The devices reached peak popularity during and after the Enlightenment, however, becoming prized examples of human ingenuity and advanced engineering. Even Leonardo da Vinci tried his hand, designing a “mechanical knight” in the late 1400s that could imitate human movements through an internal system of pulleys. In later centuries, automata were valued for the complexity and variety of their movements: the more life-like, the more skilled the craftsman. The device was later restored by the 19th century master magician Jean Eugène Robert-Houdin – on whom Harry Houdini styled himself. It could play no fewer than eight different melodies. When the device was wound up, the automaton’s hands struck the instrument’s strings, directed by a revolving cylinder hidden under her skirt. The eminently fashionable French queen Marie Antoinette owned La Joueuse de Tympanon, for example, a young woman seated at an old stringed instrument commonly known as a dulcimer. For too many of us, their fascinating story has been forgotten.Īutomata might look like children’s toys, but they were actually virtuoso feats of engineering that could once be found in Europe’s most prestigious royal collections. They were a form of artificial intelligence that took the world by storm long before the digital age. Automata are models of people or animals from previous centuries that appear to be moving independently but are actually animated by a hidden clockwork mechanism. The Who’s lead singer Roger Daltrey and his wife Heather are auctioning a selection of rare mechanical devices called automata in Edinburgh, Scotland.
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