Popular illustration of de Vaucanson’s duck automaton, which appeared in the January 21, 1899 issue of Scientific American. Although the mechanism portrayed here does not closely resemble the actual internal structure, the arrow is nicely placed to indicate the exit route.

1738

DE VAUCANSON’S DUCK AUTOMATON

“In 1738, the 29-year-old French watchmaker Jacques de Vaucanson [1709–1782] exhibited in the garden of the Tuileries what may be one of the most celebrated robots of all time,” writes American neuroscientist Paul Glimcher. The de Vaucanson duck had hundreds of moving parts and feathers. It moved its head, muddled water with its bill, flapped its wings, quacked, gulped food from the exhibitor’s hand, and carried out many more realistic actions. After a few minutes, remains of digested food would be excreted below. Of course, the duck was not really digesting food, and the tail end of the duck was secretly preloaded with simulated excrement. Nevertheless, such a versatile automaton triggered discussions about the line between the living and the purely mechanical, as well as the degree to which such boundaries might be blurred as robotic entities became even more versatile.

Through time, fascination with the famous digesting duck has grown, and the odd creature even makes an appearance in Thomas Pynchon’s highly acclaimed 1997 novel Mason & Dickson, where the creature becomes conscious and follows and terrorizes a French chef with its bec de la mort (“beak of death”).

De Vaucanson also created a marvelous automaton flute player, driven by several bellows attached to three windpipes. Gears and cams triggered levers that controlled the flute-player’s fingers, tongue, and lips. The mechanized flautist “was the first example of what Diderot’s Encyclopédie defines as an androïde, that is, a human figure performing human functions,” writes historian Jessica Riskin. More immediately practical, in the 1740s de Vaucanson designed machines to weave silk—which, alas, caused (human) silk workers to rebel and pelt him with stones in the street.

As Glimcher writes: “Vaucanson’s duck, raised for eighteenth-century audiences ancient questions that still haunt modern neuroscience: Are the mechanical interactions that occur inside each of us sufficient to generate the complex patterns of behavior that we actually produce? What is it that defines us as human beings, the complexity of the behavior that we produce or the specific patterns of interacting matter that appear to generate our behavior?”