Ancient Automata

[Richard Stokes]

Two recent books on ancient automata:

Gods and Robots: Myths, Machines, and Ancient Dreams of Technology by Adrienne Mayor (2018)

Body and Machine in Classical Antiquity Edited by Maria Gerolemou and George Kazantzidis (2023)

The wooden dove of Archytas: was this the world's first robot?

And what about the Giant Snail at the Theatre of Dionysus? 'a snail, moving by itself, led the procession, spitting out slime’

Fans of Ray Harryhausen will be intrigued by Talos, the mythical mechanised defender of Crete.

And on the the Ionian island of Leucadia there was an annual sacrifice to Apollo called Criminal’s Leap. A condemned man was forced to to “fly” from the island’s white limestone cliff. 'Like Icarus of myth, the man was fitted with a pair of artificial wings. And for good measure, all sorts of live birds were fastened to him as well, to add to the spectacle. Spectators on the cliff and in small boats below watched the hapless victim flapping with all his might while surrounded by helplessly fluttering birds.'

Weird stuff!

[Brad Henderson]

Not quite ancient but still new books about old automata. Elizabeth King is an amazing artist. Saw her exhibit at Mass MOCA years ago

From the site:

Elizabeth King and W. David Todd, with photographs by Rosamond Purcell

An abundantly illustrated narrative that draws from the history of art, science, technology, artificial intelligence, psychology, religion, and conservation in telling the extraordinary story of a Renaissance robot that prays.

This volume tells the singular story of an uncanny, rare object at the cusp of art and science: a 450-year-old automaton known as “the monk.” The walking, gesticulating figure of a friar, in the collection of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History, is among the earliest extant ancestors of the self-propelled robot. According to legend connected to the court of Philip II of Spain, the monk represents a portrait of Diego de Alcalá, a humble Franciscan lay brother whose holy corpse was said to be agent to the miraculous cure of Spain’s crown prince as he lay dying in 1562.

In tracking the origins of the monk and its legend, the authors visited archives, libraries, and museums across the United States and Europe, probing the paradox of a mechanical object performing an apparently spiritual act. They identified seven kindred automata from the same period, which, they argue, form a paradigmatic class of walking “prime movers,” unprecedented in their combination of visual and functional realism. While most of the literature on automata focuses on the Enlightenment, this enthralling narrative journeys back to the late Renaissance, when clockwork machinery was entirely new, foretelling the evolution of artificial life to come.

Elizabeth King, a sculptor and writer, is professor emerita of sculpture and extended media at Virginia Commonwealth University School of the Arts in Richmond. W. David Todd is associate curator emeritus and former conservator of timekeeping at the National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC.

“Todd, a clockmaker and conservator, carries out a scrupulous autopsy of the mechanical monk.”
—James Vincent, London Review of Books

“By combining the expertise of the art studio and the horological workshop, and aided by the detailed photographs of Rosamond Purcell, the authors bring the automaton to life.”
—Edward Rothstein, The Wall Street Journal

“Now that I have read this book, I understand far more completely the significance of these magical artificial beings, today more than four and a half centuries old.”
—Bob Frishman, Maine Antique Digest

“As demonstrated by this marvellous book, the monk automaton is testament to human ingenuity, craftsmanship and our enduring capacity for wonder.”
—Jacqueline Riding, Country Life

256 pages
8 x 10 inches
74 color and 67 b/w illustrations
ISBN 978-1-60606-839-7
hardcover

Getty Publications
Imprint: Getty Publications

2023

https://shop.getty.edu/products/miracle ... 7297548480

[Jim Martin]

Here is a video from the MET:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jiVKnlXcDDg

and one from the National Museum of American history:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kie96iRTq5M

[Jim Martin]

From a 22 dec 2023 review of this book in the WSJ:

...Juanelo Turriano (ca. 1500-85), who worked in Toledo, Spain. The authors lean toward ascribing the friar to Turriano. He may not have put his name to this figure, but his skill was so renowned that he inscribed one of his intricate astronomical clocks with a Latin declaration the book takes as its epigraph: “QVI. SIM. SCIES. SI. PAR. OPVS. FACERE. CONABERIS.” (“You Will Know Who I Am If You Try to Make This.”) A contemporary declared that Turriano was “a lowborn man, but gifted by God with such a sublime intelligence that he astounded the world, and was reputed by everyone to be a miracle of nature.” The Toledo street on which he lived is still called Calle del Hombre de Palo, the Street of the Wooden Man.

[Jonathan Townsend]

Pretty much inspired a few lines in a Douglas Adams story.

The Electric Monk was a labour-saving device, like a dishwasher or a video recorder. Dishwashers washed tedious dishes for you, thus saving you the bother of washing them yourself, video recorders watched tedious television for you, thus saving you the bother of looking at it yourself; Electric Monks believed things for you, thus saving you what was becoming an increasingly onerous task, that of believing all the things the world expected you to believe...The new improved Monk Plus models were twice as powerful, had an entirely new multi-tasking Negative Capability feature that allowed them to hold up to 16 entirely different and contradictory ideas in memory simultaneously without generating any irritating system errors... So the Monks were built with an eye for originality of design and also for practical horse-riding ability. This was important. People, and indeed things, looked more sincere on a horse. So two legs were held to be both more suitable and cheaper than the more normal primes of seventeen, nineteen or twenty-three; the skin the Monks were given was pinkish-looking instead of purple, smooth and soft instead of crenellated. They were also restricted to just the one mouth and nose, but were given instead an additional eye, making for a grand total of two. A strange-looking creature indeed. But truly excellent at believing the most preposterous things.

[Richard Stokes]

I couldn't find the original Dial of Destiny, but it is loosely based on the Antikythera Mechanism.
No time travel, alas.

[Richard Stokes]

"Evidence indicates that the complicated bronze astronomical calculating machine with thirty gears, the Antikythera mechanism, known as the world’s first analogue computer, was made between the third and first centuries BC in Rhodes."
GODS AND ROBOTS

[Jonathan Townsend]

Great to see these wonders of craftsmanship preserved and explored.

Leonardo did some of that, including an automated car and an armor covered figure of a knight which moved. There are stories from China about animated figures. This theme of contrasting animated with the mechanical is echoed in popular stories of their time including the golem, the sorcerer's apprentice, and much more recently, the Czech play R. U. R. which is where we get the word "robot".

[Brad Henderson]

For those into this sort of thing:

https://www.automatacon.org/

Great little gathering. Have a talk at the first one. Amazing collection of pieces on site.