Original subtitles

- It's often said that if you really want

to understand something,

then what you should do is build it.

Now take something like your own hand.

Do you really understand how it works?

What it's made of? How it functions?

Well one way to find out would be

to make a machine that behaves just like that.

For a very long time that was an impossible dream.

The idea that there could be machines

that could behave exactly like our own bodies

seemed entirely out of reach.

But then around 300 years ago,

this dream was made real.

This is an automaton, a self-moving machine

that simulates the actions of a living being.

This elegant young artist first went on show

in France in the 1770s.

In those days, Europe was full

of automata like these.

They entertained kings and princes

and taught moral lessons to citizens.

They raised deep philosophical questions

and they would ferment revolution.

Automata were masterpieces of art and engineering.

Forgotten wonders of an extraordinary age.

This film is their story.

(gears whirring)

For a very long time, the construction of machines

that could move like humans or animals

seemed completely fantastical.

But in the Middle Ages, a new form of technology

was developed that could begin to make

complex, controlled, and regular movements.

This technology was mechanical clockwork,

and it would be used in some of the very earliest automata.

The development of clockwork was driven

by a new type of social organization.

The burgeoning medieval city.

For medieval city states,

clockwork offered a vital tool

to help govern their population.

The city was home

to explosive tensions.

The city air made people free,

so it was said in the Middle Ages,

and what that meant was a big urban problem.

Masters and servants, traders and employees

were at each other's throat.

In the city there was plague and there was fire

and there was civil strife.

The aim was to find a technique

that could turn the city into a place

of good order and of ideal government.

Clockwork could offer the solution.

(church bells ringing) The sound of the bells

reached out across the city, bringing together

its disparate groups and offering

regularity in a world entirely

removed from nature.

(church bells ringing)

Cities soon began building spectacular clocks

to showcase their power.

And these clocks would become home

to some of the earliest automata.

(bell ringing)

This is the Zytglogge,

a German word that means "time bell."

For half a millenium,

the Zytglogge has stood in Bern,

now the capital of Switzerland,

and it's driven by an astonishing piece

of clockwork technology.

(gears whirring)

This is the machine at the heart of the Zytglogge.

Its beat, its to-and-fro movement,

is the beat that drives the time system of the city.

These complex gears, coiled ropes,

and moving weights are a system

designed more than 500 years ago,

and they're still working perfectly.

Right at the top of the machine

is a device which turns the energy of the weights

into the system that marks the minutes and the hours.

Almost as soon as such devices were built,

their fluttering, their oscillation,

their regular movement was compared

with the movement of the human body.

The analogy between clockwork and the body

inspired the engineers of the Zytglogge

to experiment.

To combine clocks with art, with sculpture,

and with design.

Clockwork could now be used

to bring machines to life.

(machine clicking)

In a world removed from nature,

these automata offered regularity

and order to the city.

Here a crowing rooster,

the rural symbol of time,

has been animated once more,

transformed into a machine

for the citizens to enjoy.

(mechanical rooster crowing)

The Zytglogge and its theater of machines

was a vision of the world

that the city-dwellers had left behind.

(church bells ringing)

These machines and their show

were designed to bring peace, order,

and harmony to the city of Bern.

The great mechanical clocks

of the medieval European towns

were intensely public structures.

From Bern across the whole of Europe,

the clocks of the city taught their citizens

lessons in morality and virtue.

But all that was soon to change,

and to change really dramatically.

These automata would become private.

Mechanical theaters that showed the universe

and the world to the few princes and rulers

who governed them.

One of the largest and most spectacular

of these new private automata was built

in the 1740s in the rich and prosperous

town of Salzburg in Austria.

It would be created especially

for the Hellbrunn palace,

a fabulously extravagant summer retreat

designed to satisfy the private pleasures

of the ruling classes.

This was a place of lavish excess.

Its gardens filled with strange devices

designed to entertain and titillate.

But one machine surpassed them all

in scale, ambition, and technical sophistication,

An automaton in the form

of an entire working city.

The automation was commissioned

in the 1740s by this man,

Archbishop Jakob von Dietrichstein.

