In addition to new practical machinery and clocks, new kinds of machines and mechanical consumer goods fascinated Europeans during the 17th and 18th centuries, and also provided mechanical philosophers with potent imagery for their accounts of the world. Among the most dramatic were life-size models of mechanical beings (automata) that could do elaborate operations. The most famous of the inventors and presenters of such automata was Jacques de Vaucanson, who in 1738 displayed the marvels of “The Flute Player” in a grand showroom in the center of Paris. This was a life-sized figure that could play a dozen tunes on the flute — blowing and fingering the instrument, controlled by an elaborate arrangement of mechanisms. Here is a description of its workings from Gaby Wood’s Edison’s Eve(New York: 2002, pp. 23-24):

“In the front, several wheels were set in motion by a weight, which in turn carried around a steel axle attached to cranks, which were attached to six bellows. In the back, there was a series of different-sized pulleys, which were connected to three more bellows. The strings on some of the pulleys led to levers and valves, which eliminated noise or excessive movement when air was pumped through. The 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 that was equivalent to a trachea, continuing up through the throat, and widening to form the cavity of the mouth. The mouth, though the smallest part, contained the most intricate apparatus. The lips, which bore upon the hole of the flute, could open more or less depending on the amount of air that was to be passed into the instrument, and they could move backwards or forwards. For each of these four movements there was a separate mechanism. Inside the mouth was a moveable metal tongue, which governed the air let through and created pauses. There were four levers to operate the tongue and to modify the wind. Other devices ruled the player’s fingers; all of these motive forces were hidden in the pedestal, and were made up of a cylinder, a key-frame, fifteen levers, and numerous steel wires and chains.”

That such a human feat as playing music could be produced by a machine was astounding, and it became a public sensation. In the next year, Vaucanson began exhibiting a mechanical duck. The metal duck not only flapped its wings and moved its legs, it also bent down and ate grain from a bowl, quacked, and then excreted. Vaucanson claimed to have replicated the actions of a living animal, such as in “Mr. Vaucanson’s Letter to the Abbé De Fontaine” [Appendix to Jacques de Vaucanson, An Account of the Mechanism of an Automaton or Image Playing on the German-Flute. Translated by J. T. Desaguliers. London: 1742.] —

“My second Machine, or Automaton, is a Duck, in which I represent the Mechanism of the Intestines which are employed in the Operations of Eating, Drinking, and Digestion: Wherein the Working of all the Parts necessary for those Actions is exactly imitated. The Duck stretches out its Neck to take Corn out of your Hand; it swallows it, digests it, and discharges it digested by the usual Passage. You see all the Actions of a Duck that swallows greedily, and doubles the Swiftness in the Motion of its Neck and Throat or Gullet to drive the Food into its Stomach, copied from Nature: The Food is digested as in real Animals, by Dissolution, not Trituration, as some natural Philosophers will have it. But this I shall treat of, and shew, upon another Occasion. The Matter digested in the Stomach is conducted by Pipes, (as in an Animal by the Guts) quite to the Anus, where there is a Sphincter that lets it out.

This Machine, when once wound up, performs all its different Operations without being touch’d any more.”

Vaucanson displayed his mechanism (rather than covering it with feathers) so that the audience could see it was not trickery, but the wonders of mechanics:

“To shew that the Contrivances for moving these Wings are nothing like what is made use of in those wonderful Pieces of Art of the Cock mov’d by the Clock at Lyons, and that at Strasburgh, the whole Mechanism of our artificial Duck is exposed to View; my Design being rather to demonstrate the Manner of the Actions, than to shew a Machine. Perhaps some Ladies, or some People, who only like the Outside of Animals, had rather have have seen the whole cover’d; this is, the Duck with Feathers. But besides, that I have been desir’d to make every Thing visible; I would not be thought to impose upon the Spectators by any conceal’d or juggling Contrivance.”

The Draftsman automaton by Pierre Jacquet-Droz, 1769 [exhibited in the Musée d’art et d’histoire de Neuchâtel since 1774], when wound up would draw pencil portraits of Louix XV and George III. A second mechanical boy dipped his quill pen in ink and wrote out “I think, therefore I am.”