The Strange Automata of Jacques de Vaucanson


Jacques de Vaucanson is the man responsible for building some of the most impressive and eerily life-like automata of the 18th century. Along with his fellow French inventor Pierre Jaquet-Droz, Vaucanson is revered as a seminal figure in the history of robotics and mechanical doll design. He is best remembered for such celebrated simulacra as the Flute Player and a spectacularly conceived moving duck.

Vaucanson is reputed to have displayed an early flair for robot design when he constructed mechanical flying angels in a makeshift workshop at his Jesuit school in Grenoble. As a true figure of the Enlightenment, Vaucanson's interests ranged from anatomy to music, from metaphysical conundrums to the everyday mechanics of 'how things worked'. As a medical student he commenced upon a 'moving anatomy' to aid anatomical training and research. The figure was intended to graphically illustrate the body's inner workings - the circulation of the blood, the movements of the intestines and so on - but for various reasons the project remained uncompleted. Nevertheless, the piece was to stand as a model for his last great work, the so-called third automaton.

Vaucanson's reputation rests on three enormously popular and intricate automata. The first was a life-sized flute player, clothed in rustic garb and capable of drawing from a repertoire of 11 different melodies. The automaton moved its mechanical fingers over the holes of the flute and appeared to blow into the instrument's mouthpiece. This first piece was completed in 1737 and proved to be an enormous hit at regional fairs. The second automaton was a more sophisticated variation of the first - this figure played the flute whist simultaneously beating a rhythm out on a small drum. This second android had an increased repertoire of 20 songs.

The third automaton proved to be Vaucanson's greatest achievement. This was a full-sized gilt brass android that reproduced the natural processes of a duck. The robot's body was pierced with small openings to reveal the internal workings of the mechanical bird. Thus, astounded observers could chart the steady progress of food through the digestive tracts until it was graphically expelled as waste product from the anus - in the form of a suitably foul smelling pellet. Vaucanson's earlier automatons had drawn upon existing musical archetypes in mechanical design - the duck, however, was a radical new departure, not least because it hinted at the wondrous digestive and anatomical processes of the still largely-unexplored human organism.