For him, the machine was the vision of a perfect society.

A city populated by well-behaved,

obedient automaton subjects.

The magnificent mechanical theater.

Imagine that you were a member

of the privileged audience here,

invited by the prince to see

this extraordinary automaton.

This amazing spectacle.

What you're looking at is a harmonious

orderly, and entertaining vision

of the way the city works,

or rather the way the city should work.

(gears turning)

As the machine comes to life,

almost 200 figurines begin to move.

The city becomes a kind of vast mechanical opera.

(organ music playing)

(gears clicking)

Beneath water pressure turns a wheel

that is connected via a series of gears

to the entire machine.

Here, this metal work acts like

a set of instructions, guiding each of the figures

to perform their actions at different intervals.

(organ music playing as gears turn)

Above the mechanism, the workers execute

their tasks perfectly,

mechanically, automatically.

Meanwhile, an elegant and aristocratic audience

keeps watch with the most minimal of movement.

This is a prince's vision

of a utopian society.

But there's a darker side to this seductive spectacle.

The machine that runs the theater

was designed and built by a salt miner Lorenz Rosenegger.

The salt miners generated the wealth

on which the city relied, and which funded this machine.

But the salt miners were radicals,

insurrectionaries, many of them Protestants.

A decade before this theater was built

almost all the Protestants in Salzburg

had been expelled by the order of its ruler.

Rosenegger indeed conducted the work

on this theater under armed guard

to keep him at his job.

It was a technical masterpiece,

but for the salt miners it was a machine

that represented the tyrannic power that ruled them.

(machine gears clicking)

The Hellbrunn mechanical theater perfectly encapsulates

the contradiction at the heart of all 18th century automata.

These were machines built as entertainment

for a fabulously wealthy court society,

but their mechanical ingenuity,

their artfully carved exteriors,

their very soul came from

poorly paid

artisan workers

What's more, the creativity of those workers

would revolutionize the automata

so beloved by the aristocracy.

In the 18th century, artisans in the workshops of Europe

began developing ingenious ways

with which to miniaturize the components

of clocks and watches.

With these new smaller mechanisms,

automata changed.

They no longer had to be rooted to the spot.

Thanks to the miniaturized components,

automata could now simulate new kinds of movements

and even make complex and naturalistic sounds.

(bird tweeting)

To see how some of these amazing feats

of miniaturization were achieved,

I've come to meet Jonathan Betts,

senior curator of horology

at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich.

When we say small, I think it's really interesting

to think a bit about just how small

the technologies that go into watchmaking

in general and some - Yes.

- of the automataries.

So you've got here

some equipment

to cut a screw

- Yes.

- To cut the piece of a screw.

- This is just an example of how the really tiny

stuff was done.

- Maybe it would be clearer if we start

with how it's done - [Jonathan] Yeah.

- [Simon] on a scale we can see more easily.

- I mean in the 18th century, screws were basically

made by forcing a plain steel rod

into this thing called a screw plate,

and each one of these holes has a screw thread in it.

If you force a piece of steel rod into that hole,

and turn it as you do so,

it will form a thread on the shaft.

This is basically the same thing as a screw plate,

but it has a single hole in the middle.

It's gonna be difficult for you to see

but right at the center is a tiny little hole.

That hole has thread...

- [Simon] And it's working on exactly the same principle.

- [Jonathan] Exactly the same principle.

You just have to be very, very careful,

because there's virtually no metal in the pin

that you're forcing into the hole.

It can very easily break off inside there.

But that's basically how it works.

An example here of the kind of tiny screw,

this is from a small watch balance

and if I just place it there, you can see

on the scale of one penny, just how tiny it is.

- [Simon] This tiny screw and its ingenious manufacturing

process are just one example of the amazing techniques

developed by the clock trade.

(ticking clock)

- There is a tendency for people to forget

that every single one of these things

has to be made by someone.

They don't sort of grow organically.

The craftsman starts with sheet metal

and blocks of metal and castings

and everything has to be formed in one way or another.

- [Simon] Creating these intricately machined components

was an extremely difficult job for the artisans,

and the work took place

in distinctly insalubrious settings.

