7

Patterns in the Carpet

Memory as Instruction

The most ecstatically received new invention in mid-eighteenth-century France, the iPod of the reign of Louis XV, was a machine that magically produced … duck poop.

It was called the Canard digérateur, or the Digesting Duck, and it was made of gilded copper feathers, papier mâché, rubber hose, wheels, gears, and armatures—four hundred moving parts, all artfully constructed to resemble a real duck. The feathers were even perforated to make the duck “transparent” so that viewers could look inside its body cavity to confirm the presence of mechanical internal organs congruent to those found in a living counterpart.

Thanks to a system of cams and nearly thirty levers, the Digesting Duck could dip its bill into water, make realistic gurgling sounds as it drank, stand, lie down, stretch and curve its neck, and even move its highly articulated wings, tail, and larger feathers.1

What made the Digesting Duck a sensation was one other singular capability: If you fed it pieces of corn or grain and waited a few moments—apparently how long it takes for mechanical digestion to take place—it would defecate (from the right place) a neat little duck turd. Not the messy duck droppings of real life, but real enough—and more appropriate to land on a Versailles tabletop.

But what made the Digesting Duck more than just a brief sensation and something of epic importance was that it opened the door to—and set the genius behind its invention on the path of—two of the greatest technological and social transformations in human history.

That’s a lot to make from a little duck poop.

MECHANICALLY THOUGHTLESS

As we saw in the Chapter 6, the explosion of accumulated knowledge and information created by the Renaissance had inspired a desperate need to organize these mountains of data into some intuitive and accessible form. But those new dictionaries, encyclopedias, manuals, and specialized libraries only brought into stark relief another problem: All of that newly cataloged and codified competence, while doing wonders for the training and education of human beings, did nothing for the machines and devices they increasingly devoted their days to operating.

This wasn’t a real concern in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. The application of the new indexing tools and stored expertise in support of more universal education had powered miracles of productivity improvements, the tools of global exploration, and the rise of the professions.

But for all of these improvements, the machines of this new “enlightened” world were still essentially extensions of manual labor. The tools might get more precise and powerful, but ultimately their every action had to be managed by a human operator. As such, while they might liberate their operators from actual physical danger, they were not labor-saving devices; on the contrary, the greater demand for manufactured goods by the growing middle class only meant more hours of skilled people manning machines that couldn’t be handed over to an apprentice or left running on their own.

What was needed now was a way to make machine production scale up without dragging their poor skilled operators along with them. Such a solution—which would require the machines to become more autonomous—would not only have the cost-cutting advantage of (somewhat) liberating their operators but would also free the machines themselves to reach levels of speed, precision, and consistency impossible with fallible human interference.

But how to do it? The older, purely mechanical machines, such as looms and forges, simply stopped functioning once the operator walked away. The new water and spring-powered machines, from mills to clocks, were impressive but monomaniacal: They did one thing very well, but unless a human operator intervened, they’d continue doing what they did until they wound down to exhausted stasis or froze up from unrelieved friction.

But how did you make such machines remember how to perform? How did you make them take multiple steps in a task without having a person there to intervene and control the transitions? And most of all, how did you transfer all of the expertise that had just been collected, indexed, and published into the “minds” of these machines so they could not only use it, but improve upon it over time?

The answer came, as it often does, from the most unlikely quarter. In this case, the expensive toys of the idle rich.

LIVING STATUES

The Digesting Duck was, in a word that has taken on a somewhat different meaning in recent years, an automaton. Even by the time it was built by a watchmaker’s son, Jacques de Vaucanson, in 1739, automatons already had a history that stretched back a couple thousand years.

We know, for example, thanks to discoveries such as the recovery in 1900 of the Antikythera mechanism—an amazing mechanical computer for calculating astronomical positions—that even classical Greeks could build sophisticated machines.2 It apparently didn’t take long to use those geared “engines” to empower sculptures to move and imitate nature. As early as the fourth century B.C., the great lyric poet Pindar would write of the automaton makers on the Island of Rhodes that:

The animated figures stand

Adorning every public street

And seem to breathe in stone, or

move their marble feet.3

As we saw in Chapter 4, the ancient world could be a stranger place than we imagined—and the image of streets lined with automatons certainly fits that notion (and the representation of a stunning figure, in this resonant location, obviously draws parallels to the Colossus).

