Hey, everybody Happy Saturday. Okay, Drew confession Uh. In part because there is a new Star Wars movie, I have droids on the brain really bad, So it seemed like a good time to revisit an episode about mankind's early attempts at automota. This episode from looks at five different historical inventions that very loosely fall into the discussion of early robotics. Welcome to Stuff you missed in History class from house stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Fry and I'm Tracy V. Wilson Fan. I'm willing to bet Tracy that when you hear the term or robot, uh, you think of things like Honda's Asimo or the I Robot roomba that might tutor around the house tidying up floors. I think of the bad Robot TV placard Yeah from J. J. Abrams production Company. Um, but there were actually way long before check playright. Carol Kapok coined the term robot in his Are You Are, which did for Rassam's Universal robots. Uh. There were mechanized creations automata that were being created without electronics or computers, and many were you know, fairly simple, but they really paved the way for robots of today. So if you do a search for first robot or earliest robot online, you're probably going to find all kinds of different conflicting answers. Some of them are philosophical, some of them are mythological, and some of them are religious. Uh. We know that clockwork devices go back many, many, many years, but most historians on the subject are not really eager to pinpoint which exact one was first. Yeah, there's there are too many possible answers because there are some of the logical ones that aren't necessarily supported with hard evidence. Those ones are a little bit tricky. Some people even refer to like the Biblical story of creation as kind of a first um, almost robotics experiment sort of thing. Uh So there, it's really hard. I mean, you get into a big philosophical debate with people if you say this was the first robot we know about for sure, because they're like, there's some other options. Yeah, so you want to do that. Some of them are so far back in history that the substantiation for them is just not add percent clear, right, And we're going to look back at the early history of mechanized beings and clockworks and steampowered mini marvels. So you're not gonna hear us talk about the DARPA Big Dog or the Mars Curiosity rover. We're going incredibly old school with this list, so nothing past the late seventeen hundreds, and we have just selected five for the sake of podcast length, But of course that means leaves out many many others, because there really are many more examples of this than I think many people realize. So think of this as just a sampling of some of mankind's ventures into automated beings. And really I'm telling a fib when I say it's five, it's sort of five instances, but some of them feature more than one automata. So it's going to be fun. We're fludging our numbers, but we're doing it with a good heart. Yes uh. And we're going to start with one that is not easily substantiated. We're going off of one text, but it's important, and that's Yan Cheese Automated Man. So the first one is in China. The reference to it can be found in a third century b C. Taoist text, and the course of this text a story is told of King Mu of Chew, who reigned from b C. E. In it, this so called artifice are presents an automated man. To the king and his book Science and Civilization in China, Volume two, writer Joseph Needham quotes a translate text about this automa time, and in his quote he says, the king stared at the figure in astonishment. It walked with rapid strides, moving its head up and down, so that anyone would have taken it for a live human being. The artificer touched its chin, and it began singing perfectly in tune. He touched its hand, and it began posturing, keeping perfect time. As the performance was drawing to an end, the robot winked its eye and made advances to the ladies in attendance, whereupon the king became incensed and would have had Yan she executed on the spot, had not. The latter, in mortal fear, instantly taken the robot to pieces to let him see what it really was, and indeed it turned out to be only a construction of leather, wood, glue, and lacquer variously colored white, black, red, and blue. Examining it closely, the king found all the internal organs complete, liver, gall heart, lungs, spleen, kidneys, stomach, and intestines. And over these again muscles, bones, and limbs with their points, skin, teeth, and hair, all of them artificial. The king tried the effect of taking away the heart and found that the mouth could no longer speak. He took away the liver, and the eyes could no longer see. He took away the kidneys, and the legs lost their power of locomotion. The king was delighted. So, and that's an often referred to text when people talk about the history of robots. And we don't have evident, hard evidence of this automaton, but it's significant that it would have been mentioned in a historical Daoist text that refers back seven hundred years. Uh. It evidences this fascination with mechanical beings going away, way way back in the ancient history, so early. Yeah, I would be delighted too if I were the king, who would not. Uh So that's our first one, and the second one is a little more recent than that. This one was a pigeon created