"Without the duck of Vaucanson, there would be nothing to remind us of the glory of France."
– Voltaire
People who prefer mechanical watches to quartz sometimes say it is because mechanical watches have "soul" and quartz ones do not. Most of them probably don't know it, but in saying this, they're part of a very long tradition of seeing something alive – sometimes, uncannily alive – in a machine, especially one that can operate autonomously. One of the most interesting aspects of the development of machines, and a way in which they've been used to explore the relationship between mechanics and life itself, is the history of their use to imitate human or other natural movements. Such machines – which often are closely related to watches and clocks, in that they're usually driven by mainsprings – have a very long, very rich history. Generally, they're known as automatons (automata that imitate humans are sometimes called androids) and they invite a question: to what extent is life itself mechanical? Can machines do more than just imitate movement – can they duplicate life's more fundamental processes as well? One of the earliest known automatons that attempted to probe the question more deeply was made in the 18th century, and is today remembered by the blunt but evocative name, "The Digesting Duck."
The Digesting Duck is an example of the extent to which Europe, in the 18th century, became fascinated with the idea that life might be dependent, not on some mysterious vitalizing substance or spiritual principle, but on purely mechanical processes, and one of the greatest practitioners of the art of making simulated life was Jacques de Vaucanson. He was born in 1709, in Grenoble, the tenth son of a poor glove-maker, and took holy orders in early life but found himself badly unsuited to it. Max Byrd, in his essay, "Man as Machine," writes, "From earliest boyhood, he exhibited both an obsessive hypochondria and a remarkable aptitude for mechanics," and even as a novice, he is supposed to have begun making automatons – androids – capable of complex and independent movement, which apparently profoundly offended the monks. Vaucanson found himself, after leaving the order he'd joined, in Paris, where he studied anatomy and continued to attempt to make machines that duplicated aspects of living organisms – and where he encountered the then-widely discussed Enlightenment idea that life was not spiritual, but mechanical.
Vaucanson learned anatomy from one of the most famous materialists of the era, the surgeon Claude-Nicolas Le Cat, and began working on even more ambitious machines. Le Cat himself had made attempts to construct androids that would have working lungs and a heart that would pump blood through artificial blood vessels, but lacked the mechanical skills to realize his ideas even partially. Vaucanson was equal to the task, though – at least, as far as the materials of the time would let him be – and in 1737, he finished the first of three automata that would make him famous. This was called The Flute Player, and unlike many other early music playing automata, it didn't imitate flute playing – it really played the flute, with mechanical lungs and working fingers, which Byrd says were "possibly covered with human skin." Vaucanson had an eye for drama – The Flute Player was painted white, and looked like an inanimate marble statue, until it began to move. Another musical automaton created in the same year played the tambourine – The Tambourine Player. But the one that seems to have been most fascinating – then and now – was the Canard Digérateur: the Digesting Duck.
The Digesting Duck did something no one had ever seen before, or at least, appeared to: offered food pellets (grains of oats, for instance) it would dip its head, consume them, and, a short while later, produce excrement. It is known to us now only from contemporary illustrations (it was shown to the French Academy of Sciences, and the public, in 1738 and created an immediate sensation) and from photographs. The final fate of the duck is unknown, as is the fate of the other two automata. Supposedly, the duck was destroyed by fire in a Krakow museum, in 1879, but in the mid-1930s, according to Byrd, "a conservator (at the Musée des Arts et Métiers in Paris) turned up several photographs of a skeletal bird with wings and springs, sitting on a complex pedestal of gears . . . the photographs are relatively modern and the are marked 'images of Vaucanson's duck, received from Dresden,' but nobody seems to know when they were taken, or by whom."
The Duck even before it met its fiery fate, led an interesting life; it was restored to working order in 1844 by a stage magician named Robert-Houdin – the man who invented the mystery clock. It was on this occasion that it was discovered that the Duck did not, in fact, defecate. Robert-Houdin is supposed to have said, "I found that the illustrious master had not been above resorting to a piece of artifice I would happily have incorporated in a conjuring trick!" The duck's feces were in reality, dyed pellets of bread, stored in a hidden compartment.
