Automata (Mechanical)

Last update: 03 Oct 1994 12:00
First version:

Not to be confused with the formal or cellular varieties. Related to clockwork.

Edgar Allen Poe's "Maelzel's Chess-Player" is a famous examination of an automaton, marred only by the fact that Poe's solution is wrong, and lots of it is sloppy if not plagarized. Wimsatt's article "Poe and the Chess-Playing Automaton" is supposed to be the first real exposure, but there's an excellent chapter on this, based on Wimsatt, in Richard Wilcocks's Maelzel's Chess-Player: Freud and the Rhetoric of Deceit (Wilcocks compares the rhetorical strategies of Freud and Poe --- and the former comes out looking rather the worse).
Otto Mayr, Authority, Liberty and Automatic Machinery in Early Modern Europe [Review: Politics and Pendula]
Joseph Needham has, of course, a quite encyclopedic treatment of Chinese automata, with brief yet thorough comparisons to the rest of the world, in Science and Civilisation in China, vol. 4, Physics and Physical Technology, part 2, Mechanical Engineering. This includes a remarkable device called the "south-pointing chariot," apparently one of the first feedback devices.
Derek J. de Solla Price, Science Since Babylon [essay collection, includes a number of important articles on the history of automata, of mechanistic philosophy and of their interconnection]

S. A. Bendi, Technology and Culture 5 24-42
Max von Boehn, Puppets and Automata
Brett, Speculum 29 477
James Douglas Bruce, Modern Philology X 511
Carrera, Androids
Carroll, Great Chess Automaton
Claflin, Street Magic
Drachmann, The mechanical technology of Greek and Roman antiquity
Stefano Franchi and Guven Guzeldere (eds.), Mechanical Bodies, Computational Minds: Artificial Intelligence from Automata to Cyborgs [Blurb]
H. S. Hatfield, Automaton
Heron, Pneumatics [on-line version: The Pneumatics of Hero of Alexandria ]
Mary Hillier, Automata and Mechanical Toys
David Hopkin, Automata
Huet, Representations 1, 4 (1983) 73-87
Minsoo Kang, Sublime Dreams of Living Machines: The Automaton in the European Imagination [Blurb]
Kayser, The Grotesque
Otto Mayr
- Origins of Feedback Control
- Philosophers and Machines
Ord-Hume, Clockwork Music
Panet, Am. Lit. 48 (Nov. '76) 370
Derek de Solla Price
- Sci. Am. June '59, 60
- Tech. + Cult. 5 (64), 9
- Hist. Tech. vol. iii
Bruno Ray, J. Pop. Cult. 14 (1980) 60
Sherwood, Studies in Philology Oct. 1947, 567
Shumaker, Thought 51, 255
Strandh, A History of the Machine
West, Flesh of Steel
Lynn White, Medieval Technology
Winter, Theatre of Marvels
Jessica Wolfe, Humanism, Machinery, and Renaissancew Literature [Blurb]
Wright, J. Hist. Ideas 41, 232