And Rhodes wasn’t alone: Across the Adriatic, in the Corinthian colony of Syracuse, similar mechanisms may also have been invented by the most celebrated ancient engineer of all, Archimedes. We do have a record that suggests he had constructed a kind of orrery, or planetarium, that used gears to show the orbits of planets and stars. From there it would have been a short jump to mechanical creatures.

Indeed, in the second century B.C., it was common for wealthy children in Hellenistic Greece to play with mechanical toys. Hero of Alexandria, often considered the greatest experimental scientist of the ancient world—the man who invented everything from the syringe to the windmill to the steam engine to the vending machine—famously put on a ten-minute-long play performed entirely by mechanical devices.4

Frankly, the more you look around the ancient world, the more automatons seem like the norm rather than the exception. Some of the examples are disturbing, such as the notorious brazen bull of Sicily, appearing in various versions for hundreds of years, which used the screams of victims being roasted to death inside a bronze bull to create the bull’s “voice.” Other examples are also remarkable—not least the Chinese account, reputedly from earlier than 1000 B.C., of an engineer named Yan Shi presenting to King Mu of Chou a life-size human automaton:

The king stared at the figure in astonishment. It walked with rapid strides, moving its head up and down, so that anyone would have taken it for a live human being. The artificer touched its chin, and it began singing, perfectly in tune. He touched its hand, and it began posturing, keeping perfect time … As the performance was drawing to an end, the robot winked its eye and made advances to the ladies in attendance, whereupon the king became incensed and would have had Yen Shih [Yan Shi] executed on the spot had not the latter, in mortal fear, instantly taken the robot to pieces to let him see what it really was. And, indeed, it turned out to be only a construction of leather, wood, glue and lacquer, variously coloured white, black, red and blue.5

Being a king, Mu decided to disembowel the automaton. He reached into the creature’s body cavity and started yanking out one internal organ after another. Incredibly:

The king tried the effect of taking away the heart, and found that the mouth could no longer speak; he took away the liver and the eyes could no longer see; he took away the kidneys and the legs lost their power of locomotion. The king was delighted.6

No kidding. Ancient Chinese history also records a flying-bird automaton, invented by a certain Kungshu Phan, which reportedly flew for three continuous days.7 Meanwhile, Jewish tradition holds that Solomon himself designed a throne that, when he ascended (in other words, sat down on) it, mechanical animals around the frame hailed him as king, a mechanical eagle lowered a crown onto his head, and a dove presented him with a Torah scroll.

Religion, violence, entertainment, toys—basically anything that inspired awe in the audience—seem to have been an occasion for automatons in the ancient world. It is a theme that continues into the present with the latest generations of humanlike robots coming out of Japan. Automatons also seemed to have enjoyed periods of great popularity (such as in ninth-century Persia and Renaissance Europe) and during other ages (the medieval world, for example) only to be nearly forgotten.

A GHOSTLY ENCOUNTER

Seventeenth-century France was just such a period of obsession with automatons, many of them prototypes of devices we still see today: birds that pop up and sing, animated dolls, and music boxes. Not coincidentally, at the same time, next door in Bavaria, clockmakers were inventing the most recognizable and popular automaton of all: the cuckoo clock. The young Sun King, Louis XIV, was entranced by a spectacular mechanical coach and horses complete with driver, footman, page, and an elegant lady passenger.

But something had changed. And it was due to the great philosopher and mathematician René Descartes. In detaching the mind from the body in the bath one day in 1641—the Meditations on Philosophy, the transitional moment between ancient and modern philosophy—Descartes not only sent philosophy on a centuries-long quest to reconnect them both but also raised two questions that have largely defined modern philosophical inquiry:

1. How does the mind work?

2. What constitutes “life”?8

It was the latter that initially got the most attention. If human beings (and perhaps other living things) were, in fact, “ghosts in machines,” how did those machines function? Not surprisingly, everyone immediately drew parallels to those machines that behaved most like they were alive: automatons.

Descartes underscored this with some notions of his own—in particular, his often-stated belief that animals themselves were merely machines in which tissues, muscles, and nerves were simply God’s more perfect (albeit messier) versions of pulleys, wires, and gears. Pursuing this still further, Descartes argued that since animals (unlike humans) lacked the divine spark of consciousness—the cogito in his cogito ergo sum—they couldn’t really think. In other words, animals were merely wonderfully complicated automatons. And this in turn convinced Descartes that animals couldn’t really feel pain, a notion that persists, against all evidence, in some populations to this day.