Above is a 18th centuruy illustration of all three of Vaucanson's most famous automatons (image attribution here). All three have vanished; the last reliable report of all three together is from an account by Goethe, after his visit to their exhibition in 1805. The automata by then had become decrepit; Goethe wrote in his diary, "The automatons were utterly paralyzed . . . A duck without feathers stood like a skeleton, still devouring the oats briskly enough, but had lost its powers of digestion." Automata continued to be made – one of the most famous was made by the master cabinet maker David Roentgen, appointed ébéniste-mechanicien (cabinet maker and mechanic) to the court of Louis XVI by Marie Antoinette. Roentgen was the creator of one of the most complicated pieces of furniture ever made: the so-called Berlin Secretary Cabinet, which you can see in this video from the Metropolitan Museum of Art (over 13 million views; surely one of the most popular YouTube videos ever uploaded by a major cultural institution).
But his masterpiece – which, unlike Vaucanson's automata, still exists, and can be seen at the Musée des Arts et Métiers on occasion – was The Dulcimer Player, which some sources say is a portrait of Marie Antoinette. It was presented to the Queen in 1785 and purchased by her for the Academy of Sciences, and it still works. It was part of the same exhibition in 2012 at the Met as the Berlin Secretary Cabinet, and in action, it sits right on the borderline between wondrous and disturbing. On occasion, it can still be seen doing its thing at the Theatre des Automates, on the rue Vaucanson, which is part of the Musée des Arts et Métiers.
Now, as marvellous as The Dulcimer Player is, it somehow lacks the Promethean fascination of the Digesting Duck, in which the simulation of life has begun to move to the hidden interior (not completely hidden, though – the Duck was, you might say in watchmaking parlance, semi-skeletonized so that some of the interior works could be seen). The longer you think about it, though, the weirder it seems. Byrd writes:
"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 . . . 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 . . . why a duck?"
And he quotes, as one does, Voltaire, who said – whether sarcastically or not is anyone's guess, though Voltaire being Voltaire, it was probably the former – that, "without . . . the duck of Vaucanson, you would have nothing to remind you of the glory of France."
Collecting automata, if you can find one outside of a museum, is a costly business. You see them at auction but rarely; the above, known as the Magician's Box, is one of six, and Sotheby's, for its June 8, 2016, auction, gave an estimate of $1.5 to 2.5 million. Like most automata, however, it's a depiction of external action, not a reproduction of internal processes. Vaucanson was after bigger game. One of his biggest fans was Louis XV – the melancholy, introverted, and sickly king who loved clocks, locks, and other machines. Louis was 29 when he saw Vaucanson's automata, and was instantly intrigued – and asked Vaucanson if it might be possible to make an automaton with a working circulatory system. For the rest of his life, Vaucanson attempted to create such an automaton, which he called L'homme Saignant: The Bleeding Man. You can't help but wonder what he might have achieved had he had access to a wider range of materials. Largely, he was restricted to materials familiar to watchmakers – brass and steel springs, rods, pivots and gears. He was, however, one of the first to experiment with rubber tubing. The whole project was carried out under great secrecy – Vaucanson was funded through a money laundering network, to keep his work hidden from the Church; like the rest of his work, it's disappeared.
The Duck, it seems, lives on though – if not as an object, then at least, as an idea. It has appeared in literature – Thomas Pynchon has it appear in his novel, Mason and Dixon, where it comes to life to attack a chef with its "bec de Mort" (beak of Death). And, in 1999, a modern automaton maker named Frédéric Vidoni made a reproduction which is on display at the Musée des Automates, in Grenoble.
So if you've ever told someone irritably that quartz watches have no soul, while mechanical watches do, you're part of – whether you know it or not – a much bigger debate than an afternoon Internet argument over whether, say, a quartz Grand Seiko is worth it might make you think – a debate that touches everything from the history of biology, to the mind-brain split proposed by Descartes, to the man who invented the mystery clock. But it might not be a tradition that means quite what you think it means. To Vaucanson, and many of his contemporaries, the body was, as Byrd writes, "no more than an automate itself and might be imitated (or created) by a sufficiently clever mechanic" – soul not required. That biological processes could be duplicated mechanically was evidence that a soul was unnecessary; Descartes famously proposed that animals were indeed simply very complex machines. Modern technology has overtaken Vaucanson, of course – there's an artist named Wim Delvoye whose 2001 artwork, aptly titled, Cloaca, really does digest and produce feces – unlike the Digesting Duck, which only simulated digestion. But the closer we come to Vaucanson's dream, the harder it is to tell whether we're proving the necessity of a soul, or proving the opposite.
For a look at more automata and a world-class collection of clocks and watches, check out our coverage of the Metropolitan Museum of Art's exhibit, "The Luxury Of Time," recently closed.
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