The Writer Automaton

Robots have been in the imaginations of people for centuries, although the reality of them has only happened in the last fifty years or so.  As technology advances, robots and automated machines are going to become more and more prevalent in society, likely taking over much of the work people do today.  This is really an inevitable consequence of the advancement of technology, and in just a couple more decades, robots will be as commonplace as smartphones are today.  In a couple centuries, the technology will have advanced so far that people today would have trouble even comprehending how that future society even functions.

Meet The Writer, a Two-Hundred Forty Year Old Programmable Automaton

Looking in the reverse direction, people would not expect complex, programmable robots to have been in existence two hundred years ago.  Machines certainly existed, and the art of fine watchmaking was an incredible skill to have, but people still did all the real work, only using the machines for their benefit.  As it turns out, this is not the case.  At least, this was not the case for certain people, namely Pierre Jaquet-Droz, a Swiss watchmaker from the late eighteenth century, who built several machines known at automata, or self-operating machines.  These machines were a marvel of the day, using miniaturized gears, cams, and a heck of a lot of ingenuity to create machines that could operate on their own, performing somewhat simple tasks all on their own.  Most notably is The Writer, an automaton built over two-hundred forty years ago that writes in script using a real quill and pen.  This automaton is made up of almost six thousand parts, and is known not just for writing, but for being programmable.  In the back of the automaton were letter tiles that could be switched out and rearranged, allowing The Writer to write whatever Jaquet-Droz wanted.  It is a work of sheer brilliance.

Words cannot properly explain the incredible nature of this piece of art, so I urge you to watch the video below and see how The Writer actually works.  I would be amazed if someone built this today, let alone prior to the American Revolution.