by archiitis of tarentum and archeitis was born around b C. In a Greek control territory that's now part of southern Italy. He was a very accomplished man. He was a philosopher, a mathematician, an astronomer, a statesman, and a commander in chief. And sometimes he gets called the father of mechanics. He's said to be the most advanced of the Pythagorean mathematicians, and he classified mathematics into four divisions geometry, arithmetic, astronomy, and music. He was really influential in his time, and Architis also influenced the work of Plato and Aristotle. In fact, he said to have rescued Plato from Dionysius the second. But historians are generally pretty quick to point out that the relationship between Plato and Architis was a complex one. It was pretty complicated. They had similar stances on many philosophical issues, but they also had some pretty obvious disagreements. But for today's interest, the accomplishment of Architis that's the most relevant is a mechanical bird. This bird, which he called simply the pigeon, was suspended at the end of a pivoting ball are it moved in revolutions around the bar, either using a jet of steam or compressed air. And while the bird, which was created somewhere between four hundred and three fifty b C. Is often listed as a footnote to Archiitis's body of work, it's really important to remember that he built this mechanism more than two thousand years ago. So it was this very simple little robotic pigeon. Yes, some people point to it is the first robot and recorded history, but as we mentioned earlier, and it's a claim that a lot of people are just not willing to make for sure about any of these. And now there's kind of a big jump to our next one because we are getting to Da Vinci, who many people know was really interested in mechanics. Uh. And so Leonardo was born in April of two. He's one of history's most famous men. So we all know his famous paintings like the Last Supper and the Mona Lisa, and his drawings of the Truvian Man. So he's not really a mystery to anyone who has even a passing knowledge of history. Late in his life, in fifteen fifteen, he created this Automata Lion, allegedly to present to King France wid the first the faux feline was said to have walked forward toward the king, opened up its chest and revealed a cluster of lilies. And while there's some lack of specificity about the original lion, UH and Leonardo did not leave any sketches of it, he did make detailed sketches of the mechanisms that he likely used in its construction, and he left some notes as well. And in two thousand nine, Renato Boretto, a master builder of automata UH, used those sketches and da Vinci's notes and he actually recreated the lion. It's really really interesting to watch. You can find video of it online and will link to some of it. You know, it's kind of sobering to watch this sample of robotics that's based on early fifteen hundreds ingenuity, because it's still a pretty impressive piece today. To see this, it almost looks like a giant toy. It's life size, but it's you know, carved, so it doesn't look like a real lion. But it just it moves along and it kind of has wheels and its feet and it rolls as its legs move along the floor, and it tilts its head side to side, and it's kind of mind blowing to me to think that that was designed hundreds of years ago. Leonardo also designed a fully automated man that was styled to look like an armored knight, with a rope and gear mechanism to raise and move the limbs, but there's no record of this one actually being built. Italian robotics historians have also constructed a machine based on these designs. Yeah it um. It can't do quite the amount of moving on its own that the lion can, which is why we focused on the lion for this one. But I thought that the the armored man should get at least to mention. And then we get to a couple of entries that are really really mind blowing. The first is Vokinson's flute player, and like I said, this one is uh, kind of a two for it's not really just the one. We're going to talk about his famous duck automaton as well, which when I have mentioned to our colleagues that we were working on this podcast, everyone asked about the duck and I just kind of shrug. We'll get there. So. Jacques de Vokinson was born in Grenoble on February seventeen, o nine, and he was the youngest child of ten born to a glovemaker and a devout Catholic wife, and the story goes that Jacques was obsessed with mechanical things at a very young age. He studied with the Jesuits as a youngster. He even entered a monastery but the age of sixteen as a means of supporting his scientific studies because at that point his father was gone and his mother couldn't really just pay for him to play in his mechanized world. And then later in seventy eight, he left the monastery to study medicine and anatomy in Paris, and throughout his life Wolkinson was inspired by medical science, and his passion for an insight into the workings of anatomy garnered him several patrons that supported his work through the years. His most famous automaton was a gold plated copper duck. And what a duck it was. It could do many of the things real ducks could do. It could it could quack and drink water and flap its wings and mimic the digestive process, reminding me of many novelty items owned by my grandfather. So