All the machines Simon visits show a level of technical sophistication and ambition that still amazes today.Īs well as the automata, Simon explains in great detail the world in which they were made – the hardship of the workers who built them, their role in global trade and the industrial revolution and the eccentric designers who dreamt them up. Travelling around Europe, Simon uncovers the history of these machines and shows us some of the most spectacular examples, from an entire working automaton city to a small boy who can be programmed to write and even a device that can play chess. The film brings the past to life in vivid detail as we see how and why these masterpieces were built. Here’s a thought that Descartes raised once:ĭocumentary presented by Professor Simon Schaffer which charts the amazing and untold story of automata – extraordinary clockwork machines designed hundreds of years ago to mimic and recreate life.
There are also so many philosophical questions that this story raises. There is so much to take into what we do now and to learn from what these masters have done about 400 years ago! Playing chess, AI – in a mechanical form they were all present 400 years ago! We are merely repeating or iterating on the ideas of the previous generations of inventors and thinkers. Consider that all our modern technologies have roots and are based on these four or five hundred year-old foundations without which we would not be able to do much. These are autonomous vehicles and anthropomorphic robots. We, engineers, are working presently on giving brains to automata. There are few stories like this in all of the history of the human race. It is once in a blue moon that someone has a chance to create a masterpiece of art and technology combining them together and this is the story about it. This is such a remarkable story and the history of people that I wanted to preserve it for posterity.
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