Your Sunday read on Enlightenment France and freaky robots, courtesy Max Byrd.
“
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.’
… 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.’
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