yes, it's the famous pooping robot. Duck. Everybody knows about. Uh, you know, it's one of those like when you go, oh, ancient robots, they go pooping robot duck right. Yes. In a letter written to the Abbey Defontaine, he wrote, my second machine or automaton is a duck in which I represent the mechanism of the intestines which are employed in the operations of eating, drinking, and digestion, where in the working of all the parts necessary for these actions is exactly imitated. The duck stretches out its neck to take corn out of your hand. It swallows, it, digests it, and discharges it digested by the usual passage. And I feel compelled to know it didn't actually digested it. There was no chemical breakdown of whatever you handed it. You could hand it buttons and it would those would pass through its automated little system. And I think when modern ears here they think of it as this cookie novelty thing. But really he was trying to represent a full um anatomical being. Like to him, it was more about the science of and study of, you know, biology, than it was like, Look, my duck poops, right, not so much to be something you would buy in the back of a spencer gift, but that duck was actually created to boost attendance at an exhibit of another of Vokinson's works, which was his Automatic Flute Player. The flute Player was allegedly conceived in a fevered state while he was ill. A famous marble statue by sculpt or Antoine Koiservo was the inspiration for the shape of the figure, although Kanson's version was made of wood and then painted to look like marble, and this figure was five point five feet tall, which is about one point seven meters uh and in the modern book Living Dolls The Magical History of the Question Mechanical Life Gabby Wood rights of the Mechanical Flute Player, nine bellows were attached to three separate pipes that led into the chest of the figure. Each set of three bellows was attached to a different weight to give out varying degrees of air, and then all pipes joined into a single one equivalent to a trachea, continuing up through the throat and widening to form the cavity of the mouth. The lips, which bore upon the whole of the flute, could open and close and move backwards or forwards. Inside the mouth was a movable metal tongue which governed the airflow and created pauses. This automaton breathed, which is cool. It's really cool. Um. It's an incredibly complex design. And of course, uh, you know, the flute is a hard instrument to play when you're an actual human, so he had to do something tricky, yes, So, borrowing from his family's roots, he gave the flute player's hands a skin covering to mimic the soft touch that you need to play a flute. That's a tricky instrumental master even for people, and his macanoid minstrel could play twelve different tunes. And this flute player went on display on February eleventh of seventy eight, and the cost of entry to see this marvel was roughly equivalent to a week's worth of wages for the average manual laborer. So this was a serious money maker because people were paying that to go see it. I mean it was too fantastical to skip, uh, which is why when the attendants fell off, Volkinson added the duck to the exhibit, as well as another piece called the Tambourine Player, in an effort to bring audiences back and keep the money flowing. He sold off his mechanical aations in seventeen forty one and at that point became France's inspector of silk manufacturer. His adventures in that job could really be their own podcast, they really could. He really sort of revolutionized looms. Um. But the flute player and the other automata changed hands several times, and the flute player was last seen in the possession of Gottfried Christoph Barres, doctor to the Duke of Brunswick, and then he disappeared from history after the doctor's death. The duck turned up a couple more times, and uh, there are allegedly there are pictures of it or something that's very much like it that you can find online. But the flute player, we don't. We don't know where it landed. Just a pity because I would really love to see how that works. And then for our final entry in our list of five instances, there are actually three pieces in this but uh, they're quite marvelous. Yes, they're the work of Pierre Jacquedras, who was born on July seventy one in Switzerland. His family was primarily involved in two modes of employment, farming and watchmaking, and In seventeen thirty eight, Jacque Edras opened up his own watch shop in le Cha Defont, and initially he specialized in pendulum clocks, but eventually he turned his attention to automated mechanisms and eventually began to sell small automeda to a special clients. I also feel like we should mentioned that he is It's kind of a side note, but he's often credited with creating the wristwatch, so he was very much into shrinking mechanisms down, which plays into his work in Automeda. In seventeen seventy four, he and his son Henri Louis, and a clockmaker Jean Frederic les Show presented their three creations, which are still considered to be marvels of mechanical engineering. The musician is the first one, and it's a female and um, she plays an organ, and it's not an actual organ, it's a custom instrument that looks like an organ, and she will bow at the end of her performances. Uh. And she plays five