Posted on 06/02/2002 9:49:05 AM PDT by vannrox
Living Dolls: A Magical History Of The Quest For Mechanical Life by Gaby Wood
The 18th-century mechanician, Jacques de Vaucanson, made 'robots' that were capable of playing musical instruments as melodiously as human beings - but it was his incontinent duck that has fascinated down the ages
Gaby Wood
Saturday February 16, 2002
The Guardian
The 18th century was the golden age of the philosophical toy, and its reigning genius was Jacques de Vaucanson. His magnificent creations were admired by audiences all over Europe; they were praised by kings and applauded by scientists. Voltaire labelled him a "new Prometheus". Like the Greek Titan, he had the power, it seemed, to create life, to fashion men out of new materials.
Vaucanson's earliest mechanical influences came from the church. He was the youngest of 10 children (born in Grenoble in 1709), and his Catholic mother would take him with her every time she went to confession. While his mother was with the priest, Jacques stared at the clock in the adjoining room. Soon he had carefully calculated and memorised its mechanism, and was able to build a perfect copy of it at home.
His father, a master glovemaker, died when Jacques was seven, and the boy was sent away to be schooled at a monastery, where he arrived clutching a metal box. He didn't get on with the other boys, and couldn't concentrate on his lessons. Eventually, the father superior was forced to open the box. He found wheels and cogs and tools, next to the unfinished hull of a model boat. When confronted, Vaucanson refused to do any studying until he could make his boat cross the school pond. He was locked in a room for two days as punishment, but he spent the time making drawings so exceptional that the maths teacher, who was later to be lauded by the Royal Academy of Sciences, decided to help him.
Of course, a story exists about the youthful genius of all famous men. What is curious here is that all of Vaucanson's early efforts as a mechanician were connected in some way to religion. The clock was seen at confession; the maths teacher was a monk. He went on to be taught by Jesuits, and, on leaving school, became a novice in the religious order of the Minimes in Lyon. This was the only way, he thought, that he would be able to pursue his scientific study, given the limited finances of his widowed mother. Indeed, Vaucanson was given his own workshop in Lyon, and a grant from a nobleman to construct a set of machines; but his talents were only encouraged up to a certain point. In 1727, to celebrate the visit of one of the heads of the Minimes, he decided to make some androids, which would serve dinner and clear the tables. The visitor appeared to be pleased with the automata, but declared afterwards that he thought Vaucanson's tendencies "profane", and ordered that his workshop be destroyed.
From this point on, Vaucanson realised he was involved in a risky business. He went home to Grenoble, and, offering the excuse of an "unmentionable illness", pleaded with the bishop to be withdrawn from the order. As soon as he was free, he ran away to Paris. Little is known about Vaucanson's activities around the time he left for Paris. It is thought that he attended classes in anatomy and medicine at the Jardins du Roi. He had soon produced enough work to go on an exhibition tour of Brittany. In Tours he met one of his main financial backers, and returned to Paris with enough money to dress in floral garments and carry a sword - in short, to gain a gentlemanly entry into high society.
Just as he was preparing to construct the automaton he had been sponsored to make, however, Vaucanson fell seriously ill. He was bedridden for four months. In his delirium, he dreamed up an android that could play the flute, in the shape of a famous marble statue by the royal sculptor Antoine Coysevox, then on display in the Tuileries Gardens. He rose from his bed and drew designs for every part, handing them out as he went along to various craftsmen and clockmakers. As soon as the pieces were joined together, the automaton could be heard to play the flute, as perfectly as any human being. It was as if the marble statue had come to life.
The Automaton Flute Player was first exhibited on February 11, 1738. The price of entry was three livres, a week's wages for a manual labourer. Vaucanson demonstrated the object himself, to groups of 10 to 15 people at a time. The show was a huge success. The figure was made of wood, and painted white to look like Coysevox's marble. It was life-size - five and a half feet tall - and was supported by a large pedestal. The flute, as Vaucanson had learned from his musical acquaintances, was considered one of the hardest instruments to play in tune - notes are produced not just by fingers and breath but by varying amounts of air blown into the flute, and different shapings of the lips. He had set himself an apparently impossible task, and emerged with a machine that could play 12 different melodies. The virtue of this flute player, and the reason it seemed an ideal Enlightenment device, was that Vaucanson had arrived at those sounds by mimicking the very means by which a man would make them. There was a mechanism to correspond to every muscle.
