THE HISTORY OF ELECTRONIC MUSIC:

Part 20.  The Attack of the Automatons : Robot Ancestors.

The History of Automatons. Chapter 1.

Ben and Dave both suffered from pins and needles

Today we start a brand new thread in our history series. The Automatons.

We’re going to discover all about the modern robot’s strange ancestors. We’re taking a strange trip into the weird and wonderful fascination mankind has to imitate living things.

But first an explanation.

If you’ve been following the blog for a while now you probably realize that some of our tales tend to go on small tangential trips before returning to the story at hand.  All the best stories do, especially those that are true.

Throughout our story so far we’ve alluded to these fascinating machines a few times, in fact, they’ve been responsible for some of those minor tangents mentioned above.

As we promised in previous posts, the tale of man’s obsession for making the mechanical act biological, deserves it’s very own tale, one that will unfold over the next few months.
And as you’ll soon discover, their relevance to the history of electronic music is more than most people realize.

So What’s an Automaton?

Glad you asked..

An Automaton is “a machine which by means of mechanical, pneumatic, hydraulic, electric or electronic devices is able to imitate a living body”.

In other words making the artificial seem biological.

Automatons are to Robots, as Caveman is to Modern Man.
As mankind becomes more sophisticated so does the robot.
In many ways the history of the automaton closely reflects the history of engineering.

The First Automaton’s.

The Word Automaton is derived from the Greek automatos: ‘meaning acting of one’s own will or spontaneously’ and it is the Greek’s that are the most famous for the beginnings of the automaton, but it should be noted that the Chinese seemed to have been just as obsessed with auotomatons and for almost as long.

Obsession seems to be the root word

Automatons even appear in Greek myth, Daedalus used quicksilver to install a voice in his statues. Hephaestus created automata for his workshop: Talos, an artificial man of bronze, and, according to Hesiod, the woman Pandora.

In fact it was the Greek philosopher Aristotle who conceptualized the idea of what would one day be called robots: “If every tool, when ordered, or even of its own accord, could do the work that befits it . . . then there would be no need either of apprentices for the master workers or of slaves for the lords.”

The Greeks used automata as toys, religious idols and tools for demonstrating scientific principals.

The earliest recorded mention of automata comes as far back, as the Greek Poet Pindar (ca. 522–443  BC). In his seventh Olympic Ode, writing about the island of Rhodes, he said:

The animated figures stand,

Adorning every public street,
And seem to breathe in stone,
or move their marble feet.

The earliest specific records of a these mechanical marvels goes back to  somewhere between 400 -350 B.C

Archytas of Tarentum a good friend of Plato is reputed to have designed and built the first artificial, self-propelled flying device.
Called The Pigeon, It was a bird-shaped model that was propelled by a jet of what was probably steam. It was reported being able to fly up to 200 meters!
(Although it must be said that The Pigeon, may have been suspended on a wire or pivot for its flight..)

The next historical records comes from another Greek, and an old friend of this blog’s Hero of Alexandria. (c.10-70 AD).
In parts 4 and 5 we talked about how hero would create all sorts of automata from singing birds to trumpet playing heralds.

Hero even created stages that would move on to stage of it’s own accord, show an animated musical play that would even include his automata pour wine, create fire then drink, and move back off stage again.

To catch up on Hero click here.

Hero of Alexandria

We also know that automata were widespread in China by the time of the Sui Dynasty (6th century AD), when the ‘Shai Shih t’u Ching Book of Hydraulic Excellencies’, was written, some believe that many of the devices in this wonderful tome may even go back as far as 200 B.C.

These incredible artisans built sophisticated mechanical animals, including birds with moving parts and otters that swallowed fish.

There were also flying automatons, mechanized doves and fish, angels and dragons, and automated cup-bearers, all hydraulically-actuated for the amusement of Emperors by anonymous engineer-craftspeople.

I like how they felt they also had to take the wig off to show the inside workings..

But to me their masterpiece was surely an entire mechanical orchestra.
Unfortunately I can find very little written about this, which strikes me as odd as surely something as profound as the first musical mechanical polyphonic instrument would be important?
Previous to this post in chapter 14 I reported that the Panharmonicon was the first truly polyphonic orchestral instrument. If the this mechanical orchestra is true it predated the Panharmonican by over 1800 years!

See.. another tangent!

And it is on this tangent – one that connects the story back to music, where we can see that even from the beginning of man’s obsession with the automaton, we have searched for ways to get them to make sound and music. In fact by the end of this tale of the mechanical imitating the biological, we will discover the very first digitized speech! (and you won’t believe how long ago it was created too!)

In our next part we’re going to visiting the world’s first programmable robot, Leonardo Divinci’s little known masterpiece and the device that started an automatom fad across Europe that would last 200 hundred years and end with real life robots!

Coming soon – part 2 in the Attack of the Automatons!

Click here for the previous chapter.