The letters of the unknown Dutch merchant Johan Wem would probably have remained unclaimed in one of the departments of the National Archives of the Netherlands if the two young scientists had not found in them a real sensation from the times of Ivan the Terrible.
A sensation that can turn our ideas about the history and development of robotics.
Peter Dancy is a "pure", so to speak, historian who is most interested in the mores and ways of life of people of different eras. Having become interested in Russia, he tried to find something interesting from our history in the archives.
And I came across letters, diaries and notes of the merchant Johan Wem, who, as pedantically stamped dates testify, repeatedly visited Russia as a "guest", that is, traded with merchants and … the court of Ivan the Terrible himself.
A less inquisitive person than Vem, a person would most likely put all these papers aside - the merchant calculated in too much detail (obviously for the edification of the heirs) the results of numerous trade operations with contemporaries and subjects of the king, who has recently been increasingly called the king educator.
Another would postpone … And Dancy leafed and leafed until he began to find records of interest not only for one long time ago in the bose of the deceased hoarder. First, the young researcher found several dates spaced apart in months or even years on the sale of large quantities of books to the royal court. “And also handwritten and printed books were purchased and sold for the royal depositories for 5 thousand gold guilders”.
The amount at that time was incredible. Dancy calculated: the whole flotilla of the then merchant ships was required to deliver the cargo to the court of Grozny.
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“For this, the Lithuanians were beaten and the Russian tsar opened access to the seas on the honorable terms of the conquered good-neighborliness”.
Well, here, for example, the Dutchman exaggerated, the Russian tsars cut windows to Europe not just to buy Western cultural works. But the fact remains that Ivan Vasilyevich thought about the sciences no less than about pacifying "his loyal children".
But the "iron man", the memories of which Dancy came across literally after a few evenings of classes in the archive, is news. At first he mistook the phrase for an ordinary pun:
"The iron man beat the tsar's bear for the amusement of the feasting on, and the bear ran away from him in wounds and abrasions" and did not give in."
It is a pity that I did not give in. Probably, now, otherwise, much more detailed descriptions of the "iron man" and his outlandish songs would be found.
However, the lines found were enough for Dancy to turn to his friend, college friend, robotics specialist Steve Lennart.
Together they were not too lazy to rummage through the Mont Blanc archival dust, to find and restore the records and letters of the contemporaries of Grozny and Vem.
Here it is! The "iron man" or "iron man", serving at the table or around the palace no worse than a living servant, met in the half-rotted papers of two more merchants who regularly traded with Russia and were admitted to the royal court. One of the authors was more interested in describing Russian wonders than counting rubles and guilders.
The "iron man" serves the tsar at the table, gives him a caftan in front of the guests stunned by this spectacle, sweeps the courtyard with a broom. When the king was objected that this thing was not created by the art of the master, the king was angry at first.
But after drinking a cup of Malvasia, he called three people of artisan appearance, dressed in boyar style, and ordered something to them. They opened the covers hidden under the clothes of the iron man, inside him were gears and springs that moved his arms, legs and head. The guests sobered up in fright, and the Russian tsar boasted that such servants "were in Russia two or three centuries ago."
Interesting evidence that the "iron man" served at the royal table only in hot sunny weather. After reading this from Vem with Lennart, the journalist addressed with a commentary to the specialist, candidate of technical sciences, researcher of the Institute of Metals and Metallurgy Heinrich Dobrovolsky.
- I think Dancy and Lennart are fantasizing a bit, ascribing to the palace masters of Grozny the ability to create almost solar panels. Everything, in my opinion, is simpler. If we estimate the level of development of technology at that time and take into account the love of rich people for all kinds of clockwork caskets, mechanical "music boxes", then we can build such a version.
The "iron man" was driven by a mechanical propulsion device, the main element of which was a bimetallic spring. Science has evidence that, in principle, the problem of bimetallic plates was solved in practice by chemists. In the sun, the spring warmed up faster, and this undoubted prototype of the modern robot "was not lazy" and turned faster. How were the commands programmed?
This question is much more complicated. In general, the level of the then technology allowed to solve the system of "control at a distance" by including a set of certain gears. After all, the chimes, by the way, began to regularly beat off the allotted time even before Grozny.
D. Larin managed to find evidence that the distant descendants of the modern robot (a musical box of a complex design, a mechanical piano, etc., working according to an absolutely similar principle) were created here, with us, and were not imported from afar.
A small wooden puppet from Germany, depicting a monk, dates from the mid-sixteenth century and is equipped with levers and hinge joints. On the right is a mechanical woman playing the lute from the same period.
Nowadays, a foreign flea, grounded by Lefty, has turned from a legend into a fact of history.
The "iron man" was most likely a complex construction, but in terms of the miniature technique of execution it was inferior - it was "five fingers higher than a normal person and turned more sharply than we would do."
By the way, have you seen how industrial robots turn - steel arm machines used, for example, in welding or painting car bodies? Quite right! Somewhat sharper than their creators.
In my opinion, this record from the papers found by Dancy and Lennart testifies: the ancient Russian craftsmen assembled an industrial robot, fantastic for its time, with specific tasks. And that it was not powered by the current energy sources … The greater the merit of the craftsmen.