Automata may have been put on show

in palaces and courts and elegant gardens,

but they relied completely on the extremely skilled work

of badly paid

and ingenious artisans.

Men and women of the clock trades.

These trades centered

on the working class district

of the great European cities.

In London, for example, around Clark and Well,

there would be streets in which each house

would specialize in a different component

of a watch or clock, and then a master would arrive

and put those components together.

The distributed and coordinated labor

of a vast artisan workforce was essential

to making clocks and automata.

But life as an artisan in the clock trade was tough.

In places like this, gathered around a table,

would be half a dozen workers devoted entirely

to one specific task of the trade.

They'd be preparing the spring drives

that were the source of energy for each clock.

They'd be cutting a gear of exquisite tininess

inside the watchwork itself.

This was hard painful labor that required

the most intense attention.

Lit only by candlelight, one's eyes could fail.

You could damage your limbs,

and yet while this was challenging and difficult work,

it was also innovative.

It was here that new tools, new machines,

new kinds of designs were constantly being developed.

(gears ticking)

The artisan workforce was a source

of constant gradual innovation.

(ticking)

What had once needed an entire clock tower

could now be made to fit snugly

into the palm of one hand.

The miniaturization and technical sophistication

of the masterpieces of the clock trade

had at least one really important consequence.

These clocks were able

to stay stable and working

and vital against changes in their environment.

That principle is called homeostasis.

It means that however the environment changes,

temperature, pressure,

the bumps and knocks of every day life,

these machines will keep on going

reliably and regularly.

Now homeostasis is so important,

but for some scientists,

that was the definition of life itself.

So with these techniques provided by the clock trades,

a huge breakthrough was possible

in the design of automata.

(automaton clicking)

Automaton makers could perhaps not just imitate

but simulate living beings.

One man in particular began to pioneer

the simulation of living things.

His name was Jacques de Vaucanson,

and he succeeded in building some

of the most beautiful and complex

clockwork beings of the era.

Vaucanson was convinced that there was no significant

difference between humans and machines.

He spent his nights attending anatomy classes,

studying in extreme and gory detail

the way the body worked.

By looking closely at human anatomy,

Vaucanson hoped that he could reconstitute it

using clockwork.

His ideas were part of a novel way of thinking

about the human body that began to

emerge in the 18th century.

Vaucanson's contemporaries began to see

the way which the human body works

is essentially automatic.

Automatic is the key word in the way

they describe what humans do.

So here's a writer in the 1740s,

a friend of Vaucanson.

He asks "Doesn't your body leap back

"in terror when you come upon

"an unexpected precipice?

"Don't your eyelids close automatically

"at the threat of a blow?

"Don't your lungs automatically work" he says

"continually like a bellows."

And it was exactly those ideas that Vaucanson

would use to engineer a machine

that could simulate life itself.

(flute playing)

By studying the activity of flute playing in great detail,

Vaucanson was able to build a device

that actually played the flute.

There was no music box hidden inside

this masterpiece.

Mechanical lungs and a silver tongue

controlled the movement of air.

Clockwork fingers precisely covered the holes,

and Vaucanson even got hold of real skin

with which to clothe his extraordinary machine.

The automaton took Europe by storm.

It was a glorious celebration

of the combination of engineering,

artistry, and the study of anatomy.

Unfortunately, Vaucanson's flute player

does not survive.

What made such a splash in the 18th century

disappeared somewhere in eastern Europe

in the 19th century, and its whereabouts,

or indeed its survival now completely unknown.

But at the time this machine inspired

a whole generation to ask about

whether there's any difference at all

between mere machines and living beings.

Vaucanson's work had inspired philosophical debate

and much technical innovation.

But for all his visionary ideas,

his success was based on the mastery

of one seemingly simple mechanical device.

A circularly shaped piece of metal known as a cam.

The beauty of the cam lies in its versatility.

Anything that the machine needs to do

can be cut into the undulating surface of the cam.

The edge of the cam is simply a way

of turning circular motion into up and down

or backwards and forwards motions.

And these motions can be of the most various kind.