different tunes and the mechanical works are actually all concealed neath her gown. But her fingers move super briskly and they tap along at the instrument's keys, and it's really quite something to watch. The draftsman can draw floor pictures, and he'll also blow dust and graphite off of his page. The Draftsman looks more like a little boy, and he looks almost identical to the third one, which is an automaton that people sort of hold in this extremely high regard because it's really quite a marvel. It's called the Writer, and it's um to my mind and I think the mind of many other others that study this subject. It's the most impressive of the three because he can write as many as forty letters in sequence, and because he has built with a series of coded gears in his back that can be moved, he can actually be programmed to write new sequences. His messages aren't static, uh, and he'll dip his pen in an ink well so that ink needs to be refreshed whenever he writes, and he carefully scrawls out the program message onto paper, and his eyes actually follow his pen as he's working, which is sort of amazing and wonderful. The fact that this one can be programmed to do different things would probably put him higher on the list in like the Nitpickers list of robots, because one of in terms of today's terminology, one of the hallmarks of robotics is that these are programmable things, not just things that work on like a remote control or some kind of tether. Yeah. Uh and Jacket Drows would take these automoda around with him on tour while he was visiting wealthy families and he would, you know, have them do their little activities and show off, and then he would use those charms to sell his high end watches and smaller automoda to his elite clientele. And he would also book them into hotel rooms and then charge admission for people just come and see them. And the Jaquet Draws name is still famous for its watches. Um. Just as Paul Party, who we discussed in a previous podcast, brought branding into fashion houses, Jacque Drows did a similar thing, and he understood the idea of building a brand in his industry, and his touring automata were part of that brand. Today, this trio lives in the Museum of Art and History in Switzerland and they all still work, which is a testament to the extraordinary engineering and skill that went into their creation. Yeah, those are other ones that you can see lots of video footage of online you know, people carefully programming them, and I've noticed in some of them the writer he's a little um squeaky. In some points they had to scoot the paper along form a little bit because the paper actually gets kind of moved on this little um carrier that goes back and forth underneath his hands. But generally he's still I mean, they're all still in great working order and pretty amazing, and I feel like, um, we should mention as we wrap up, we're not going to talk about this one, but uh, I know people will ask why we didn't include it, which is the katakui Ningio, which are Japanese automeda uh that are generally referenced from like sixteenth through early nineteenth century, and I really think they deserve their own podcasts, so stay tuned. It would be weird to talk about robots and not mentioned Japan at Also I wanted to make sure we at least pointed those out. Uh. They also kind of go past the point in history where we wanted to do the cut off so much the early it's a little later than early. Some of it's in this realm that I was talking about, but it goes on a little bit further, and there are many different types, and I feel like they just they deserve their own whole little discussion because they're really quite amazing. But uh, those are, like I said, a little sampling of historical robotics and automoeda that I just I think it's sort of beautiful and wonderful that going back these thousands of years, we've always been obsessed with creating sort of mechanized versions of ourselves and other natural elements of world, right, and a lot of these to remind me of stuff that happened much later, or things that that later would not have been quite so impressive, like the Um you look at the movie Hugo and the book that it was based off of, like that was a much more recent era of of clockworks and steam based things and automata that could write things. Um, and this predates those sort of things by some hundreds of years. Yeah, it's very very cool. So that's historical robots will hopefully do more perhaps in the future, in addition of the Japanese ones, because robots are awesome, They're really cool. I also, as as we're reading this, I just like every description sort of could have ended with the sentence, and then they all came to life and the doctor had to come and save us. Thank you so much for joining us for this Saturday classic. Since this is out of the archive, if you heard an email address at Facebook, U r L or something similar during the course of the show, that may be obsolete now, so here is our current contact information. We are at history Podcasts at how stuff works dot com, and then we're at Missed in the History. All over social media that is our name on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Pinterest, and Instagram. Thanks again for listening. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit how stuff works dot com.