This image of animals as ghostless machines produced two trains of thought, one ghastly and one that is the subject of this book. On the nasty side, the belief that animals were incapable of experiencing pain led to the popularization (which still survives in some high-school biology classrooms) of vivisection—the science of dissecting living animals—with generations of scientists and doctors managing to overlook the shrieking and flailing of the creatures on which they were slicing away.

The second, and blessedly the more influential, pathway from Descartes’s notion of the body as machine led not only to automatons but also to a fundamentally new way of thinking about these devices. As Stanford history professor Jessica Riskin describes it, “The designers now strove, not only to mimic the outward manifestations of life, but also to follow as closely as possible the mechanisms that produced these manifestations.”9

In other words, it was no longer enough for automaton makers to build clever mechanisms that exhibited lifelike behavior; now automatons had to be lifelike. In Professor Riskin’s words, “the design of automata became increasingly a matter, not just of representation, but of simulation.”10

After a quarter-millennium of research into cells, membranes, nucleic acids, oxidation-reduction, hormones and glands, reproduction, digestion, and a thousand other features and processes of living organisms, we now know that simulating living organisms is infinitely more complicated than any eighteenth-century scientist or watchmaker ever imagined. Indeed, the automaton makers ran into this problem almost from the beginning … which is why they often cheated.

Consider again that story about King Mu. It’s pretty obvious that the human automaton operated using the usual components, but ones that were disguised to look like real human organs. That’s why the automaton lost its voice when its “heart” was removed.

By the eighteenth century, and amid the growing pressure to build devices that duplicated living things, automaton makers almost had no choice but to cheat. Take Jacques de Vaucanson, arguably the greatest automaton maker of all. In 1737, he wowed the French royal court with “The Flute Player,” usually considered the world’s first true biomechanical automaton. But when it came time to top that wonder with an even greater device—his masterpiece—de Vaucanson found he had hit a technological wall.

And that’s why the Digesting Duck, the wonder of its era, turned out to be a fraud.

DUCK CONFIT

In fact, the duck did perform most of the actions claimed of it. It just didn’t do the one for which it was most famous: pooping. It took thirty years for the fraud to be uncovered. In truth, the meal fed into the duck’s bill fell down its hollow throat onto a tray, where it remained. Meanwhile, the hindquarters of the duck were prefilled with fake duck turds (crumbs pressed together and dyed green) and a mechanism pushed them through an “intestine” (one of the very first identified uses of rubber hose) out through the spot on the duck where the sun didn’t shine.

The reader might be asking at this point why more perceptive observers of the era didn’t detect the deception merely by the fact that in the few seconds between the feed going into one end of the duck and the feces coming out the other that there simply wasn’t enough time for digestion to take place. After all, even the nobility had likely spent a bit of their lives in relatively close proximity to farm animals.

The precise answer is unknowable at this distant remove, but it probably had to do with a combination of context, credulity, and complexity. Even today, experiencing a major technological breakthrough for the first time is always an event surrounded by a kind of magical awe, where the apparent impossibility of what you are seeing frees you to overlook what later seem to be obvious flaws. Looking at those old automatons and their replicas today, it’s hard to imagine how anybody could have been fooled into believing these creaky, jerky machines were alive. And yet I can remember as a boy in the early 1960s sharing in the audible gasp of a crowd at Disneyland as they watched the “animatronic” Abraham Lincoln for the first time.

For an even more contemporary example, consider how, even as we were dazzled by our new ability to download MP3 music files by the thousands into a tiny, handheld device, we barely noticed that the sound quality of these files was vastly inferior to the LP records and cassette tapes they would soon replace.

In other words, once the poop hit the tabletop—or, more precisely, a silver tray—nobody in the cheering crowd asked themselves why it had happened, and so quickly.

The Digesting Duck, with its winning combination of world-class construction, clever ruse, and earthy behavior, raised the bar on every clockmaker and automaton builder in the world. Its effect was so great that its image has regularly cropped up over the years all the way to the present—most famously in a Nathaniel Hawthorne short story (“The Artist of the Beautiful”) and the Thomas Pynchon novel Mason & Dixon.

As de Vaucanson had taken the technology as far as it could go for the era (and, it seemed, further), the only way to top him in the automaton arms race was to extend the repertoire—that is, to make new devices that performed ever-more-complex and more far-ranging activities. After all, as any automaton owner knew, even the most elaborate, life-imitating device could only do a handful of predetermined actions over and over, while real living things were in a process of continuous and ever-adapting interaction with the outside world.

