Eighteenth-century wetware

Representations

Volumn 83, Issue , 2003, Pages 97-125

  Riskin, Jessica ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 33846012800     PISSN: 07346018     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1525/rep.2003.83.1.97     Document Type: Article

References (138)

1. Julien Offray de La Mettrie, Man a Machine and Man a Plant, trans. Richard A. Watson and Maya Rybalka (Indianapolis, 1994), 71-72
2. (first published as L'Homme-machine in 1747)
3. Rudy Rucker, Wetware (New York, 1988), 66
4. "Biomimetic" means in imitation of biological systems, and "chemomechanical" means that chemical energy is converted directly into mechanical work, as is the case in living creatures. The terms, along with "wetware" and "soft machines," are to be found in Yoshihito Osada and Simon B. Ross-Murphy, "Intelligent Gels," Scientific American, May 1993, 82-87
5. Riskin, "Defecating Duck."
6. I am grateful to Evelyn Fox Keller for pointing out the difference between eighteenth- and twentieth-century meanings of "simulation" and for pressing me to clarify my use of the term. For arguments that eighteenth-century machines were simulative in the modern sense, see André Doyon and Lucien Liaigre, "Méthodologie comparée du biomécanisme et de la mécanique comparée," Dialectica 10(1956): 292-335
7. Georges Canguilhem, "The Role of Analogies and Models in Biological Discovery," in A. C. Crombie, ed., Scientific Change: Historical Studies in the Intellectual, Social, and Technical Conditions for Scientific Discovery and Technical Invention, from Antiquity to the Present (New York, 1961), 507-20, esp. 510-12
8. Derek de Solla Price, "Automata and the Origins of Mechanism and Mechanistic Philosophy," in Technology and Culture 5, no. 1 (Winter 1964): 9-23
9. David M. Fryer and John C. Marshall, "The Motives of Jacques Vaucanson," in Technology and Culture 20, no. 1 (January 1979): 257-69
10. Gaby Wood, Living Dolls: A Magical History of the Quest for Mechanical Life (London, 2002), xvi, 59, xiv (the American edition was issued under the title Edison's Eve)
11. Similarly, Tom Standage, in his recent account of the Turk, emphasizes how "little has changed" since its performances; Tom Standage; The Turk: The Life and Times of the Famous Eighteenth-Century Chess-Playing Machine (New York, 2002), 246
12. La Mettrie, Man a Machine, 63-64
13. "Diverses machines inventées par M. Maillard. Cygne artificiel," in M. Gallon, ed., Machines et inventions approuvées par l'Académie royale des sciences depuis son établissement jusqu'à present; avec leur Déscription, 7 vols. (Paris, 1735-77), 1:133-35
14. On Maillard's Swan and the contrast between seventeenth- and eighteenth-century automata, see also Riskin, "Defecating Duck."
15. Georges Canguilhem has observed that the "Cartesian animal-machine remained as a manifesto, a philosophical war-machine, so to speak" in contrast with eighteenth-century physiologists' and mechanicians' "elaboration of detailed plans with a view to the construction of simulators"; Georges Canguilhem, "Analogies and Models in Biological Discovery," in Crornbie, Scientific Change, 510-11
16. On the importance of automata as "models of intelligibility" in Descartes's philosophy, see Peter Dear, "A Mechanical Microcosm: Bodily Passions, Good Manners, and Cartesian Mechanism," in Christopher Lawrence and Stephen Shapin, eds., Science Incarnate: Historical Embodiments of Natural Knowledge (Chicago, 1998), 51-82 (here 59)
17. I have found one possible exception to the general rule that seventeenth-century automata were not simulative, a "statue" designed by a Württemburg physician named Reyselius. According to reports, this artificial man demonstrated circulation, digestion, and respiration with great "resemblance to man in all the internal parts"; Journal des savants (1677): 352
18. Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own. On the artificial man of Reyselius, see also Thomas L. Hankins and Robert J. Silverman, Instruments and the Imagination (Princeton, 1995), 182
19. and André Doyon and Lucien Liaigre, Vaucanson, mécanicien de genie (Paris, 1966), 117-18, 162-63
20. Going back still earlier, one might well take Leonardo da Vinci's uses of cords and wires to model the muscles as simulations; see Paolo Galluzzi, "Leonardo da Vinci: From the 'Elementi Macchinali' to the Man-Machine," in History and Technology 4 (1987): 235-65. I am grateful to Michael John Gorman for pressing me to consider the simulative aspects of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century automata and models, and for pointing me to Dear's and Galluzzi's articles. There does seem to me to be an important difference between a model or illustration, which is meant to depict its natural subject, and a simulation, which is meant to reproduce it. Whereas a model assumes a gap between itself and its subject, a simulation tries to collapse the gap