Nine bellows were attached to three separate pipes that led into the chest of the figure. Each set of three bellows was attached to a different weight to give out varying degrees of air, and then all pipes joined into a single one, equivalent to a trachea, continuing up through the throat, and widening to form the cavity of the mouth. The lips, which bore upon the hole of the flute, could open and close and move backwards or forwards. Inside the mouth was a moveable metal tongue, which governed the air-flow and created pauses.
This automaton breathed .
Vaucanson had designed seven levers corresponding to the fingers; but although the actions were all correct, the sound was not quite right. He discovered that wooden fingers could not play a metal flute the way a man or woman could: the machine was just not soft enough. So he looked around for a material that would accurately simulate the effect, and found it - the glovemaker's son covered his android's fingers in skin. As a later commentator put it, "What a shame the mechanician stopped so soon, when he could have gone ahead and given his machine a soul."
In 1739, when attendance at the exhibition was flagging, Vaucanson introduced two other machines. One was a pipe-and-drum figure, which played the pipe at a speed faster than any living person could achieve. The other was a mechanical duck. What was remarkable about this duck was that it ate food out of the exhibitor's hand, swallowed it, digested it, and excreted it, all before an audience. It became Vaucanson's most famous creation; without the shitting duck, Voltaire commented wryly, there would be nothing to remind us of the glory of France. It was made of gold-plated copper, but it was the same size as a living duck. It could drink, muddle the water with its beak, quack, rise and settle back on its legs and, spectators were amazed to see, it swallowed food with a quick, realistic gulping action in its flexible neck.
Vaucanson gave details of the duck's insides: not only was the grain, once swallowed, conducted via tubes to the animal's stomach, but Vaucanson had also had to install a "chemical laboratory" to decompose it. It passed from there into the "bowels, then to the anus, where there is a sphincter which permits it to emerge". The duck was beyond a machine, it was a highly skilled joke. Had the duck been an artificial defecating man, there would no doubt have been a more complicated, less rapturous response.
Vaucanson, it must be said, was a man much preoccupied by the state of his body. He was plagued by an illness that had prevented him from eating. He suffered from a fistula of the anus. The mechanician's particular mention of the bowels, anus and sphincter of the duck - parts audiences may have preferred to imagine for themselves - might be seen as a reflection of his own personal preoccupations.
By 1741 Vaucanson had had enough of his automata. He wanted them to be shown in England, where there was a substantial audience for mechanical exhibitions, but he did not want to take them there himself. He had never seen himself as a mere entertainer, and in any case by then he had been given another, rather grand job. So he packed off his three machines with three Lyonnais businessmen, who paid over the odds for the privilege. They disappeared from their inventor's view, and embarked on a new stage of their mechanical lives.
As soon as he had sold his automata, Vaucanson put all his energies into his new job. Louis XV had been a great admirer of the duck, and in 1741 he appointed Vaucanson inspector of silk manufacture. Until then, there had been specific problems in the making of silk: the mills and wheels were mediocre, the weaving process was faulty. Vaucanson made several lengthy trips to Lyon, the silk-making capital and home of his former monastery. By introducing new regulations and designing new looms, he revolutionised the industrial process in France. Although not strictly automata, these machines were in a sense prostheses - extensions of men - or substitutes for men. The silk workers of Lyon rebelled against Vaucanson's automatic loom by pelting him with stones in the street; they insisted that no machine could replace them. In retaliation, Vaucanson spitefully built a loom manned by a donkey, in order to prove, as he said, that "a horse, an ox or an ass can make cloth more beautiful and much more perfect than the most able silk workers".