But if physical simulations were tough, imitating mind and thought was simply off the charts. Some builders just gave up and took the easy path of straight-out fraud. Some of these cons were so clever—such as Wolfgang von Kempelen’s “The Turk,” a purported chess-playing automaton that was in fact operated by a midget inside it—that they are still remembered (and occasionally imitated) to this day.

But others, still in thrall to the Cartesian paradigm, chose to keep trying to find a mechanical counterpart to the animal, if not human, brain. To do that, they turned to another, older automaton component: the pinned barrel. By the time of the Digesting Duck, the pinned barrel (or toothed cylinder) was already a century-old technology.

Probably everyone reading this book is familiar with this component, as it survives to this day in music boxes, regulator pocket watches, and, most famously, jack-in-the-boxes. It is essentially a metal cylinder out of which projects, at various predetermined locations, small spikes. Using a hand crank that is attached to a reducing gear, you rotate the cylinder slowly and with a fair amount of torque (thus the gearing), in close proximity to a collection of levers or, more commonly, a fine metal comb. In the case of the latter, as in a music box, the spikes hit the tuned teeth of the comb in the right order to create a melody. In the former, such as with an automaton, the spikes work the levers to produce the lifelike effects.

ONE THING AT A TIME

The pinned barrel seems prosaic today only because we live in the world it created. In the context of its day, it was an extraordinary invention. Why? Because for the first time it introduced time—or, more accurately, timing and sequence—to autonomous machines. Without the presence of a pinned barrel, all of the actions of an automaton would essentially happen all at once and continue until the power source ran down. But the rotation speed of the barrel set the pace of various actions, and the pins determined the order—as well as the start and stop times—of those actions.

And there was more. Already mentioned was the toy builders’ growing need to expand the repertoire of their automatons—and here was a way to do it. Once they figured out how to make the barrels removable and interchangeable, they merely had to switch barrels with different pin arrangements (rather than rebuilding the entire device each time) to create a different performance.

This, too, may strike the reader of today as a minor matter, but in truth that little change represents one of the greatest intellectual breakthroughs. For the first time, mechanical memory, in the form of instruction, was detached from the machine itself. In more modern terms, it was at this moment that the paths of hardware and software diverged.

It can’t be entirely a coincidence that almost exactly at this moment, the greatest philosopher in the world, Immanuel Kant, the heir to Descartes’s mantle, was pacing the seven bridges of his hometown of Konigsberg, Prussia, and pondering the nature of human knowledge. Nor that he would choose to divide that knowledge into that with which we are born (a priori) and that which we learn (a posteriori). Descartes may have separated the mind from the body, the ghost from the machine, but Kant was determined to put some of operations of that machine—what we would call firmware—back into the functions of the mind.

But that’s only half the story. Implicit in the operation of the pinned barrel is the possibility of reversing its operation. That is, taking an existing sequence of events and using it to determine the proper location of the pins on the barrel—thus making it possible to endlessly repeat even a complex activity or to capture an event for future study. That technology would find its way into every proper American parlor (and every improper American saloon) in the late nineteenth century as the player piano.

But the ultimate effect of this process reversal was far greater than that. If initiating action with the pinned barrel was the birth of instruction software, capturing information with that same barrel was the beginning of memory storage. Two hundred years hence, in the age of computers, this difference would define read-only memory (ROM) and random-access memory (RAM).

THE RULES UNROLLED

Remarkably, we still have one more, and even bigger, revolution to go. There is one simple act that, though largely unheralded, seems to consistently change history in a profound way. Simple as it may sound, it is the process of taking a successful new invention … and flattening it. That is, converting it from a three-dimensional to a two-dimensional form (or as close as you can get in the real world). We’ve already seen this with the printed book, and it happens again with the integrated circuit.

The single act of flattening the pinned barrel may have had a historic influence at least as great as the other two. To understand how this happened, we need to return to that genius designer, Jacques de Vaucanson.

From the perspective of the twenty-first century, de Vaucanson seems the very embodiment of the Enlightenment: worldly, multidisciplined, and infinitely curious. Yet at the same time he also seems more a figure from the future: a born entrepreneur, perpetually driven to pursue the next opportunity and outrun the competition.

