Robert Race - Making Simple Automata

Figure Kneading dough. An ancient moving toy, operated by pulling a string. egypt, around 2000 BCE.

It is well worth following these histories. Since prehistoric times the urge to represent living things by animating them has been a significant factor in the development of technology.

Among the toys, or toy-like objects, found in ancient Egyptian tombs are a variety of jointed figures with movable limbs, and animals with moving jaws, operated by pulling a string. One notable example that survives in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo is an ivory sculpture of three dancing dwarves mounted on a base: strings can be pulled to rotate the figures (a fourth figure from the group is in the Metropolitan Museum, New York).

A number of moving toys, including wheeled toys, dolls with movable limbs and figures operated by pulling a string, survive from ancient Greece, and also from earlier civilizations, such as those in Mesopotamia and the Indus valley.

References to automata, moving toys and puppets in classical texts are sparse, and often difficult to interpret with any certainty, but they do suggest that such things were familiar objects in ancient Greece. For example, in Chapter 7 of The Republic, in the well-known allegory of the cave, Plato pictured puppets, with their operators hidden behind a wall below, casting shadows on the wall. Aristotle, in De motu animalium, compared the movement of animal limbs to automata (by which he probably meant some sort of puppet, or mechanical theatrical device) and also to a strange-sounding toy cart, which runs in a circle because the wheel, or wheels, on one side are smaller than on the other.

Solid descriptions of more complex automata first appear in the second and first centuries bce in the works of the Alexandrian school, and particularly of Ctesibius, Philo and Hero. A wide variety of hydraulic, pneumatic and mechanical devices are described in the texts that survived. Some of these, such as clepsydrae (water-clocks), are machines with a really practical purpose, but they often incorporate moving figures, singing birds and, literally, bells and whistles. In addition, many are really just automata intended to mystify theatre-goers and temple-goers, or simply to amuse.

These texts survived because they were transcribed by Byzantine and Arab scholars. They subsequently had a considerable impact on Renaissance Europe when Latin translations appeared during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Woman with Rolling Pin, by a modern maker, Edessia Aghajanian. In the British Museum there is a terracotta string-pull toy from Rhodes, dating from 450bce, showing the same timeless domestic task.

Heros device for automatically opening temple doors when a fire is lit on the altar. From Giambattista Aleottis work of 1647.

Under Harun al-Rashid, the fifth caliph of the Abbasid dynasty, who succeeded in 786ce, and under his successors, Baghdad became an important centre of learning, not least in mathematics and science. Scholars at the House of Wisdom actively sought Greek texts, such as Euclids