Tuesday, August 2, 2016

Amazing Automaton Called "The Writer...!"

Back in the days we often think of being almost primitive, some amazing works of functional art were being created. This is one of my favorites !

The Writer



At the Neuchatel Museum of Art and History west of Bern, Switzerland, a three-year-old barefoot boy sits before a mahogany desk, writing full letters with a goose feather quill in its right hand. What at first glance looks like a charming toy doll is actually an engineering wonder: the ancestor of the modern computer. Look closer and you can see its eyes following its work. It shakes the quill pen after dipping it into the inkstand.

Built by Swiss-born watchmaker Pierre Jacquet-Droz in the late 1770s, The Writer’s 6,000 custom-made components work in concert to create a fully self-contained programmable writing machine. The boy is animated by a crank that winds up the mainsprings. It can write any custom text of up to 40 letters long with a maximum of four lines, thanks to 40 cams that function like a read-only program. This programming system disk allows it to write without any external intervention. The Writer can even be interrupted in the middle of a line, and be made to compose another.

Jacquet-Droz had always dazzled with his automata. In the court of King Ferdinand VI of Spain, people were convinced that his lifelike creations were the work of witchcraft. To escape the charge of sorcery by the Inquisition, Jacquet-Droz invited the Grand Inquisitor to examine his robot and its inner mechanism to satisfy himself that it moved by purely natural means.

The Writer is one of a trio of androids Jacquet-Droz built from 1767 to 1774. The other two, less complex than The Writer, are the Lady Musician and the Draftsman. What makes these robots especially remarkable was the use of miniaturization. All the mechanisms that operate the androids are enclosed within their bodies, not on a piece of furniture accompanying the tableau, as was usual. This miniaturization made synchronization of all pieces more difficult, which makes the robots, which still work after more than 200 years, all the more awesome.

When I see something like this, I realize that we don't give anywhere near the credit to the inventors and craftsmen of the past that they deserve. So much of what we create today is built on the foundations laid by these great men, don't you think?

Coffee out on the patio this morning!

7 comments:

Chickenmom said...

Love automata! A lot of the fist ones were made by the watchmakers, who understood how gears worked. Here is a great blog on them: http://blog.dugnorth.com/

linda m said...

The inventors and craftsmen of the past are what inspire the inventors and craftsmen of the future. It always amazes me how they could do what they did with the tools they had at the time.

Sixbears said...

Amazing! Sent the link to my mechanical engineer friend. As a hobby he builds old machines from the past.

Dizzy-Dick said...

We seem to think just because someone lived back many generations in the past, that they were not as smart as we are today, but they were, and maybe more so. They gave us a lot of great ideas that we could expand on. Without the fundamentals that they laid down, we couldn't have come up with all the modern gadgets.

HermitJim said...

Hey Phyllis...
Yeah, they are really something to watch. Lots of skill involved there.
Thanks for stopping in today!


Hey Linda...
Sort of boggles the mind, doesn't it?
Thanks for coming over today!


Hey Sixbears...
What an interesting hobby! Must be a handy fellow to have around when it comes to fixing stuff.
Thanks for the visit today!


Hey Dizzy...
Like I said, they were the ones to lay the foundation. We owe them a lot of credit, I think.
Thanks for coming over today!

JO said...

This is so exciting to see. The work that went into these automata are something to see after 200 yrs. May go back and watch all of them.

Woke up really late this morning must have been the kept me sleeping.

HermitJim said...

Hey Jo...
They are very special, I think. Thank goodness for YouTube!
Thanks, sweetie, for dropping by today!