Philidor takes on The Turk

Here is Wolfgang von Kempelen's  famous chess-playing automaton, the Turk. There is loads and loads written on it. This account of the Turk's tour to Paris in 1783 and its encounter with the great Philidor is taken mostly from Thomas Standage's book of 2002 The Mechanical Turk (p.42-46).

The Dulcimer player

Here is another marvellous  automaton!

Video, made to accompany the Metropolitan Museum exhibition of 2012-13, showing the Dulcimer player "in performance".

"The Dulcimer player" ("Joueuse de typanum")
David Roentgen & Peter Kinzing
c.1782-4
The height of figure is 53 cm. 
The instrument measures 31.5 cm x 70.5cm x 36.5 cm

This beautiful automaton from the Musée des arts et métiers was the fruit of a collaboration between the celebrated German cabinet maker David Roentgen and the clockmaker Peter Kintzing.  Created in secret at Roentgen's workshop in Neuwied near Coblenz, it was presented to Marie-Antoinette at Versailles in 1784. In a letter of February 1785 Prince Johann Friedrich Alexander of  Wied-Neuwied reported that David Roentgen had demonstrated to the French court "a doll that plays music on a clavichord" (in fact it is a percussive instrument so more properly a dulcimer).  The piece was valued by Roentgen at 800 louis d'or, though he accepted a mere 500. The queen, aware of its scientific interest (or possibly not knowing what else to do with it!) promptly deposited in the cabinet of the Academy of Sciences in March 1785. Roentgen himself was rewarded with high honours - he was given the title of royal ébéniste-mechanicien in 1779 - and Kintzing was named clockmaker to the queen.

The defecating duck of Jacques Vaucanson

An 18th-century automaton reborn


This beautiful, if slightly disturbing creation, is a modern replica, made in 1998 by automaton artist and restorer, Jacques Fréderic Vidoni, of one of 18th-century France's most celebrated automatons, the famous defecating duck of Jacques Vaucanson.   Until recently it took pride of place in the musée des automates in Vaucanson's birthplace, Grenoble, a private museum, now closed sadly  due to its proprietor's  ill-health.

 In December 2013, Vidoni's duck was sold at auction where it made a cool 36,000 euros!

Given the technologies at Vaucanson's disposal the original canard digérateur must have been a truly phenomenal piece of engineering. The duck was life-sized, constructed of hundreds of beautifully crafted parts covered in perforated gold-plated copper to allow view of the workings in its interior. It sat atop a substantial housing which concealed the clockwork mechanism.  A weight wrapped around a lower cylinder, drove a larger cylinder which in turn activated thirty of so levers connected to the Duck's skeletal system.  This allowed a wide repertoire of movements;  the duck waved its head, wiggled its beak in the water, quacked and adjusted its position in a fair facsmile of the real bird   Most impressively of all it appeared to eat pellets offered to it, with an realistic motion of it flexible neck, "digest" them and duly defecate.(producing authentic looking faeces made of dyed green breadcrumbs, rather than the more sanitary pearls of the replica).