi, printed at the same place in 1592, some from the fine edition of Aleotti, published in 1589, and others from the Amsterdam version of 1680, all of which editions I am able to show you. I have, moreover, copied some from manuscripts in the British Museum, of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, of which there are four in the National Library, i.e., two in the Harley Collection and two among the Burney manuscripts.