ject, merely that you may pay through the nose for my communication, I shall conclude at once with a SONNET TO MY OWN NOSE. O nose! thou rudder in my face's centre, Tho' oft invisible, for ever nigh; Guard him from all disgrace and misadventure, Scenting the gales of Heaven, that have not yet H. SCIENTIFIC AMUSEMENTS. NO. I. OF AUTOMATA. WHILE political economists amuse themselves and the public with the nicely-balanced powers of man as a propagating and eating animal, and philosophers and divines often assure us that he is, in other and higher respects, but a machine of a superior description; we, in especial deference to the latter grave authorities, have been entertaining ourselves with the notion of his mechanical construction, as contrasted with the various imitations of it, that have been occasionally offered to the world. We take it for granted, in this paper, that man is a machine, and shall not presume to arrogate for him any higher pretensions. We know nothing of his impulses as an animal, nor of the duties or influences to which he is subject as a rational being (if such he be); we only propose to introduce to our readers a variety of claimants for the honour of having made a part of him—of imitating portions of his organs, in their actual exercise-and isolated actions of his very mind. What wonder, if, in the progress of these efforts, our artists should occasionally have struck off a complete and clever duck, a learned fly, or a royal eagle! Automata have been favourite objects of mechanical contri * From aulos, ipse; and μasual, excitor, a self-excited, or self-moving machine. 2 G VOL. I. NO. IV. vance from a very early period. If the term, indeed, may be allowed to include what some writers have considered under it, their history would quickly swell into a volume. The celebrated Glanvil, for instance, speaks of "the art whereby the Almighty governs the motions of the great automaton" of the universe! Bishop Wilkins ranks the sphere of Archimedes amongst the aνтομаTа σTаTα, or "such as move only according to the contrivance of their several parts, and not according to their whole frame." It was, in fact, an early orrery, according to Claudian : Jupiter in parvo cum cerneret æthera vitro, Risit, et ad superos talia dicta dedit; Huccine mortalis progressa potentia curæ ? Jam meus in fragili luditur orbe labor, &c. This learned prelate has even extended the application of the term to machines moved (in consequence of their peculiar construction) by external forces or elements, as mills, ships, &c. Its modern acceptation, however, and that to which we shall restrict ourselves, will not include all machines that are self, or internally moved. It is confined to the mechanical imitation of the functions and actions of living animals, and particularly those of man. The celebrated story of the statue of Memnon (one of the wonders of Ancient Egypt) has some pretensions to lead the way in this historical sketch. We have positive testimony* to the circumstance of the most beautiful sounds being emitted from this statue, at the rising and setting of the sun; and from the pedestal after the statue was overthrown. What was the contrivance in this case, it may be vain to conjecture; but automata are, by profession, a puzzling race. If a certain disposition of strings, exposed to the rarefaction of the air, or to the morning and evening breezes, after the manner of our Æolian harps, produced these sounds; or if any method of arranging the internal apertures so as to receive them from a short distance, were the artifice, a considerable acquaintance with the science of music, and with acoustics generally, will be argued. Wilkins quotes a musical invention of Cornelius Dreble of similar pretensions, which "being set in the sunshine, would, of itself, render a soft and pleasant harmony, but being removed into the shade would presently become silent." The statues and the flight of Dadalus are equally famousand, perhaps, fabulous. Aristotle, however, speaks of the former in his treatise De Anima, 1. i. c. 3, as successful imitations of the human figure and human functions in walking, running, Strabo, lib. xvii. &c. and attempts to account for their motions by the concealment of quicksilver. Archytas' flying dove (originally mentioned in Favorinus) is another of the ancient automata. The inventor is said to have flourished about B. C. 400, and was a Pythagorean philosopher at Tarentum. It was made of wood, and the principal circumstance of its history, which Favorinus mentions, is, that like some other birds of too much wing, when it alighted on the ground, it could not raise itself up again. Aulus Gellius, in his Noctes Attica, attempts to account for its flight, by observing (Ita erat scilicet libramentis suspensum, et aura spiritus inclusa atque occultâ consitum, &c.) that it was "suspended by balancing, and moved by a secretly inclosed aura, or spirit!" Friar Bacon, we all know, made a brazen head that could speak, and that seems to have assisted, in no small degree, in proclaiming him a magician. Albertus Magnus is also said to have devoted thirty years of his life to the construction of an automaton, which the celebrated Thomas Aquinas broke purposely to pieces. Men, treated as these were by the age in which they lived, had no encouragement to hope that any details of their labours would reach posterity. Amongst the curiosities of his day, Walchius mentions an iron spider of great ingenuity. In size it did not exceed the ordinary inhabitants of our houses, and could creep or climb with any of them, wanting none of their powers, except, of which nothing is said, the formation of the web. Various writers of credit, particularly Kircher, Porta, and Bishop Wilkins, relate that the celebrated Regiomontanus, (John Muller) of Nuremberg, ventured a loftier flight of art. He is said to have constructed a self-moved wooden eagle, which descended toward the Emperor Maximilian as he approached the gates of Nuremberg, saluted him, and hovered over his person as he entered the town. philosopher, according to the same authorities, also produced an iron fly, which would start from his hand at table, and after flying round to each of the guests, returned, as if wearied, to the protection of his master. This An hydraulic clock, presented to the Emperor Charlemagne, by the Caliph Haroun al Rashid, merits record in the history of these inventions. It excited the admiration of all Europe at the period of its arrival. Twelve small doors divided the dial into the twelve hours, and opened successively as each hour arrived, when a ball fell from the aperture on a brazen bell and struck the time, the door remaining open. At the conclusion of every twelve hours, twelve mounted knights, handsomely caparisoned, came out simultaneously from the dial, rode round the plate and closed the doors. Dr. Clarke, in his last volume of Travels, (part iii. Scandinavia, sec. 1. 