Perhaps what drove him on was the familiar combination of enormous talent and a tough start. He had been born into the family of a master glove maker in Grenoble, France, and trained in a Jesuit school there. Unfortunately, de Vaucanson’s father died when he was seven, and the family was left impoverished. It is said that even as a boy he planned to become a watchmaker and once, while waiting in an anteroom to make confession, had figured out the mechanism of a clock on the wall.

In time, de Vaucanson took orders with the ultra-rigorous Minims, an obscure order of Catholic monks that had a brief popularity.11 Joining such a group was seen by de Vaucanson as the only way, in his poverty, that he could afford to continue his research. The Minims would prove important to de Vaucanson for an unlikely reason: They had been deeply influenced sixty years before by one of their members, a Father Mersenne, who was a dedicated scientist and friend of Descartes’s—hence de Vaucanson’s internalization of Cartesian dualism.12

Luckily for the future, de Vaucanson didn’t stay a monk for long. At age eighteen, the order had set him up in his own shop in Lyon with a sizable contract from a local nobleman to build machines. Learning that he would soon be visited for dinner by one of the heads of the order, de Vaucanson decided to make the meal itself a demonstration of what he could accomplish.

So, de Vaucanson built a collection of humanlike automatons (or, more properly, androids) to serve the dinner and later clear the table. The visiting dignitary was politely impressed during the meal … but soon afterward declared de Vaucanson’s activities to be “profane” and ordered the workshop destroyed. It wouldn’t be the last time that de Vaucanson would be attacked for violating the status quo.

De Vaucanson was clever enough to see where this was going. So he went home to Grenoble, begged the bishop for a release from his vows because of an “unmentionable illness,” and once he got approval, ran for Paris. There, like a good entrepreneur, he built prototypes, found some angel investors, and located subcontractors to do his manufacturing. Soon, also like a good entrepreneur, he found a venture capitalist to underwrite taking his devices on tour, and started making some real money.13 At this point de Vaucanson might have enjoyed a very profitable career building watches and novelty automatons.

But then everything changed. He fell deathly ill and was bedridden for four months. In his delirium, a vision came to him of a full-sized human automaton, in the shape of a currently famous marble statue by sculptor Antoine Coysevox, which could play the flute. As legend has it, the moment de Vaucanson recovered, he quickly sketched out all of the components of what would be called “The Flute Player” from the complete designs in his head. Teams of craftsmen scattered to start building, and when the finished parts were at last assembled the Flute Player worked perfectly.

With one exception: The flute being an incredibly delicate instrument to play, de Vaucanson found that he had to cover the automaton’s articulated wooden fingers with real skin—leading a later observer to comment, only half jokingly: “What a shame the mechanician stopped so soon, when he could have gone ahead and given his machine a soul.”14

DUCK TALE

The Flute Player, made of wood but painted white to resemble marble, debuted in a private gallery on February 11, 1738. The automaton stood about five-foot-six, its height nearly doubled by a large pedestal to make it look even grander. Only about a dozen people were allowed into the gallery at a time, and de Vaucanson charged each 3 livres—nearly a hundred dollars in today’s money. No one seems to have complained about being overcharged; on the contrary, most were utterly dazzled by the the Flute Player, whose repertoire included twelve different melodies. It also caught the eye of the aristocracy, in particular, the court of Louis XV.

Such was the sensation of the Flute Player that de Vaucanson probably could have retired a very young and very wealthy man. But when the crowds began to thin for the Flute Player, the driven inventor was already prepared with a follow-up: an equally large, tambourine-playing automaton in the form of a shepherd. It proved a success as well. More important, it paved the way for de Vaucanson’s final masterpiece: the Digesting Duck.

Not only did the Digesting Duck represent a huge leap in the history of machinery (its frauds aside) but, as already noted, it captured the fancy of the leading lights of France and much of Europe. Frederick II of Prussia invited de Vaucanson to join his court—an offer the patriotic Frenchman refused. As Voltaire famously joked, “What better image of the glory of France than a shitting duck?”15

Having tickled the fancy of the monarchy, de Vaucanson was now rewarded in their typical way. In 1741, Cardinal Fleury, chief minister of Louis XV, appointed de Vaucanson, the glove maker’s son, to the post of inspector of the manufacture of silk in France. Presumably, even though it was awarded by the famously pragmatic cardinal, this was to be a largely ceremonial sinecure. But the thirty-two-year-old de Vaucanson took it as nothing of the sort. In short order, he sold off his great automatons and set to work revitalizing France’s troubled silk industry. He was done forever with automatons; now he would automate the world.

