Yet even in the first century CE, Hero of Alexandria, famous for his contributions to science, math and engineering, created a mechanical stage play that utilized ropes with knots, cogwheels, and other simple machines to complete an entire performance claimed to have lasted for ten minutes. The earliest objects were often created as religious machines to demonstrate the power of a leader or to invoke a spiritual experience when visiting a holy place such as a temple. One might include in the discussion the ancient Antikythera mechanism from around 100 BCE, but since this was likely not an automatic machine but a complex counting and calculating machine, I don’t include it here. Sadly, examples from ancient cultures such as China, Greece, and Rome are either lost to history or only survive via writings, drawings, and paintings. History of automataĬlever engineers and craftsman have been building automatons for a long time, with some accounts showing up as early as circa 1000 BCE, over 3000 years ago. I’ll cover more examples later, but first let’s walk through the history of automatons from the beginning. Historical automata include music boxes with little figurines, mechanical chirping birds, and the highly complex and awe-inspiring humanoid creations of Pierre Jaquet-Droz that draw pictures, write phrases, or play instruments.
The automata that I’d like to focus on are sophisticated versions of a few you might be familiar with, like cuckoo clocks (little chirping birds that pop out of doors to chime the hour) or simple hand-cranked desk toys of animals (such as horses, birds, or fish) and fun scenes. A fictional writing automaton in the feature film ‘Hugo’ (photo courtesy IMDB)Īutomata can come in all shapes and sizes and can do nearly anything one can imagine and engineer into a mechanical system.
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