The most famous automaton in history was an “impostor.” In 1769, the Hungarian aristocrat Wolfgang von Kempelen made an imposing wooden bust of a chess player, known today as the Turk for its attire. As the pegs responsible for the musical notes could be exchanged for different ones in order to interpret another melody, it is considered one of the first programmable machines in history. Credit: Freer Gallery of ArtĪs the water flowed, it started a rotating drum with pegs that, in turn, moved levers whose movement produced different sounds and movements. The Al-Jazari orchestra, one of the earliest examples of known automatons. This latter invention was meant to liven up parties and banquets with music while floating on a pond, lake or fountain. In 1206, the Arab polymath Al-Jazari, whose creations were known for their sophistication, described some of his most notable automatons: an automatic wine dispenser, a soap and towels dispenser and an orchestra-automaton that operated by the force of water. The earliest examples of known automatons appeared in the Islamic world in the 12th and 13th centuries. Some of the greatest inventors in history, such as Leonardo Da Vinci, have contributed to our fascination with these fabulous creations: The Al-Jazari automatons But their predecessors, the automatons (from the Greek automata, or “mechanical device that works by itself”), have been the object of desire and fascination since antiquity. The idea was introduced in 1921 by the Czech writer Karel Capek in his work R.U.R to designate a machine that performs tasks in place of man. The concept of robot is relatively recent.
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