A feather, a bellows, the movement can be

of an amazing range of things.

The possibility for variation and design becomes infinite.

Cams function as a kind of mechanical memory for a machine.

The more detailed and intricate the edge of the cam,

the more complex the actions it can store.

Automaton builders focused on this device,

constantly refining and developing the cams.

Devices would be built that contained

whole stacks of miniaturized cams.

One of the most remarkable realizations

of cam technology is a device in the shape

of a small boy.

It's perhaps the world's most astonishing

surviving automaton.

What's on this card is a piece of writing

made by a 240 year old machine.

One of my favorite machines.

One of the most magnificent automata

of the 18th century,

It's this boy, this writer.

He was built in Switzerland

by Pierre Jaquet-Droz,

one of Switzerland's greatest clockmakers.

The aim was, I think, to mechanize reason

and automate the passions.

Jaquet-Droz was about 50 years old

in the early 1770s when he designed

and built this masterpiece.

Inside the boy are almost 6,000 parts.

What's astonishing is that every one

of these crafted components has been refined

and miniaturized to fit completely inside

the body of the boy himself.

What Jaquet-Droz did was to use the technologies

of homeostasis, of miniaturization,

to build really a true automaton.

Inside the little writer is all his source of energy

and all the machinery that drives him.

He works on his own.

(clicking gears)

At his core, is a great stack of cams.

As these cams move, three cam followers

read their shaped edges and translate these

into the movement of the boy's arm.

Working together, the cams control

every stroke of the quill pen,

and exactly how much pressure is applied to the paper

so as to achieve beautiful, elegant, and fluid writing.

With this sublime machine, Jaquet-Droz

had reverse engineered the very act of writing.

But the mechanical boy contained

one perhaps even more astonishing feature.

The wheel that controlled the cams

was made up of letters that could be removed

and then replaced and reordered.

These allowed the writer in principle

to make any word and any sentence.

In other words, it allowed the writer to be programmed.

This beautiful boy is thus a distant ancestor

of the modern programmable computer.

The writer was one of the most technologically

advanced objects of the 18th century,

but it was also one of the most socially exclusive.

Like many other automata of the age,

it was a private spectacle only to be seen

by the very privileged few.

But that was soon to change.

At the end of the 1700s, the play things

of the aristocracy would be turned against their patrons

in the most dramatic way imaginable.

Late 18th century automata were

pricy, expensive.

They were for posh people, for well heeled gentry,

for aristocrats, courtiers, monarchs.

When Jaquet-Droz brought his machines to Paris,

he made sure that only the extremely wealthy

could see them by charging ludicrously inflated prices

and then proclaiming that no servant

would be allowed in to see the show.

The courtiers and the automata that fascinated them

began to resemble each other too closely

because the resemblance was spotted

by radicals, republicans, and revolutionaries,

and they exploited it mercilessly.

A science fiction novel written in the 1770s

to attack the aristocratic regime

described courtiers as bodies without souls

covered in lace.

Automata that might look like humans but weren't.

Radical pamphleteers pointed out

that while it was easy to be

an automaton like the king,

it was very hard to build one like the artisans.

Craftsmen were surely nobler than royalty.

The leaders of the French Revolution

simply described the king that they executed

as a crowned automaton.

By describing monarchy

as that kind of automatic machine,

it became possible to destroy it.

The machinery of life and death

helped inspire the protagonists of the French Revolution.

As the court society that had funded and built

many of the grandest automata collapsed,

these extraordinary machines would begin

to change again.

Automata became highly sought after commodities

in the newly emerging worlds of global trade.

The late 18th century was

a period of dramatic crisis.

European society, economics, politics

were completely transformed.

The old world of court society

with its princes and its prelates

gave way to a new expansive world

of international trade and global networks.

Into the European sphere erupted new kinds

of peoples, aliens,

exotic, foreign,

and European machinery changed too.

The automata would soon take

on the appearance of these strangers.

Automata would become foreign and exotic beings.

These two extraordinary machines

represent some of the first of a new kind of automaton

that began to appear towards

the end of the 18th century.