SILKY SOLUTION

In the mid-eighteenth century, French silk manufacturing, once one of the country’s most powerful industries, had fallen on hard times. Like successful industries even today, it had been a victim of its own success and had grown wary of change, resistant to upgrading its expensive capital equipment, and content to pull high profits out of this cash moth. As a result, it was ceding market share, decade by decade, to newer, hungrier, and less risk-averse competitors in England and Scotland.

De Vaucanson seemed to instantly understand that what the French silk industry needed to get back into the game was to technologically leapfrog its rivals. Toward that end, in the decades that followed he would himself invent a number of important machine tools—most famously the metal slide-rest lathe, an invention deemed so important at the time that Diderot and his team put it into the Encyclopédie.

But de Vaucanson’s greatest invention—both for French silk history and human prosperity—was his first: the automatic loom.

As far back as 1725, a couple of inventive French weavers, Basile Bouchon and Jean Falcon, had independently tried to make the process of weaving more systematic. Bouchon, in particular, had come up with a device that used a perforated paper tape to control the raising and lowering of the needles that regulated the height of the warp threads as they were woven across the weft surface of the fabric—a process that had traditionally been done using a series of cords. The invention had only proven marginally successful: Reliability problems aside, it also required yet another worker on hand to feed the tape.

Twenty years later, looking for a breakthrough technology, de Vaucanson seized on the paper-tape idea—and then applied to it the genius of the world’s greatest automaton maker.

Most inventors are celebrated for making a single design breakthrough. But with his loom alone, de Vaucanson made three. First, he not only recognized the potential power of Bouchon’s now nearly forgotten invention but also saw its key weakness. Second, seeing there was an analogy of the paper tape to the pinned barrels of his own inventions, de Vaucanson essentially took a barrel, sliced it up one side, and flatted it out into a durable wooden “card” about the size of a modern automobile license plate. Then, taking Bouchon’s cue, he replaced the pins with drilled holes. Third, and most important, he strung the cards together side by side and—like the reduction gear on his automatons—created a controlled feed for them into the loom, powered by the loom itself and synchronized to the weaving.

In operation, with each line of the weave, the warp needles would push up against these cards, penetrate through wherever there was a drilled hole, and lift the warp thread to the surface. The result, we recognize today, was a binary event: on or off, closed or open, go or stop. To change the pattern of the finished fabric, you merely had to swap out the cards.

What de Vaucanson had invented was the world’s first fully automated, user-programmable production machine.

POINT OF INFLECTION

It can be said of few men or women who have ever lived that they materially influenced a historic epoch. In de Vaucanson’s case, he influenced two. His loom stands, along with the steam engine and the Bessemer steel furnace, as one of the defining inventions that made the Industrial Revolution possible. But it is recognized as a key source of the subsequent Information Revolution as well. That’s because once you replaced the needles going through those holes with electricity, you could build computers and write complex computer instruction code: software. Use that same on-off screening with light and the light-sensitive emulsion that would be invented in another century, and you had photography, photolithography … and ultimately the semiconductor chips that would fill those computers.

What’s more, though de Vaucanson didn’t recognize it at the time, his automatic loom had yet one more discovery hidden inside of it. If he had ever attempted to reverse the loom’s operation—that is, to use the needles to extract the location of each line of thread and then feed that backward into a device that drilled the holes in the cards—de Vaucanson would not only have invented instructional memory but memory “recording” as well.

Unfortunately for M. de Vaucanson, whereas his clever automatons had provided a thrilling after-dinner entertainment for rich royals, his far-more-important automatic loom only managed to provoke anger among the working classes, who saw the new invention as a threat to their livelihoods. Presaging the Luddites, French silk workers not only attacked the looms, but de Vaucanson himself, showering the inventor with stones when he visited their factories.

It would be fifty-five years before another intrepid inventor, Joseph Marie Jacquard, would revisit de Vaucanson’s design and perfect the loom that forever bears Jacquard’s name. And, with no little irony, the Jacquard loom would find itself most valued in England, where recent inventions in thread-making, such as the Spinning Jenny, had created the need for a fast, configurable, and automatic loom. In the end, de Vaucanson’s loom not only failed to restore the French silk industry, it gave its British competitors the missing piece it needed to capture the entire industrial world.

The Industrial Revolution, which the Jacquard loom helped to power, is—as every schoolchild is taught—one of the two or three most important points of inflection in human history, ranking right up there with the birth of agriculture. But living as we do on the far side of that revolution, and knowing only a world irrevocably changed by it, it can be difficult to completely appreciate the full measure of this transformation.

