The Little Man Project
Dave Johnson, one of my Apple juggling buddies,
just built a parlor automaton . Mechanical moving toys were
all the rage in the 16th century, and got insanely sophisticated.
Excerpt from "The
Role of Automata in the History of Technology " by Silvio A
Bedini:The most spectacular
of all automata that have survived are the Writer. the Artist, and the Musician
produced by Pierre Jacquet-Droz (1771-1790) and his son Henry-Louis (1753-1791)
of Geneva. Father and son combined all the technical developments known in their
time in an effort to produce a machine that faithfully imitated a human being,
and their efforts were as successful as any have ever been. The Writer, a
life-size and lifelike figure of a boy seated as a desk, is capable of writing
any message up to 40 letters. The Artist is a similar figure of a boy that makes
four sketches: a dog, a cupid, the head of Louis XIV, and the profiles of Louis
XVI and Marie Antoinette. The third figure is that of a young girl that plays
the clavichord by the pressure of her own fingers upon the
keys.Check out Dave's movie . Hand-building such a toy is way
cool.
Filed Fri - January 7, 2005, 10:03 AM in
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