Today in Technology History
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November 21
Chances are, you've probably never heard of Jacques de Vaucanson, who died exactly 220 years ago. He was a French inventor whose work had an effect on robotics and computers.
Vaucanson, born in 1709, had a knack for making mechanical marvels. His greatest inventions were automatons -- primitive robots. Two of his most famous automatons were shaped like men and played musical instruments. Another was a mechanical duck that simulated the motions of a real duck, including drinking, eating and defecating.
The brilliant French thinker and writer Voltaire (who, coincidentally, was born on November 21, 1694) compared Vaucanson to Prometheus, the figure in Greek mythology who taught humans the secret of fire. (Of course, Voltaire may have been mocking the inventor; he also apparently said that Vaucanson's defecating duck was a true reminder of the glory of France.) We'll discuss Vaucanson's automatons at greater length on some future date, but we're going to skip over them today.
In 1741, Vaucanson was appointed chief inspector of France's silk industry, and he developed an automated loom that used punch-cards; it didn't catch on during his lifetime.
In the final years of his life, Vaucanson amassed a great collection of tools and mechanical inventions -- both his own, and others'. Some time after his death on November 21, 1782, the contents of his collection were incorporated into the Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers (Academy of Arts and Trades), part of which is a museum of technology. In the early 1800s, a French mechanician named Jacquard visited the museum and was inspired by Vaucanson's loom. Jacquard improved on Vaucanson's design, and the Jacquard loom played a pivotal role in the Industrial Revolution -- and later, its punch-cards became important in the history of computing.
The museum that Vaucanson posthumously launched now has more than 80,000 objects in its collection, representing almost every field of technology. The writer Umberto Eco has called the museum "a cemetery of mechanical corpses that look as if they all might start working again at any moment."
Related links:
Click here to read (in English) about the Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers.
Umberto Eco mentioned the museum because it is now home to the original pendulum exhibited by the scientist Foucault to demonstrate the rotation of the Earth -- and Eco wrote a book called Foucault's Pendulum.
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