21. Christian Bailly Sharon Bailly and Eric Desmarest, Automates (Paris, 1993), 20, 26
22. Henri Nicolle, Les jouets - ce qu'il y a dedans (Paris, 1868)
23. Anson Rabinbach has studied the cultural importance of such analogies in his book The Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue, and the Origins of Modernity (Berkeley, 1990)
24. Pierre Jaquet-Droz built clocks, watches, and automata together with his son Henri-Louis and his adopted son, Jean-Frédéric Leschot. On the Jaquet-Droz family, see Charles Perregaux and F.-Louis Perrot, Les Jaquet-Droz et Leschot (Neuchâtel, 1916)
25. Alfred Chapuis and Edmond Droz, The Jaquet-Droz Mechanical Puppets (Neuchâtel, 1956)
26. and F. M. Ricci, Androïdes, les automates des Jaquet-Droz (Lausanne, 1979)
27. Perregaux and Perrot, Les Jaquet-Droz et Leschot, 31-34
28. See Richard Altick, The Shows of London (Cambridge, 1978)
29. Simon Schaffer, "Enlightened Automata," in William Clark, Jan Golinski, and Simon Schaffer, eds., The Sciences in Enlightened Europe (Chicago, 1999), 126-65, here 138
30. and Alfred Chapuis and Edmond Droz, Automata: A Historical and Technological Study (Neuchâtel, 1958), 280-82
31. Jacques Vaucanson, Le mécanisme du fluteur automate (Paris, 1738)
32. "Lettre de M. Vaucanson, à M. l'abbé D.F.," in Vaucanson, Le Mécanisme du fluteur automate, 19-22
33. On the close simulation of bodily and intelligent processes in the Jaquet-Droz Lady-musician and in Vaucanson's automata, see Riskin, "Defecating Duck."
34. Jean-Eugène Robert-Houdin exposed Vaucanson's fraud (see my discussion later in the text); Jean-Eugène Robert-Houdin, Memoirs of Robert-Houdin, trans. Lascelles Wraxall (New York, 1964), 103-7
35. (first published in French as Confidences d'un prestidigitateur [Blois, 1858])
36. See also Doyon and Liaigre, Vaucanson, 124-27
37. Jonathan Swift, "The Lady's Dressing Room" (1730), in Robert A. Greenberg and William B. Piper, eds., The Writings of Jonathan Swift (New York, 1973), 537-38
38. John Wilkins, Mathematicall Magick. Or, The Wonders that may be performed by Mechanicall Geometry (London, 1648), 177-78
39. See Hankins and Silverman, Instruments and the Imagination, 181
40. Denys Dodart, "Sur les causes de la voix de l'homme et de ses différents tons," 13 November 1700, in Histoire de l'Académie royale des sciences, Année 1700, Mémoires, 244-93
41. Dodart, "Supplément au Mémoire sur la voix et sur les tons," 14 April 1706, and "Suite de la première partie du Supplément," in Histoire de l'Académie royale des sciences, Année 1706, Mémoires, 136-48, 388-410
42. and Dodart, "Supplément au Mémoire sur la voix et les tons," 16 March 1707, in Histoire de l'Académie royale des sciences, Année 1707, Mémoires, 66-81
43. For Fontenelle's commentary on Dodart's memoirs, see Bernard le Bouyer de Fontenelle, "Sur la formation de la voix," in Histoire de l'Académie royale des sciences, Année 1700, 17-24; Année 1706, 136-48; Année 1707, 18-20
44. See also Jean-Pierre Séris, Langages et machines à l'age classique (Paris, 1995), 231-35
45. Fontenelle, "Sur la formation de la voix," 20
46. Abbé Desfontaines, "Lettre CLXXX sur le Flûteur et l'Aristippe Moderne," in Observations sur les écrits modernes XII (1738), 341
47. reproduced in Doyon and Liaigre, Vaucanson, 162
48. Antoine Court de Gébelin, Le Monde primitif, analysé et comparé avec le Monde moderne (Paris, 1775), 2:83-84
49. See Séris, Langages et machines, 239
50. Erasmus Darwin, The Temple of Nature; or, The Origin of Society (London, 1803), 119-20
51. See Hankins and Silverman, Instruments and the Imagination, 199
52. Têtes parlantes inventées et exécutées par M. l'abbé Mical. (Extrait d'un ouvrage qui a pour titre: Système de prononciation figurée, applicable à toutes les langues et exécuté sur les langues française et anglaise), VZ-1853, Bibliothèque nationale, Paris
53. Procès verbaux, 3 Septembre 1783, Archives de l'Académie des Sciences, Paris
54. Antoine Rivarol, "Lettre à M. le president de, sur le globe aerostatique, sur les têtes parlantes et sur l'état present de l'opinion publique à Paris," in Oeuvres completes de Rivarol (Paris, 1808), 2:207
55. André Chapuis and Edouard Gélis, Le Monde des automates (Paris, 1928), 2:204-6
56. Wolfgang von Kempelen, Le Mécanisme de la parole, suivi de la déscription d'une machine parlante (Vienna, 1791), 413-14