Hey, everybody Happy Saturday. Okay, Drew confession Uh. In part because there is a new Star Wars movie, I have droids on the brain really bad, So it seemed like a good time to revisit an episode about mankind's early attempts at automota. This episode from looks at five different historical inventions that very loosely fall into the discussion of early robotics. Welcome to Stuff you missed in History class from house stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Fry and I'm Tracy V. Wilson Fan. I'm willing to bet Tracy that when you hear the term or robot, uh, you think of things like Honda's Asimo or the I Robot roomba that might tutor around the house tidying up floors. I think of the bad Robot TV placard Yeah from J. J. Abrams production Company. Um, but there were actually way long before check playright. Carol Kapok coined the term robot in his Are You Are, which did for Rassam's Universal robots. Uh. There were mechanized creations automata that were being created without electronics or computers, and many were you know, fairly simple, but they really paved the way for robots of today. So if you do a search for first robot or earliest robot online, you're probably going to find all kinds of different conflicting answers. Some of them are philosophical, some of them are mythological, and some of them are religious. Uh. We know that clockwork devices go back many, many, many years, but most historians on the subject are not really eager to pinpoint which exact one was first. Yeah, there's there are too many possible answers because there are some of the logical ones that aren't necessarily supported with hard evidence. Those ones are a little bit tricky. Some people even refer to like the Biblical story of creation as kind of a first um, almost robotics experiment sort of thing. Uh So there, it's really hard. I mean, you get into a big philosophical debate with people if you say this was the first robot we know about for sure, because they're like, there's some other options. Yeah, so you want to do that. Some of them are so far back in history that the substantiation for them is just not add percent clear, right, And we're going to look back at the early history of mechanized beings and clockworks and steampowered mini marvels. So you're not gonna hear us talk about the DARPA Big Dog or the Mars Curiosity rover. We're going incredibly old school with this list, so nothing past the late seventeen hundreds, and we have just selected five for the sake of podcast length, But of course that means leaves out many many others, because there really are many more examples of this than I think many people realize. So think of this as just a sampling of some of mankind's ventures into automated beings. And really I'm telling a fib when I say it's five, it's sort of five instances, but some of them feature more than one automata. So it's going to be fun. We're fludging our numbers, but we're doing it with a good heart. Yes uh. And we're going to start with one that is not easily substantiated. We're going off of one text, but it's important, and that's Yan Cheese Automated Man. So the first one is in China. The reference to it can be found in a third century b C. Taoist text, and the course of this text a story is told of King Mu of Chew, who reigned from b C. E. In it, this so called artifice are presents an automated man. To the king and his book Science and Civilization in China, Volume two, writer Joseph Needham quotes a translate text about this automa time, and in his quote he says, the king stared at the figure in astonishment. It walked with rapid strides, moving its head up and down, so that anyone would have taken it for a live human being. The artificer touched its chin, and it began singing perfectly in tune. He touched its hand, and it began posturing, keeping perfect time. As the performance was drawing to an end, the robot winked its eye and made advances to the ladies in attendance, whereupon the king became incensed and would have had Yan she executed on the spot, had not. The latter, in mortal fear, instantly taken the robot to pieces to let him see what it really was, and indeed it turned out to be only a construction of leather, wood, glue, and lacquer variously colored white, black, red, and blue. Examining it closely, the king found all the internal organs complete, liver, gall heart, lungs, spleen, kidneys, stomach, and intestines. And over these again muscles, bones, and limbs with their points, skin, teeth, and hair, all of them artificial. The king tried the effect of taking away the heart and found that the mouth could no longer speak. He took away the liver, and the eyes could no longer see. He took away the kidneys, and the legs lost their power of locomotion. The king was delighted. So, and that's an often referred to text when people talk about the history of robots. And we don't have evident, hard evidence of this automaton, but it's significant that it would have been mentioned in a historical Daoist text that refers back seven hundred years. Uh. It evidences this fascination with mechanical beings going away, way way back in the ancient history, so early. Yeah, I would be delighted too if I were the king, who would not. Uh So that's our first one, and the second one is a little more recent than that. This one was a pigeon created