4to. 1819,) mentions a similar contrivance, in a clock at Lubeck, of the high antiquity of 1405. Over the face is an image of Jesus Christ, on either side of which are folding-doors, which fly open every day as the clock strikes twelve. A set of figures, representing the twelve apostles, then march forth on the left hand, and, bowing to our Saviour's image as they pass in succession, enter the door on the right. On the termination of the procession the doors close. This clock is also remarkably complete (for the age) in its astronomical apparatus; representing the place of the sun and moon in the ecliptic, the moon's age, &c. Similar appendages to clocks and time-pieces became too common at the beginning of the last century to deserve particular notice. We should not, however, omit some of the productions of the Le Droz family, of Neufchatel. About the middle of the century, the elder Le Droz presented a clock to the King of Spain, with a sheep and dog attached to it. The bleating of the former was admirably correct, as an imitation; and the dog was placed in custody of a basket of loose fruit. If any one removed the fruit, he would growl, snarl, gnash his teeth, and endeavour to bite until it was restored. The son of this artist was the original inventor of the musical boxes, which have of late been imported into this country. Mr. Collinson, a correspondent of Dr. Hutton's, thus clearly describes this fascinating toy in a letter to the Doctor, inserted in his Mathematical and Philosophical Dictionary. When at Geneva I called upon Droz, son of the original Droz of La Chaux de Fords (where I also went). He shewed me an oval gold snuff-box, about, if I recollect right, four inches and a half long by three inches broad, and about an inch and a half thick. It was double, having an horizontal partition; so that it may be considered as one box placed on another, with a lid, of course, to each box. One contained snuff; in the other, as soon as the lid was opened, there rose up a very small bird, of green enamelled gold, sitting upon a gold stand. Immediately this minute curiosity wagged its tail, shook its wings, opened its bill of white enamelled gold, and poured forth, minute as it was (being only three quarters of an inch from the beak to the extremity of the tail) such a clear melodious song as would have filled a room of twenty or thirty feet square with its harmony." In Ozanam's Mathematical Recreations, we have an account, by the inventor, M. Camus, of an elegant amusement of Louis XIV. when a boy. It represented a lady proceeding to court, in a small chariot drawn by two horses, and attended by her coachman, footman, and page. When the machine was placed at the end of a table of proper size, the coachman smacked his whip, the horses started off with all the natural motions, and the whole equipage drove on to the farther extremity of the table; it would now turn at right angles in a regular way, and proceed to that part of the table opposite to which the prince sat, when the carriage stopped, the page alighted to open the door, and the lady came out with a petition, which she presented with a courtesy to the bowing young monarch. The return was equally in order. After appearing to await the pleasure of the prince for a short time, the lady courtesied again and re-entered the chariot, the page mounted behind, the coachman flourished his whip, and the footman, after running a few steps, resumed his place. About the same period, M. Vaucanson, a member of the Academie Royale of France, led the way to the unquestionable superiority of modern times, in these contrivances, by the construction of his automaton duck, a production, it is said, so exactly resembling the living animal, that not a bone of the body, and hardly a feather of the wings, seems to have escaped his imitation and direction. The radius, the cubitus, and the humerus had each their exact offices. The automaton ate, drank, and quacked in perfect harmony with nature. It gobbled food brought before it with avidity, drank, and even muddled the water after the manner of the living bird, and appeared to evacuate its food ultimately in a digested state. Ingenious contemporaries of the inventor, who solved all the rest of his contrivances, could never wholly comprehend the mechanism of this duck. A chemical solution of the food was contrived to imitate the effect of digestion. This gentleman is also celebrated for having exhibited at Paris, in 1738, an ANDROIDES*, a flute player, whose powers exceeded all his ancestry; and for the liberality and good sense with which he communicated to the Academy, in the same year, an exact account of its construction. The figure was nearly six feet in height, and usually placed on a square pedestal four feet and a half high, and about three and a half broad. The air entered the body by three separate pipes, into which it was conveyed by nine pairs of bellows, which were expanded and contracted at pleasure, by means of an axis formed of metallic substances, and which was turned by the aid of clock-work. There was not even the slightest noise heard during the operations of the bellows: which might otherwise have discovered the process, by which the air was conveyed ad libitum into the body of the machine. The three tubes, into which the air was sent by means of the bellows, passed again into three small reservoirs concealed in the body of the automaton. After From avng, a man, and eidos, a form; a term under which some scientific works have classed all the automata, that have been made to imitate the human person. |