57. I discuss Kempelen's speaking machine at greater length in Riskin, "Defecating Duck."
58. See also Hankins and Silverman, Instruments and the Imagination, 190-97
59. In 1779, probably at the instigation of Leonhard Euler, the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences sponsored a prize competition to determine the nature of the vowels and to construct an instrument like vox humana organ pipes to express them. C. G. Kratzenstein, a member of the Academy, won the prize. He used an artificial glottis (a reed) and organ pipes shaped according to the situation of the tongue, lips, and mouth in the pronunciation of the vowels; Hankins and Silverman, Instruments and the Imagination, 188-89
60. Hankins and Silverman write that "Wilkins, Mical, Kempelen, Darwin, and several of Vaucanson's contemporaries shared a consistent approach to the imitation of the voice. All of them defined vowels and other speech sounds in terms of the configurations of the human organs of speech"; Hankins and Silverman, Instruments and the Imagination, 198. This seems to me to be true of Mical, Kempelen, and Darwin but not of Wilkins; see discussion earlier in the text
61. On Wheatstone's and Bell's reproductions, see J. L. Flanagan, "Voices of Men and Machines," in Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 51 (1972): 1375-87
62. James L. Flanagan, Speech Analysis, Synthesis, and Perception (Berlin, 1965), 166-71
63. M. R. Schroeder, "A Brief History of Synthetic Speech," in Speech Communication 13 (1993): 231-37
64. and Hankins and Silverman, Instruments and the Imagination, 218-19
65. Hankins and Silverman write that many "artificial glottises, similar in design to those that seem to have activated Mical's heads, were made in the nineteenth century," but the physiologists who made these (Johannes Müller, Édouard Fournié) "did not aim to copy articulate speech, but simply to disclose the operation of the larynx"; Hankins and Silverman, Instruments and the Imagination, 199
66. "Nineteenth-century physicists who studied the voice were generally much less interested in reproducing articulate speech than their eighteenth-century counterparts had been" (209). The following are some exceptions: Richard Potter, in the 1870s, "imitated vowels with an apparatus that would have seemed familiar to the eighteenth-century investigators mentioned above: a free reed connected to a hollow india rubber sphere that could be deformed to copy the shape of the mouth and produce a variety of vowels." R.J. Lloyd, a Liverpool phonetician, wrote in 1890 that the best apparatus for studying speech would have some resemblance to the vocal organs, but not too close a resemblance, and used glass bottles. "One of Lloyd's methodological descendants, Sir Richard Paget, contrived plasticine models of the vocal tract in his study of imitation vowel sounds during the 1920s" (210). "Copying the manifest appearance of the organs of speech was the ultimate end of the French physiologist Georges René Marie Marage, who worked in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. ... Marage's resonant cavities exactly copied the shape of the oral cavity. In fact, they were cast from molds of the mouth, complete with lips and teeth" (210-11). "In 1905, E. W. Scripture discussed another attempt based on the model of the vocal anatomy - one that did not even bother to make a copy of the human form. His 'vowel organ' involved fitting a human skull with artificial cheeks and lips to recreate a resonance chamber. Rubber glottises imitated the larynx" (211-12). "The first patent for a talking doll was awarded to J. M. Maelzel, the inventor of the metronome, in 1824. It consisted of a bellows, reed and cup-shaped resonator" (213)
67. Hermann von Helmholtz, for example, built a machine using tuning forks and resonance chambers to produce the vowel sounds, described in Helmholtz, On the Sensations of Tone as a Physiological Basis for the Theory of Music, trans. A.J. Ellis (New York, 1954), 399
68. On Helmholtz's speech synthesizer, see Flanagan, Speech Analysis, Synthesis, and Perception, 172-74
69. Timothy Lenoir, "Helmholtz and the Materialities of Communication," in Osiris, 2d ser., 9 (1993), 185-207
70. Schroeder, "A Brief History of Synthetic Speech," 232-33
