![]() Cox’s work was often made for export to China he borrowed heavily, bankrupting himself more than once. Vaucanson was a French inventor, his metal lathe contributing to early industrialisation, and his automata gaining a reputation as convincing simulacra of living beings Jaquet-Droz was born in Neuchâtel and lived in Paris and Geneva, his creations perhaps the true forerunners of computers Londoner James Cox made wildly elaborate timepieces and automata, specialising in bejewelled animals that could move gracefully and sing and snarl. They were manifestations of technical prowess, projections of national power, celebrations of Enlightenment science and, most surprisingly, regarded by some as experiments in the search for eternal life. I’d assumed that these automata were mere luxuries for the very rich but in researching my novel I discovered that they were about much more than adornment or entertainment. ![]() But some automata from that era can still be seen operating as they did then, notably Jaquet-Droz’s ‘The Writer’ and ‘The Musician’ which can be found in Neuchâtel, Switzerland and James Cox’s Silver Swan which is in the Bowes Museum, Barnard Castle, England. Most of the real automata of two hundred and seventy years ago have been lost – Vaucanson’s famous duck (famous because it ate, digested and excreted its food), and Wolfgang Von Kempelen’s infamous chess-playing ‘Turk’ (infamous because it was proved to be a hoax, though only after it had played and defeated the Emperor Napoleon, Benjamin Franklin and countless others over its eighty year life). Ultimately one of his father’s automatons brings peril to Zachary’s family when it is seized in the Sultan’s palace in Constantinople, along with his father. In my novel, The Second Sight of Zachary Cloudesley (Doubleday, 9 June), set in the mid eighteenth century, Zachary’s father makes remarkable automata, simulations of people and animals driven by clockwork and programmed by cams that worked much like prototype computer software. ![]() The eighteenth-century automaton: the power and the glory… and the horror
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