AUTOMATON, a self-moving machine, or ma chine so constructed, that, by means of internal springs and weights, it may move a considerable time as if en dowed with life. ( From ipse, and 14006p4C1 excitor.) According to this definition, clocks and watches, as well as mechanical imitations of living animals, are automata.
We are told, that so long ago as 400 years before Christ, Archytas of Tarentum, a Pythagorean phi losopher, made a wooden pigeon that could fly. The story is related by Anlus Gellius, who quotes it from Favorinus ; but neither have enabled us to understand how the effect was produced. Favorinus says, if it fell it could not raise itself again : and Aulus Gellius adds, that it flew by mechanical means, being suspended by balancing, and animated by a secretly inclosed aura of spirit. Ita erat scilicet libramcntis suspensum et aurd Spiritus inclusi atque occultil consitum, &c. (Nodes Ahem, lib. 10. c. 12.) Several authors have related, particularly Kircher, Porta, Gassendi, Lana, and Bishop Wilkins, that the famous John Muller of Nuremberg, commonly called Regiomontanus, con structed a self-moving wooden eagle, which flew forth from the city of Nuremberg aloft in the air, met the Maximilian a good way off coming towards it ; and, having saluted him, returned again, waiting on him to the city gates. This story has much the air of a romance, and more especially as some of the authorities, instead of the Emperor Maximilian, call it the Emperor Charles V. his grandson, who was born 64 years after the death of Muller. The same philosopher is also said to have made an iron fly, which, at a feast to which he had invited his fa miliar friends, flew forth from his hand, and, taking a. round, returned thither again to the great astonish ment of the beholders. This, if it was really per formed, was probably nothing more than a magneti cal trick.
M. Vaucanson, so celebrated for the construction of the mechanical flute-player, and mechanical pipe and tabor player, of which a description has been given under the article ANDROIDES, also invented a machine capable of imitating all the natural motions of a duck. In external form this machine'exactly resembled its prototype : its wings were anatomically exact in every part; and every bone in the real duck had its representative in the autumaton. Not a cavity,
a curvature, or an apophysis, but was exactly imita ted: the humerus, the cubitus, and the radius, all had their proper movements. Besides this, the artificial duck imitated every natural motion of a real one. It swallowed its food with avidity, exhibited those quick motions of the head and throat which. are peculiar to the living animal, and muddled the water which it drank with its bill exactly like the natural duck. It was capable of producing the sound of quacking ; and what was perhaps most surprising of all, the food which it swallowed was evacuated in a digested state. M. Vaucanson, indeed, did not pretend to imitate the process of real digestion ; but the food evacuated by his artificial duck was in a state very different from that in which it was swallowed ; and this alteration was produced not upon the principles of mechanical trituration, but of chemical solution. M. Montucla, speaking of the machines of Vaucanson, says, that the first time he saw them, he immediately discovered some of the artifices employed in the construction of the two musical Androides; but he confesses that the artificial duck entirely baffled his penetration.
Towards the end of the 17th century, Father Truchet, ofthe Royal Academy of Sciences, construct ed, for the amusement of Louis XIV., an automaton consisting of a kind of moving pictures, which was considered as a master-piece in mechanics. One of these pictures, which the monarch called his little opera, represented an opera in five acts, and changed the decorations at the commencement of each. The actors performed their parts in pantomime. This moving picture was only 16i inches in breadth, 13 inches 4 lines in height, and 1 inch 3 lines in thick ness, for the play of the machinery. The representa tion could be stopped at pleasure, and made to re commence at the same place by the operation of a catch. The account of this piece of mechanism may found in the eulogy on E. Truchet in. the Mem.