Automatons are Ancient

When people think "robots," and "history," it is probably quite common to think of the 1950s - pulp science fiction, B-movies, and Walt Disney. As an art historian interested in technologies and art, I have a visual catalogue of mechanical life forms that is immense. Before robots, androids, and cyborgs, there were animated creatures of all kinds. Not every example comes with an extant image, but there are written descriptions of machinic "life" that go back to antiquity. Chinese puppets given motion through quicksilver, engineered mechanisms by Ctesibius (early 3rd C BCE), the pneumatica described by Philo of Byzantium (late 3rd C BCE), which operated using air and fluid mechanics, Mannerist grottoes concealing curious theatrical mechanisms that would spring into action to delight visitors, the complex clockworks made by Swiss and German inventors --- these all predate the more familiar automatons of the 18th century, by the likes of Jaquet-Droz and Jacques de Vaucanson.

There is a nice overview in Barbara Maria Stafford's essay: "Revealing Technologies/Magical Domains," in Devices of Wonder. From the World in a Box to Images on a Screen (Los Angeles: the Getty Research Institute, 2001).

So, next time you ponder the future, simultaneously ponder the past. A fuller understanding of robots, androids, and cyborgs, comes from examining their histories.