I've been reading this amazing book about the history of automata from ancient times to the present. This is the first time that my research has felt a bit like paging through the Sotheby's catalogue, but I'm not about to complain. In addition to little, pearl-studded mice that run around in circles when you pull their tails, and caged birds that sing every hour on the hour, there are even more impressive feats of baroque engineering that I've discovered: a flute player, a speaking figure, and -- most famous of all -- Vaucanson's duck. This duck is a composite of model and machine: it's attached to a gigantic mechanism of gears and levers that's larger than a washing machine. It toured Europe in the middle of the eighteenth century, and was famous for approximating the motions of an honest-to-goodness duck: eating, drinking, preening, and even pooping. Apparently there are over four hundred moving parts in just one of its wings. When people found out that the duck wasn't actually digesting the food it ate, but was producing pre-fab waste that had been stuffed into it before the show, a huge outcry erupted. The idea that an automaton could mimic animal life entirely was plausible enough at the time -- few were entirely sold on materialism's mechanical explanations for the principles of life, but plenty considered it a possibility -- that it was an offense to the concept of the materialist body to produce an imperfect mechanical model.
My favorite contraption from this remarkable collection of automata, however, isn't the duck. Instead, it's a fake eagle someone made to lead his hot air balloon into uncharted territory. The description finishes with the comment, "Gentlemen with hunting-dogs are requested not to bring them, as experience has shown that these animals can be dangerous to the eagle, which imitates nature to perfection."
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