But if you look at historic graphs of human demographics and behavior, nearly every one is essentially a straight line (with a few brief anomalies) for five thousand years beginning with that birth of agriculture. Life expectancy didn’t much change, infant mortality stayed high, and educational levels remained low. Per capita income? About the same. Average speed of movement? Walking, with bursts up to twenty miles per hour with horses and sails. Regularly recurring plagues? Check. Famines? Check.

In other words, even if you include the genius of Periclean Greece and the Italian Renaissance, the might of Imperial Rome and the Persian Empire, or the endurance of Dynastic Egypt or Imperial China, the lot of mankind changed little over the millennia. The notion of progress, which defines every minute of every day of modern life, was all but nonexistent before the Industrial Revolution and usually reserved only for making one’s place in heaven.

And then suddenly, shockingly, around 1800 all of those flat lines curve upward. Humanity starts living longer, is healthier and bigger. More children survive—and go to school. Plagues become less frequent and (with one big exception) less murderous. Per-capita income skyrockets as more and more people leave the once-dominant profession (farming) and flock to the rapidly growing cities to take better-paying and more reliable factory jobs, the requirements of those jobs in turn driving literacy levels to nearly 100 percent. This is turn precipitates the greatest jump in productivity in human history, increasing both personal wealth and ownership.

With people healthier, living longer, and having more surviving children, population shoots upward as well. And these new uprooted populations also begin moving about more quickly: The locomotive presented the first real improvement in human speed since the domestication of the horse 20,000 years before.

Yet for all of this, the single greatest change wrought by the Industrial Revolution may have been our relationship with time. The timing and sequence that defined de Vaucanson’s automaton was now mapped onto all of civilization, and with each decade time marched faster and the sequences grew ever more sophisticated. The English system of factories, steel, and improved transportation quickly made Great Britain the most powerful and wealthy and country in the world—and set off two centuries of industrial espionage as other countries raced, by any means necessary, to duplicate its success.

None was better at this than the United States—and the American scheme of systematization of processes and interchangeable components would in turn set off what would be called the Second Industrial Revolution of large-scale mass production that would bring the fruits of manufacturing to nearly every person on the planet. Automatons had now become automation, and human beings were not only the observers and consumers of this newly automated world, but they were now also components within the automaton itself. It’s not a coincidence that early in this process Mary Shelley created that most influential of all modern myths, Frankenstein—the horrifying tale of a man beset by a monster of his own making.

Indeed, the role of people in this newly industrialized society became problematic. The task of one group—investors, bankers, managers, scientists, experts, and eventually marketers—became that of making the machines more powerful, productive, and cost-efficient. For the other group—workers—the job was to become a component inside the machine, moving the process along at pivot points where automation couldn’t be trusted to accomplish the work itself.

As we all know, for the latter group, all of the advances in wealth and quality of life wrought by industrialization didn’t make up for the dreariness and anonymity of assembly-line work. And this frustration reached a breaking point when, in order to keep up with the ever-faster machines, timing and sequence improvement evolved into a science: Frederick Taylor’s “scientific management,” with its time-motion studies and obsession with efficiency. The resulting explosion in productivity led to modern professional management, with its focus on empirical decision-making and a shared collective memory of “best practices.”

But before that, the revolt against automation gave us the labor movement, with its reassertion of the rights, the dignity, and most of all, the humanity of those workers trapped inside the automaton. The ghosts had at last fought back. And thus, it shouldn’t be surprising that perhaps the most resonant image of this revolt was Chaplin’s Little Tramp as a factory worker in Modern Times, being processed through a series of giant gears—the simplest form of pinned barrel—like, well … shit through a duck.

Somewhere, Voltaire was laughing.

*   *   *

Jacques de Vaucanson spent the rest of his life inventing and earning awards, including membership in the French Academy of Science. But history soon forgot him and his remarkable contribution. There is an engraving of de Vaucanson, made just before his death, showing a bewigged old man with the face of a wary bloodhound.

De Vaucanson died in 1792. He didn’t live long enough to see either the revolt of his factory-worker employees over his former royal audiences (and the destruction of many of his automatons) or the other great social revolution his inventions helped to create. And if, in the end, he hadn’t managed to bring his machines to life, de Vaucanson had done the next best thing: He had given them independent lives of their own.