Summer 2003
Volume 29, Number 4

By the late eighteenth century, automata were imitative internally as well as externally, in process and substance as well as in appearance. Cartesian dualism, which had exempted consciousness from mechanist reduction, and "hypotheticalism,"¹¹ which had allowed for an infinity of possible mechanisms underlying nature's visible behaviors, gave way to an emergent materialism and to a growing confidence, derived from ever-improving instruments, that experimentation could reveal nature's actual design. These developments brought a new literalism to automata and a deepening of the project. The designers now strove, not only to mimic the outward manifestations of life, but also to follow as closely as possible the mechanisms that produced these manifestations.

See Also Lorraine Daston: Enlightenment Calculations (Autumn 1994) Simon Schaffer: Babbage's Intelligence: Calculating Engines and the Factory System (Autumn 1994) Peter Galison: The Ontology of the Enemy: Norbert Wiener and the Cybernetic Vision (Autumn 1994)

Thus the hands of three automata built by a Swiss clock-making family named Jaquet-Droz in 1774 (fig. 4) were probably designed with the help of the village surgeon, their skeletal structures modeled on real, human hands (fig. 4).¹² During the century that separated the Jaquet-Droz automata from de Caus's birds, the array of technological devices available to automata-makers did not change significantly. In fact this array remained fairly constant from the late sixteenth century, when mechanical musical devices began to incorporate pinned barrels, through the addition of electric motors in the early twentieth century.¹³ But the way in which these mechanisms were deployed did change importantly: the design of automata became increasingly a matter, not just of representation, but of simulation.¹⁴

This new, simulative impulse embraced, not only the mechanisms underlying living processes, but also the matter of life, its material aspect. Indeed, the two were inseparable in the eyes of eighteenth-century designers of simulative machines. How, for example, could one build a circulatory system that worked like natural ones without using an elastic material for the veins? So Vaucanson incorporated into his plans for a "moving anatomy" an exotic, new material: rubber.¹⁵ The Jaquet-Droz family were also innovators in this regard, using lifelike materials such as leather, cork, and papier-mâché to give their machines the softness, lightness, and pliancy of living things. By imitating the stuff of life, automata makers were once again aiming, not merely for verisimilitude, but for simulation; they hoped to make the parts of their machines work as much as possible like the parts of living things and thereby to test the limits of resemblance between synthetic and natural life. Eighteenth-century mechanicians also produced devices that emitted various lifelike substances; not only did their machines bleed and defecate, but, as we will see, they also breathed.¹⁶

Vaucanson's Duck marked the turning point in these developments (fig. 5). It produced the most organic of matters; and Vaucanson made the imitation of internal process explicitly central to his project. He boasted that the Duck was transparent–its gilded copper feathers were perforated to allow an inside view–and wrote wittily that although "some Ladies, or some People, who only like the Outside of Animals, had rather have seen . . . the Duck with Feathers," his "Design [had been] rather to demonstrate the Manner of the Actions, than to shew a Machine" ("L," pp. 22-23, 22). The Duck was powered by a weight wrapped around a lower cylinder, which drove a larger cylinder above it. Cams in the upper cylinder activated a frame of about thirty levers. These were connected with different parts of the Duck's skeletal system to determine its repertoire of movements, which included drinking, playing "in the Water with his Bill, and mak[ing] a gurgling Noise like a real living Duck" ("L," p. 23) as well as rising up on its feet, lying down, stretching and bending its neck, and moving its wings, tail, and even its larger feathers.¹⁷

Most impressively, the Duck ate bits of corn and grain and, after a moment, excreted them in an altered form (fig. 6). Vaucanson said these processes were "copied from Nature," the food digested "as in real Animals, by Dissolution. . . . But this," he added, "I shall...shew...[on] another Occasion" ("L," p. 21). By claiming that his Duck digested by dissolution, Vaucanson entered a debate among physiologists over whether digestion was a chemical or a mechanical process. Unfortunately his postponement of further explanations to "another occasion" aroused suspicions. Already in 1755 a critic accused the Duck of being "nothing more than a coffee-grinder" (JV, p. 479). Then in 1783, a close observer of the Duck's swallowing mechanism uncovered an even greater deceit: the food did not continue down the neck and into the stomach but rather stayed at the base of the mouth tube. Reasoning that digesting the food by dissolution would take longer than the brief pause the Duck took between swallowing and expulsion, this observer concluded that the grain input and excrement output were entirely unrelated and that the tail end of the Duck must be loaded before each act with fake excrement.¹⁸ The Duck that pioneered physiological simulation was, at its core, fraudulent. On the other hand, this central fraud was surrounded by plenty of genuine imitation. Vaucanson was intent on making his Duck strictly simulative, except where it was not. Each wing contained over four hundred articulated pieces, imitating every bump on every bone of a natural wing. All the Duck's movements (except the one just mentioned) were modeled upon exhaustive studies of natural ducks.¹⁹