It's likely that they were made for the great London dealer

entrepreneur and automaton salesman James Cox

sometime towards the end of the 1700s.

They were made specifically

to be exported to China.

At the very end of the 18th century,

Europeans were desperately trying to find

anything they could sell

to the rich and powerful Chinese.

James Cox soon realized that while the Chinese

were deeply uninterested in most of the trinkets

that the West produced, the one thing

they did desire was automata.

Cox's ambition was to use

his automaton business

to reverse the appalling trade imbalances

between China and Europe.

The point was that China made goods

Europeans lusted after.

Tea and porcelain and silk.

The Chinese didn't seem to want anything

that Europe produced and this was the exception.

Cox openly boasted in London that

by manufacturing and then exporting

clocks like these he could make as he put it

Asian luxury serve the arts of Europe

and at last win cash for the really

cash-strapped European trades.

With the Chinese buying up automata in large quantities,

London workshops and show rooms

expanded and flourished.

As money poured in from the East,

lavish exhibitions attended by fashionable

London residents were held to help

promote and sell these new

and highly exclusive commodities.

In this new world, automaton builders

started to gain celebrity status.

None more so than James Cox's star employee,

a brilliant Belgium immigrate to London, Joseph Merlin.

Merlin cultivated a deliberately

eccentric public reputation.

He'd appear at show rooms and fashionable parties

dressed up as a bar maid with her own drink store

playing the fiddle.

And traveling around the room on his own

new fangled invention, roller skates.

Every thing Merlin did was news,

and what happened to him became meat

for gossip columnists.

Sometimes things didn't go entirely smoothly.

He was at a party in Soho and of course

he turned up with his roller skates

playing his violin, passing drinks round the room,

and I've got here a report of what happened next

written by a journalist at the time.

"Having no means of retarding his velocity

"or commanding his direction," we're told,

"Mister Merlin impaled himself against

"a mirror of more than 500 pounds value

"and dashed it to atoms, and broke his violin

"to pieces and wounded himself most severely."

But although Merlin may not have been brilliant

as a roller skater, he was unparalleled

as a designer of automata, and these machines

would astonish the late 18th century public.

Merlin's masterpiece was a fabulous swan

made entirely of silver.

It's one of the most revered automata of the age,

and it features both ingenious clockwork engineering

and visionary artistic flourishes.

By using clockwork to drive these simple

glass cylindrical rods,

Merlin was able to mimic

the extraordinary complexity of moving water.

As the light catches the twisted and imperfect

surface of the rods, it creates

the unmistakable reflection of water

on the underside of the swan.

The craftsmanship and artistry

of the creature was breathtaking.

(hand crank clicking)

(chimes playing)

A mechanical marvel,

when we look at the swan executing its actions

with extraordinary precision,

a masterpiece combing the clockmaker's art

and the skill of the master jeweler,

we can easily imagine the effect this device

must have had on London audiences

in the 1770s.

It made Merlin's reputation

as the social celebrity

he'd always wanted to be.

Celebrity culture at the time flocked

to see this device, to gawp in amazement

at this triumph of beauty

and of technical skill.

The success of devices like the swan

and the celebrity of their makers

established a huge audience for automata,

and as the market expanded, new builders emerged

creating ever more ingenious ways to wow the public.

The most eminent of these

was Wolfgang von Kempelen.

A man whose mechanical ability seemed

to many almost supernatural.

Von Kempelen became famous for creating a device

far in advance of any machine

that had ever been built.

This is one of the masterpieces

of late 18th century engineering.

Automata could draw, they could play music,

they could write and now apparently

they could play chess.

Imagine you were in a show room

in London's West End in 1784.

This is what you would see.

You'd be shown in to a darkened chamber

lit by candles and on stage in front of you,

a machine in the shape of an oriental,

A Turk with his cushion, his pipe,

and in front of him a chess board.

The chess board sits on top of this large cabinet

and inside marvels

of 18th century gearing and wheelwork.

The master of ceremonies shows you how elegant

and splendid this machinery is.

Then he closes the doors.

The machine has to be wound up.

(hand crank winding)

And his pipe

and his cushion removed.

