Da Vinci Automata

9 Responses to “Clockwork Men”

1. 1 David March 12, 2007 at 10:56 am

   How about Hero of Alexandria, who built anamatronics in 50 A.D.?

2. 2 Da Vinci Automata March 12, 2007 at 1:22 pm

   Hero of Alexandria lived in the classical Greco-Roman period and thus there are difference in opinion regarding if he should be included or not given that Clockpunk is mainly set in the Renaissance and shortly before that.

3. 3 Heather McD. March 13, 2007 at 10:42 pm

   This may be a strange question, but I read a novel a long time ago (early 90’s, but the book was maybe 10 years older) about a guy who built clockwork automata in the 1700’s (?). He ended up traveling to, and living in, the Kingdom of Siam with a clockwork person he’d made. It was a strange book, and I didn’t particularly fall in love with it, but the descriptions of clockwork in it got me started on a lifelong obsession. Anyone ever heard of it? I’d love to find it again.

4. 4 Da Vinci Automata March 14, 2007 at 6:29 pm

   Heather, I am not familiar with the story but I would love to know more myself. Anyone got more info on this?

5. 5 Sue Mitchell March 17, 2007 at 5:47 am

   Da Vinci Automata wrote: “Clockpunk is mainly set in the Renaissance and shortly before that.”
   ———————-
   Isn’t this a bit limiting? If someone is before his or her time, should there not be at least an honourable mention?
   –

6. 6 Da Vinci Automata March 19, 2007 at 3:06 am

   Sur, In some sense it is limiting but I like the idea of honorable mention and so I will add Hero the list.

7. 7 Ethan March 20, 2007 at 8:39 pm

   Along with Bida’ azZaman, the Wonder of the Age, as al-Jazari was known, you should include his earlier predecessors in Islamic engineering and automata, the brothers Banu Musa, who worked as scientists and engineers for the calliph in Baghdad in the 9th century CE (3rd century AH, year of the Hijra). Ahmad ibn Musa’s “Book of Ingenious Devices” (kitab al hiyal) containes many, well, ingenious devices, largely using water pressure, including very fancy automata for serving wine (although not “programmable).

   In general, the “Renaissance” is a very limiting time period for clockpunk, because many of the mechanical innovations that make it possible were in fact invented centuries earlier by Arabic/Muslim engineers and were only translated into European languages following the fall of Andalucia, Muslim Spain, in the decades preceeding 1492 CE. In general they made vast advances in gear technology, precision crafting, clockworks, and the study of water pressure and fluid dynamics, not to mention optics, medicine, astronomy and mathematics that became the basis for everything the Europeans did later once translations into Latin became available to them.

8. 8 Da Vinci Automata March 24, 2007 at 3:20 am

   Ethan, that is an excellent point i.e., some of the inventions were indeed created before the Renaissance. However Renaissance comes with a particular mindset but I see your point so it would be fruitful to expand the definition which I will do so.

9. 9 judasnoose March 29, 2008 at 10:22 pm

   There was a medieval Japanese researcher who built a clockwork tea-serving robot.

   Japan’s mechanical dolls, or karakuri ningyo, are said to have come from China. The Edo period (1603-1867) brought development of a true clockwork-doll culture, spurred by the Takeda-za, a mechanical-puppet theater founded in 1662 in Osaka’s Dotonbori district.

   Diagrams for a tea-serving doll, archetype of the clockwork figures that were Japan’s earliest robots, can be found in Karakuri Zui (Illustrated Miscellany of Automata) written by Hanzo Yorinao Hosokawa in 1796. This book is an early guide to mechanical devices. In its pages the late Masanori Takashina (the seventh doll artisan to inherit the name Tamaya Shobei) found the instructions he needed to recreate the wondrous tea-serving doll. We asked Shoji Takashina, the ninth and current Tamaya Shobei, for a demonstration and some inside information on clockwork dolls. He invited us up to the roof of the Aichi Pavilion in the Nagakute area of the World Expo.

   http://int.kateigaho.com/spr05/robots.html

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