A Robot Build Without Modern Technology

The Flute Player:Voltaire called mechanical genius Jacques de Vaucanson the “new Prometheus” for his apparent power to bestow life to inanimate material. When he was a child, Jacques studied a church clock as he waited for his mother to finish confession. Jacques memorized all its parts and was able to recreate it at home. He experimented with automata as he grew up. One day, Jacques was taken ill, and in his delirium, he dreamed of an android flute player. As soon as he recovered, he began to put the robot together.



First exhibited on February 11, 1738, The Flute Player was a near-impossible machine to build, considering that the flute is one of the hardest instruments to play in tune by real humans. Notes are produced not just by dexterity of fingers and breath but also through the amount of air blown and how the flutist shapes the lips. But Jacques de Vaucanson managed to build a robot that could play 12 different tunes. He crafted mechanisms to mimic every muscle involved in playing the flute.
Through a system of bellows, pipes, and weights, Jacques was able to control the air flowing through the passageways. He designed the lips to open and close and move backward and forward. A metal tongue regulated the airflow and created pauses. Jacques’s robot actually breathed. Jacques’s problem with the fingers was that even though his levers produced the correct actions, the wooden fingers were just too stiff to create the right sounds. To simulate real fingers, Jacques fitted the wooden digits with real skin to make them soft.
Jacques de Vaucanson made other automata, the most famous being a duck that defecated after eating. But unlike The Flute Player, the duck was more of an amusing conjuring trick than a real attempt at mimicking the functions of a living creature.