by archiitis of tarentum and archeitis was born around b C. In a Greek control territory that's now part of southern Italy. He was a very accomplished man. He was a philosopher, a mathematician, an astronomer, a statesman, and a commander in chief. And sometimes he gets called the father of mechanics. He's said to be the most advanced of the Pythagorean mathematicians, and he classified mathematics into four divisions geometry, arithmetic, astronomy, and music. He was really influential in his time, and Architis also influenced the work of Plato and Aristotle. In fact, he said to have rescued Plato from Dionysius the second. But historians are generally pretty quick to point out that the relationship between Plato and Architis was a complex one. It was pretty complicated. They had similar stances on many philosophical issues, but they also had some pretty obvious disagreements. But for today's interest, the accomplishment of Architis that's the most relevant is a mechanical bird. This bird, which he called simply the pigeon, was suspended at the end of a pivoting ball are it moved in revolutions around the bar, either using a jet of steam or compressed air. And while the bird, which was created somewhere between four hundred and three fifty b C. Is often listed as a footnote to Archiitis's body of work, it's really important to remember that he built this mechanism more than two thousand years ago. So it was this very simple little robotic pigeon. Yes, some people point to it is the first robot and recorded history, but as we mentioned earlier, and it's a claim that a lot of people are just not willing to make for sure about any of these. And now there's kind of a big jump to our next one because we are getting to Da Vinci, who many people know was really interested in mechanics. Uh. And so Leonardo was born in April of two. He's one of history's most famous men. So we all know his famous paintings like the Last Supper and the Mona Lisa, and his drawings of the Truvian Man. So he's not really a mystery to anyone who has even a passing knowledge of history. Late in his life, in fifteen fifteen, he created this Automata Lion, allegedly to present to King France wid the first the faux feline was said to have walked forward toward the king, opened up its chest and revealed a cluster of lilies. And while there's some lack of specificity about the original lion, UH and Leonardo did not leave any sketches of it, he did make detailed sketches of the mechanisms that he likely used in its construction, and he left some notes as well. And in two thousand nine, Renato Boretto, a master builder of automata UH, used those sketches and da Vinci's notes and he actually recreated the lion. It's really really interesting to watch. You can find video of it online and will link to some of it. You know, it's kind of sobering to watch this sample of robotics that's based on early fifteen hundreds ingenuity, because it's still a pretty impressive piece today. To see this, it almost looks like a giant toy. It's life size, but it's you know, carved, so it doesn't look like a real lion. But it just it moves along and it kind of has wheels and its feet and it rolls as its legs move along the floor, and it tilts its head side to side, and it's kind of mind blowing to me to think that that was designed hundreds of years ago. Leonardo also designed a fully automated man that was styled to look like an armored knight, with a rope and gear mechanism to raise and move the limbs, but there's no record of this one actually being built. Italian robotics historians have also constructed a machine based on these designs. Yeah it um. It can't do quite the amount of moving on its own that the lion can, which is why we focused on the lion for this one. But I thought that the the armored man should get at least to mention. And then we get to a couple of entries that are really really mind blowing. The first is Vokinson's flute player, and like I said, this one is uh, kind of a two for it's not really just the one. We're going to talk about his famous duck automaton as well, which when I have mentioned to our colleagues that we were working on this podcast, everyone asked about the duck and I just kind of shrug. We'll get there. So. Jacques de Vokinson was born in Grenoble on February seventeen, o nine, and he was the youngest child of ten born to a glovemaker and a devout Catholic wife, and the story goes that Jacques was obsessed with mechanical things at a very young age. He studied with the Jesuits as a youngster. He even entered a monastery but the age of sixteen as a means of supporting his scientific studies because at that point his father was gone and his mother couldn't really just pay for him to play in his mechanized world. And then later in seventy eight, he left the monastery to study medicine and anatomy in Paris, and throughout his life Wolkinson was inspired by medical science, and his passion for an insight into the workings of anatomy garnered him several patrons that supported his work through the years. His most famous automaton was a gold plated copper duck. And what a duck it was. It could do many of the things real ducks could do. It could it could quack and drink water and flap its wings and mimic the digestive process, reminding me of many novelty items owned by my grandfather. So