created 2025-04-30, & modified, =this.modified
rel: Magic Action Words Jacques de Vaucanson’s Digesting Duck
In looking at various automaton and early automatic machines, I notice that the core of what the device is trying to emulate is there (a body) but there’s this externalized segment, that is the orchestrating physical logic of it.
The puppet and the puppeteer.
It’s easier to show in images that motivate the thought.
See, Vaucanson’s Digesting Duck and the apparatus below.
Also, with Claude Shannon’s Chess game and the configuration of possibilities within.
Similarly, in a sense, the human playing on inert pieces.
What are all the points that converge to play the game?
I’ll make record of writer and the fascinating method.
These early automata were devised as flexes for clockwork makers to demonstrate their proficiency in engineering.
The automaton is able to create it’s drawing be reading the surfaces of brass discs. The discs have hills and valley on their surface, and three followers ride the hills and valleys of that surface, translating the movement into the movement of levers that move the drawing hand.
The information capacity of the automaton to hold seven images within the machine was calculated to be 299,040 points, almost 300 kilobits of storage, or slightly more than a quarter of a kilobyte.
Thought
Make a shirt of this early automaton sketch.
More on Young Writer Automaton
Made from 6.000 individual parts, the 240-year-old machine can be thought of as the ancestor of modern computers. At its core, the Writer features a large stack of 40 cams with three cam followers that read their shaped edges and translate them into movements of the boy’s arm. Cams are rotating or sliding piece used in mechanical constructions especially in transforming rotary motion into linear motion or vice-versa
The cams are controlled by a large wheel or ‘system disk’, made up of letters that could be removed, replaced and reordered (therefore, the machine is programmable). The Writer is able to write any custom text up to 40 letters long, spread over four lines.