In 1744, makers of silk fabric and stockings - labourers and journeymen, overseers, dye workers, carpenters, crochet workers, shopkeepers - and manufacturers of gold and silver cloth revolted. The King responded first by issuing fines, and then by prohibiting the workers, on pain of prison, from gathering in "cabarets, taverns, cafes and places of public games" in groups of more than four. A crochet worker by the name of Gaspard Jacquet was condemned to appear before the Palace and the Hôtel de Ville, holding a blazing torch, naked except for his shirt, with a sign around his neck that read "seditious crochet worker". Other strikers suffered the same fate; still more were imprisoned. Almost a year later, the king issued an amnesty; but the damage had been done. Vaucanson had tried to replace men with machines; men had died as a result, and he had been forced to escape violence under cover of night, disguised as a Minime monk. Vaucanson's biographers, André Doyon and Lucien Liaigre, blame the silk workers for stalling the march of progress, for France's industrial revolution lagging behind England's.
Meanwhile Vaucanson's three automata passed from one owner to another. The flute player left few traces, but the duck appears to have risen now and then, like a clockwork phoenix. A man named Dumoulin, a perfumier and glovemaker like Vaucanson's father, travelled with the machines through Europe and then pawned them in Nuremberg.
The automata were next seen, packed up in boxes in an attic, by the German writer Christoph Friedrich Nicolai, who published an account of his travels in 1783. The duck was intact, but Dumoulin had carefully positioned its internal chains in reverse, so that they would break if the duck was set in motion. The result of Nicolai's report was that the machines were rescued by an extraordinary man who had heard about them as a boy, declaring them to be "the greatest masterpieces of mechanics that humankind has ever created". The man was Gottfried Christoph Beireis, doctor to the Duke of Brunswick, collector of curiosities and reputed master of alchemy.
In 1805, Johann Goethe went to visit Beireis, lured by the legend of "the old wonder-worker"."The Vaucansonian automatons were utterly paralysed," Goethe reported. "In an old garden-house sat the flute player in very unimposing clothes, but his playing days were past... A duck without feathers stood like a skeleton, still devoured the oats briskly enough, but had lost its powers of digestion."
After Beireis' death, the automata disappeared once again; only the duck has been heard of since. It was found 20 years later, in the attic of another pawnbroker, by Georges Dietz, a theatrical impresario and exhibitor of automata. Dietz passed it on for repair to a Swiss clockmaker, who spent three and a half years working on the duck. Dietz took the duck to Paris in 1844 for the Exposition Universelle at the Palais Royal, where a wing fell out of order.
Also on show at the exposition were the automata of a celebrated magician, Jean-Eugène Robert-Houdin (the conjuror from whom Houdini took his name). Robert-Houdin had made an automaton that could write and sketch, and Dietz asked him to repair the duck's broken wing. The magician, delighted to have his hands on the famous creature, wrote about the occasion in his memoir. "To my great surprise," he reported gleefully of Vaucanson, "I found that the illustrious master had not been above resorting to a piece of artifice I would happily have incorporated in a conjuring trick." Robert-Houdin discovered that the digestion had been faked, and the emitted substance was a premixed preparation of dyed green breadcrumbs, "pumped out and collected with great care on to a silver platter".
Subsequent traces of the duck are scarce. In 1882, someone wrote a letter to a German newspaper claiming they had seen the duck in a private museum in Krakow during the summer of 1879. But within days the museum had burnt down. Amid the ashes, the writer of the letter reported, he and his wife found a pair of misshapen metal wheels, "the pitiful remains of our glorious bird".
More recently, however, some mysterious photographs have come to light in the archives of the Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers in Paris (situated on a street now called rue Vaucanson). They show a crude, featherless bird, made of spring-like windings of wire and perched on a huge wooden frame that contains a mechanism resembling a watermill. They are extraordinary views, reminiscent of the sorry skeleton Goethe described.
The provenance of the photos is still in question. The present director of the museum does not believe the bird in the pictures is the original duck; Doyon and Liaigre believe it is. Either way, these photographs, the last fragments of possible evidence, tell their own story: Vaucanson's artificial being broke free from its creator and developed an afterlife of its own; stripped back and rebuilt, seen through and newly admired - whether in truth or in legend - it survives
· This is an edited extract from Living Dolls: A Magical History Of The Quest For Mechanical Life, by Gaby Wood, to be published by Faber on March 4.
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2002
This is now my favorite Voltaire quote.
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