12. See Charles Perregaux and F.-Louis Perrot, Les Jaquet-Droz et Leschot (Neuchatel, 1916), pp. 31-34.

13. On the advent of the pinned cylinder in the late sixteenth century, see Sylivio A. Bedini, "The Role of Automata in the History of Technology," Technoloy and Culture 5 (Winter 1964):35, and Maurice Daumas, "Industrial Mechanization," in A History of Technology and Inventiona: Progress through the Ages, trans. Eileen Hennessy, ed. Daumas (1962-68; New York, 1969-79), 3:178-79. On the continuity in automata technology before electronics, see Reed Benhamou, "From Curiosité to Utilité: The Automaton in Eighteenth-Century France," Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 17 (1987): 95.

14. I intend the word simulation in its modern sense, which originated around the middle of the twentieth century, to mean an experimental model from which one can discover properties of the natural subject. Simulation in its eighteenth-century usage meant "artifice" and had a negative connotation, implying faker. (I am grateful to Evelyn Fox Keller for pressing me to clarify my use of the term.) I have not found eighteenth-century uses of simulation in reference to automata. I employ it here despite the anachronism because it describes Vaucanson's and his contemporaries' newly experimental approach to automata and in order to suggest that their work had a pivotal place in the history of attempts to simulate (in its modern sense) life processes. For an analysis of the meaning and implications of simulation and an argument that the project of simulating life originated in the mid-eighteenth century, see Riskin "Eighteenth-Century Wetware." For arguments that Vaucanson's automata were simulative in the modern sense, see Doyon and Liaigre, "Méthodologie comparée du biomécanisme et de la mécanique comparée," Dialecta 10 (1956): 292-335; George Canguilhem, "The Role of Analogies and Models in Biological Discovery," trans. Mrs. J. A. Z. Gardiner and Mrs. G. Kitchin, in Scientific Change: Historical Studies in the Intellectual, Social, and Technical Conditions for Scientific Discovery and Technical Inventions, from Antiquity to the Present, ed. A. C. Crombie (New York, 1961), pp. 510-512; Price, "Automata and the Origins of the Mechanistic Philosophy"; and David M. Fryer and John C. Marshall, "The Motives of Jacques Vaucanson," Technology and Culture 20 (Jan. 1979): 257-69.

15. See "EV," 2:655; Elinae Maingot, Les Automates (Paris, 1959), p. 18; JV, pp. 118-19; Linda Marlene Strauss, "Automata: A Study in the Interface of Science, Technology, and Popular Culture" (Ph. D. diss., University of California, San Diego, 1987), pp. 71-72. For Vaucanson's introduction of the phrase o"moving anatomy" ("anatomie mouvante") to descibe mechanical physiological models, see JV, p. 110; see also pp. 18, 34.

16. On eighteenth-century automaton designers' interest in lifelike materials and textures, see Riskin, "Eighteenth Century Wetware."

17. See Chapuis and Gélis, Le Monde des automates, 2:149-51, and Chapuis and Droz, Automata, pp. 233-42.

18. See Friedrich Nicolai, Chronique à travers l'Allemagne et la Suisse, 2 vols. (Berlin, 1783), 1:284. The magician and automaton-maker Jean Eugène Robert-Houdin claimed to have made the same discovery in 1845, while repairing the Duck's mechanism. See Jean Eugène Robert-Houdin, Memoirs of Robert-Houdin, trans. Lascelles Wraxall (1858; New York, 1964), pp. 104-7. The parts Robert-Houdin repaired may or may not have been from Vaucanson's Duck. On this question, see Chapuis and Gélis, Le Monde des automates, 2:151-52, and Chapuis and Droz, Automata, pp. 248, 404 n. 17. On the Duck's fraudulence in general and its discovery, see JV, pp. 125-29, and Barbara Maria Stafford, Artful Science: Enlightenment Entertainment and the Eclipse of Visual Education (Cambridge, Mass., 1999), pp. 193-94.

19. See "L," and Godefroy-Christophe Bereis, letter dated 2, Nov. 1785, quoted in Chapuis and Droz, Automata, p. 234; see also pp. 233-38 and n. 14.