yes, it's the famous pooping robot. Duck. Everybody knows about. Uh, you know, it's one of those like when you go, oh, ancient robots, they go pooping robot duck right. Yes. In a letter written to the Abbey Defontaine, he wrote, my second machine or automaton is a duck in which I represent the mechanism of the intestines which are employed in the operations of eating, drinking, and digestion, where in the working of all the parts necessary for these actions is exactly imitated. The duck stretches out its neck to take corn out of your hand. It swallows, it, digests it, and discharges it digested by the usual passage. And I feel compelled to know it didn't actually digested it. There was no chemical breakdown of whatever you handed it. You could hand it buttons and it would those would pass through its automated little system. And I think when modern ears here they think of it as this cookie novelty thing. But really he was trying to represent a full um anatomical being. Like to him, it was more about the science of and study of, you know, biology, than it was like, Look, my duck poops, right, not so much to be something you would buy in the back of a spencer gift, but that duck was actually created to boost attendance at an exhibit of another of Vokinson's works, which was his Automatic Flute Player. The flute Player was allegedly conceived in a fevered state while he was ill. A famous marble statue by sculpt or Antoine Koiservo was the inspiration for the shape of the figure, although Kanson's version was made of wood and then painted to look like marble, and this figure was five point five feet tall, which is about one point seven meters uh and in the modern book Living Dolls The Magical History of the Question Mechanical Life Gabby Wood rights of the Mechanical Flute Player, nine bellows were attached to three separate pipes that led into the chest of the figure. Each set of three bellows was attached to a different weight to give out varying degrees of air, and then all pipes joined into a single one equivalent to a trachea, continuing up through the throat and widening to form the cavity of the mouth. The lips, which bore upon the whole of the flute, could open and close and move backwards or forwards. Inside the mouth was a movable metal tongue which governed the airflow and created pauses. This automaton breathed, which is cool. It's really cool. Um. It's an incredibly complex design. And of course, uh, you know, the flute is a hard instrument to play when you're an actual human, so he had to do something tricky, yes, So, borrowing from his family's roots, he gave the flute player's hands a skin covering to mimic the soft touch that you need to play a flute. That's a tricky instrumental master even for people, and his macanoid minstrel could play twelve different tunes. And this flute player went on display on February eleventh of seventy eight, and the cost of entry to see this marvel was roughly equivalent to a week's worth of wages for the average manual laborer. So this was a serious money maker because people were paying that to go see it. I mean it was too fantastical to skip, uh, which is why when the attendants fell off, Volkinson added the duck to the exhibit, as well as another piece called the Tambourine Player, in an effort to bring audiences back and keep the money flowing. He sold off his mechanical aations in seventeen forty one and at that point became France's inspector of silk manufacturer. His adventures in that job could really be their own podcast, they really could. He really sort of revolutionized looms. Um. But the flute player and the other automata changed hands several times, and the flute player was last seen in the possession of Gottfried Christoph Barres, doctor to the Duke of Brunswick, and then he disappeared from history after the doctor's death. The duck turned up a couple more times, and uh, there are allegedly there are pictures of it or something that's very much like it that you can find online. But the flute player, we don't. We don't know where it landed. Just a pity because I would really love to see how that works. And then for our final entry in our list of five instances, there are actually three pieces in this but uh, they're quite marvelous. Yes, they're the work of Pierre Jacquedras, who was born on July seventy one in Switzerland. His family was primarily involved in two modes of employment, farming and watchmaking, and In seventeen thirty eight, Jacque Edras opened up his own watch shop in le Cha Defont, and initially he specialized in pendulum clocks, but eventually he turned his attention to automated mechanisms and eventually began to sell small automeda to a special clients. I also feel like we should mentioned that he is It's kind of a side note, but he's often credited with creating the wristwatch, so he was very much into shrinking mechanisms down, which plays into his work in Automeda. In seventeen seventy four, he and his son Henri Louis, and a clockmaker Jean Frederic les Show presented their three creations, which are still considered to be marvels of mechanical engineering. The musician is the first one, and it's a female and um, she plays an organ, and it's not an actual organ, it's a custom instrument that looks like an organ, and she will bow at the end of her performances. Uh. And she plays five