And now the Turk is ready to play chess.

(gears moving)

(choral music)

Clockwork seemed to be mimicking human reason.

One of the great hopes of the age

had finally been realized.

At last the mind could be simulated

by clockwork engineering.

The Turkish chess player went

on tour throughout Europe.

Almost everywhere he went, he won.

In cafes, academies, and courts,

the Turk was able to invent new chess openings

and destroy the reputation

of numbers of expert players.

As almost nothing else could at the time,

The Turk demonstrated just how ambitious,

just how endless the possibilities were

for engineering, mechanism, and design.

(machine parts moving)

But this amazing machine would do

much more than merely entertain.

It would inspire one of the most

important inventions of the Industrial Revolution.

In the middle of the 1780s, a group

of wealthy English gentlemen met together for dinner.

At their dinner party, they discussed

one of the really major problems

of the British textile trades.

The problem was could the process

of weaving, one of the most complicated activities

in industry, could there be a machine

that could do something like that?

Well one of the guys at dinner

had seen the Turkish chess player

down in London and he'd been completely amazed

by what this machine could do.

He reckoned that if there was a machine

so ingenious that it could play chess,

surely it would be possible to design

a machine that could weave cloth.

(machine parts working)

These are mechanical power looms.

What used to be done by hand, weaving,

is now done

by automatic machinery.

The men who first designed machines like this

had been inspired by the Turkish chess player

and I don't think it's too fanciful to see

in the components of this mechanical animal

things that absolutely resemble the moving

components of the Turk.

The picking arm that throws the shuttle

backwards and forwards really does look like

the mechanical arm the Turk uses

to move pieces across the chess board.

(machine parts moving)

Once upon a time, automata had been there

for entertainment and now a range of automatic machines

like this would revolutionize the world.

The Turkish chess player had helped inspire

the mechanization of weaving

and the transformation of industry.

But the machine was not all it seemed.

Its amazing ability relied on something

none of its audience was aware of.

In the end, the Turk's secret was revealed.

As you can see I'm sitting here

inside the Turk.

Despite appearances, there was more than enough

room inside the cabinet for a fully grown

human being to sit in some comfort.

From inside, the operator could guide the Turk's arm,

picking up and moving pieces at will.

And they could follow the course of the game

by looking up from underneath

at the chess board on top of the cabinet.

So the Turk was an experiment

about confidence.

Instead of being

a magnificent automaton,

it was, in fact,

a magnificently arranged device

in which a human pretended

to be a machine

that was pretending to be a human.

A vision of the fluidity, the ambiguity,

that characterized the boundary

between humanity and technology,

between people and machines.

(machines working)

Now that machines of industry could really do

what humans did, the mechanical marvels

of the Industrial Age began to make

vast swathes of artisans and craftsmen redundant.

Having finally succeeded in building devices

that could mimic the actions of the human body,

the artisans had unwittingly created machines

that would now be used to replace them.

(machine working)

But the story of automata does not end here.

This is the Draftsman.

It is a stunning example of what is perhaps

automata's greatest legacy,

the ability to store memory

and then reactivate it at will.

All the information to recreate this intricate picture

is held in a complex stack of cams

that guides the movements of the pencil.

This idea of storing information in the changing surface

of the disk would, amongst other things,

inspire the birth of the technology

of recorded sound.

This vinyl disc

is materialized memory

and it works exactly the way a cam

in any automaton works.

The groove that the needle follows

encapsulates permanently and reliably

an extremely complicated amount of information.

Placed on a record player, that information

can be recaptured

with a machine

that is in many ways

the descendent of 18th century automata.

(classical music playing)

Recording technology doesn't

just capture sound.

It also tries to bring it back to life.

We live in a world of technologies that try to achieve this.

In cinemark, we have a machine

that captures the light

and then brings it back to life.

We think these are new technologies,

but the story of automata shows

just how old they are.

(mechanical rooster crowing)

Automata are machines that allow us

to experience again the movements

of a world we thought we'd lost.

They were built by people who dreamt

of a new relation, a better relation,

between humanity and technology.

(gears clicking)

(water running)

(classical music)