The Wilson Quarterly: Man as Machine (Mechanical Duck)

[David Payne]

Again, sorry if this has already posted.
 
http://www.wilsonquarterly.com/article.cfm?AID=2056
 
[snip...]"Vaucanson, however, was less a philosophical theorist than a practical, even greedy businessman. In 1739, as profits from the Flute Player’s performances began to decline, he added two new automatons to his exhibit. One was a pipe-and-drum player. The other—which was to make him, for a time, one of the most famous men in Europe—was a mechanical duck.
And not merely a wind-up duck that flapped its wings and quacked and turned its head. If you held out a bit of food in your palm, the duck’s head would lower, its beak would fall open, and the automaton would actually gulp down the morsel. And then, some minutes later—Reader, I am not making this up—the duck would excrete it.
 
I have devoted more hours than I like to recall thinking about the question of why—why would a sane person create something as bizarre as a metal duck that ate, digested, and excreted? It was no toy. A single wing of the duck contained more than 400 tiny articulated parts. The food was digested in a stomach that contained chemicals to transform it, and it exited, Vaucanson wrote helpfully in an explanatory booklet, through “the anus, where there is a sphincter which permits it to emerge.” (The excretion part was a fraud, of course. The grain the duck ate was caught in a receptacle in its throat, and the material it excreted was stored inside it before demonstrations.)
I have wondered if the project had something to do with the well-known French fascination with intimate plumbing. Or if Vaucanson was projecting his own imagined bodily frailties—his hypochondria—onto a living creature that would, in contrast to him, perform its functions flawlessly. Or did the duck represent a daring progression from Outer to Inner, from the statue-like frame of the Flute Player to the hidden bowels of a living creature? Granted, an automate of a man or a flute player doing the same thing would have presented certain problems. But even so—why a duck? Un canard? Was it all just a very odd, sophomoric joke? Voltaire, equally baffled, fell back, as usual, on irony, remarking only that “without Vaucanson’s shitting duck there would be nothing to remind us of the glory of France.”
 
There was at least one person who regarded the duck without irony.
 
Louis XV was not quite 30 years old when he traveled from Versailles into Paris to see Vaucanson’s exhibition. He was motivated by his passionate interest in science; but the “Beloved King” was also quite conscious of his own frail health and was unusually close to his team of physicians. Descriptions of the automate had evidently sparked an idea in his mind. After studying the duck closely, he called its creator to his side and posed a bold question, scientific but tottering on the edge of blasphemous: Could Vaucanson possibly make something of the same sort . . . in which the blood flowed? 
 
Thus was born Vaucanson’s double life. On the one hand, having sold his automates and sent them off on a European tour, he took up, as a perk of his new friendship, the remunerative post of Royal Inspector of Silk Manufacture. Quickly, almost casually, he redesigned the looms used in the great factories in Lyon, displaced a huge number of silk workers from their jobs, and set off one of the first riots of the Industrial Revolution. At the same time, more or less secretly, he began work on the king’s project. 
 
Secretly, because what he and the king had in mind was far grander and more outrageous than Le Cat’s surgical model. What they intended to construct was nothing less than a life-size figure that would imitate the human body in all its biological functions—breath, blood, digestion, movement—a perfect android, an automate that would stand and walk and no doubt peer curiously at the brave new world around him, that had such creatures in it. Or, as Vaucanson sometimes more poignantly called it, “L’homme saignant,” the Bleeding Man.
 
No one knows how far he got. The work was carried out away from the Church’s disapproving eye, some of it perhaps in the countryside near Lyon. Certainly Vaucanson was paid large sums of money for a number of years, through intermediaries and concealed accounts. But he was handicapped not only by secrecy. He faced the nearly impossible challenge of making his android with only the materials available to him in the middle of the 18th century—brass, wood, wax, copper, and glass. Other inventors have encountered the same problem, of course. The gifted 19th-century mathematician Charles Babbage probably would have invented the modern digital computer—he had the theory right—except for the fact that he had to build his “Difference Engine” with brass and mahogany, not silicon. But one development in materials suggests that Vaucanson may have made more progress than we imagine.[...]"