About Jacques de Vaucanson, who lived three centuries ago, and especially about the devices he invented, there are a lot of legends and rumors, secrets and mysticism.
Vaucanson was born in 1709 in France, in the southeast, in the town of Grenoble, and from an early age showed an ability to mechanics and create various devices. According to one of the legends, at the age of ten he collected an exact copy of the clock from the town hall.
Fate prepared for him life in the Jesuit order, where his father arranged for Jacques to get an education, but the irrepressible energy played a joke - Vaucanson made a servant for one official reception: moving automaton dolls, which caused the anger of the church and expulsion from the order.
The inventor moved to Paris, where on February 11, 1738 he created his first real masterpiece - the automaton "The Flute Player", which played 12 tunes on a real flute - moved his fingers and blew into the instrument "like a human being." The next mechanism worked in the same way - "The Tambourine Player", made a little later.
Poster for an exhibition in Paris in 1738.
In the same year, a specially organized exhibition showed the mechanical duck, Vaucanson's most fascinating device. The mechanical bird stood on a pedestal, quacked, drank water from a cup, ate grain, and opened and flapped its wings! But this is not all - the food was “digested” and then, like a real bird, left the cloaca with “excrement” of a different color.
The mechanism controlling the bird was hidden in the pedestal, like in other devices of the inventor.
Promotional video:
Drawing by Jacques de Vaucanson showing the construction of a mechanical duck.
The mechanical morning made a splash, and in 1742 it was bought, along with the other two automatons, by the rich Lyons and transported to London. In 1805, the great Goethe observed the operation of the mechanism, and the illusionist Robert-Houdin in 1844 dismantled, cleaned and repaired it in Paris, after which it went to the Krakow Museum, where it disappeared after the fire of 1882.
A copy of this remarkable device was created in 1998 by the watchmaker Jacques Frédéric Vedoni, who constructed an exact model of a mechanical duck for the Grenoble Automatic Machine Museum. In 2013, it was bought by a private collector and the trace of the wonderful mechanism is lost, perhaps forever (like that of the original one).
It is also worth noting the fact that the son of a simple glover, Jacques de Vaucanson, thanks to his gift and talent as an inventor, became a member of the Academy of Sciences in Paris and died at the age of 73.