different tunes and the mechanical works are actually all concealed neath her gown. But her fingers move super briskly and they tap along at the instrument's keys, and it's really quite something to watch. The draftsman can draw floor pictures, and he'll also blow dust and graphite off of his page. The Draftsman looks more like a little boy, and he looks almost identical to the third one, which is an automaton that people sort of hold in this extremely high regard because it's really quite a marvel. It's called the Writer, and it's um to my mind and I think the mind of many other others that study this subject. It's the most impressive of the three because he can write as many as forty letters in sequence, and because he has built with a series of coded gears in his back that can be moved, he can actually be programmed to write new sequences. His messages aren't static, uh, and he'll dip his pen in an ink well so that ink needs to be refreshed whenever he writes, and he carefully scrawls out the program message onto paper, and his eyes actually follow his pen as he's working, which is sort of amazing and wonderful. The fact that this one can be programmed to do different things would probably put him higher on the list in like the Nitpickers list of robots, because one of in terms of today's terminology, one of the hallmarks of robotics is that these are programmable things, not just things that work on like a remote control or some kind of tether. Yeah. Uh and Jacket Drows would take these automoda around with him on tour while he was visiting wealthy families and he would, you know, have them do their little activities and show off, and then he would use those charms to sell his high end watches and smaller automoda to his elite clientele. And he would also book them into hotel rooms and then charge admission for people just come and see them. And the Jaquet Draws name is still famous for its watches. Um. Just as Paul Party, who we discussed in a previous podcast, brought branding into fashion houses, Jacque Drows did a similar thing, and he understood the idea of building a brand in his industry, and his touring automata were part of that brand. Today, this trio lives in the Museum of Art and History in Switzerland and they all still work, which is a testament to the extraordinary engineering and skill that went into their creation. Yeah, those are other ones that you can see lots of video footage of online you know, people carefully programming them, and I've noticed in some of them the writer he's a little um squeaky. In some points they had to scoot the paper along form a little bit because the paper actually gets kind of moved on this little um carrier that goes back and forth underneath his hands. But generally he's still I mean, they're all still in great working order and pretty amazing, and I feel like, um, we should mention as we wrap up, we're not going to talk about this one, but uh, I know people will ask why we didn't include it, which is the katakui Ningio, which are Japanese automeda uh that are generally referenced from like sixteenth through early nineteenth century, and I really think they deserve their own podcasts, so stay tuned. It would be weird to talk about robots and not mentioned Japan at Also I wanted to make sure we at least pointed those out. Uh. They also kind of go past the point in history where we wanted to do the cut off so much the early it's a little later than early. Some of it's in this realm that I was talking about, but it goes on a little bit further, and there are many different types, and I feel like they just they deserve their own whole little discussion because they're really quite amazing. But uh, those are, like I said, a little sampling of historical robotics and automoeda that I just I think it's sort of beautiful and wonderful that going back these thousands of years, we've always been obsessed with creating sort of mechanized versions of ourselves and other natural elements of world, right, and a lot of these to remind me of stuff that happened much later, or things that that later would not have been quite so impressive, like the Um you look at the movie Hugo and the book that it was based off of, like that was a much more recent era of of clockworks and steam based things and automata that could write things. Um, and this predates those sort of things by some hundreds of years. Yeah, it's very very cool. So that's historical robots will hopefully do more perhaps in the future, in addition of the Japanese ones, because robots are awesome, They're really cool. I also, as as we're reading this, I just like every description sort of could have ended with the sentence, and then they all came to life and the doctor had to come and save us. Thank you so much for joining us for this Saturday classic. Since this is out of the archive, if you heard an email address at Facebook, U r L or something similar during the course of the show, that may be obsolete now, so here is our current contact information. We are at history Podcasts at how stuff works dot com, and then we're at Missed in the History. All over social media that is our name on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Pinterest, and Instagram. Thanks again for listening. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit how stuff works dot com.