71. and Hankins and Silverman, Instruments and the Imagination, 203-5
72. Robert Willis, "On the Vowel Sounds, and on Reed Organ-Pipes," read 24 November 1828 and 16 March 1829, published in the Transactions of the Cambridge Philosophical Society 3 (1830): 231-68
73. See Hankins and Silverman, Instruments and the Imagination, 201
74. Claude Bernard, Cahiers des notes, M. D. Grmek, ed. (Paris, 1965), 171
75. David Lindsay, "Talking Head," Invention and Technology (Summer 1997): 56-63
76. Hankins and Silverman, Instruments and the Imagination, 214-16
77. Cf. Hankins and Silverman, Instruments and the Imagination, 216, where the authors identify a partial return to "more humanoid apparatus" in "the last years of the nineteenth century." Investigators such as Lloyd, Marage, Scripture, and Paget "approached the problem from a physiological and phonetic point of view. If Faber had demonstrated his machine either fifty years earlier (in Kempelen's time) or fifty years later than its introduction in the 1840's, the Euphonia might have been greeted by an enthusiastic audience" (216). It seems to me, however, that despite Lloyd, Marage, Scripture, and Paget, the simulative approach to artificial speech never regained the dominance it had had during the late eighteenth century
78. Flanagan, "Voices of Men and Machines," 1381-83
79. Dennis H. Klatt, "Review of Text-to-Speech Conversion for English," Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 82, no. 3 (Summer 1987): 741-42
80. Ambroise Paré, "Of the Meanes and Manner to Repaire or Supply the Naturall or accidentall defects or wants in mans body," in The Collected Works of Ambroise Paré, trans. Thomas Johnson (New York, 1968). Paré also presents designs for prostheses to replace missing eyes, ears, noses, teeth, tongues, and penises. These, like his prosthetic limbs, are as remarkable for their unlikeness as for their likeness to the parts they replace. They fulfill either an aesthetic purpose (in the case of the eyes, ears, and noses) or a functional one (the tongues and penises) but not both (except perhaps in the case of the teeth)
81. Fontenelle, "Éloge du père Sébastien Truchet Carme," in Éloge des académiciens (La Haye, 1740), 2:366-67
82. Gallon, Machines et inventions approuvées par l'Académie des sciences, 6:71-73
83. Jacques Delille, Épitre à M. Laurent, ... à l'occasion d'un bras artificiel qu'il a fait pour un soldat invalide, 2d ed. (London, 1761)
84. See Reed Benhamou, "From Curiosité to Utilité: The Automaton in Eighteenth-Century France," Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 17 (1987): 91-105, here 100
85. In 1786, a cousin and perhaps collaborator of the Jaquet-Droz family the Director of the French Mint in Paris, a man named Jean-Pierre Droz, designed an artificial hand to improve the safety of workers at the mint, who, because they had to slide metal strips under the balance arm of the machine that stamped them, frequently had bad accidents. Droz's artificial hand was intended to take on this dangerous task. See Perregaux and Perrot, Les Jaquet-Droz et Leschot, 31-36, 89-91, 100-111, 140
86. Linda Marlene Strauss, "Automata: A Study in the Interface of Science, Technology, and Popular Culture, 1730-1855" (Ph.D diss., University of California, San Diego, 1987), 109
87. Nina Rattner Gelbart, The King's Midwife: A History and Mystery of Madame du Coudray (Berkeley, 1998)
88. and Thomas Schnalke, Diseases in Wax: The History of the Medical Moulage (Berlin, 1995). I am grateful to Paula Findlen for pointing out the relevance of wax anatomical models to the emergence of artificial life in the eighteenth century
89. The machine is described as an "anatomie mouvante" in Commision extraordinaires du Conseil, Plumitif no. 10, Archives nationales V7 582
90. cited in Doyon and Liaigre, Vaucanson, 110
91. see also 18, 34. The second description is from Acte de société Colvée-Vaucanson du 26-1-1734, Archives nationales, Minutier Central, Notaire CXVIII
92. cited in Doyon and Liaigre, Vaucanson, 18
93. Registre contenant le Journal des Conférences de l'Académie de Lyon
94. quoted in Doyon and Liaigre, Vaucanson, 148
95. and in translation in Jean-Claude Beaune, "The Classical Age of Automata," in Fragments for a History of the Human Body, ed. Michel Feher, Ramona Naddaff, and Nadia Tazi (New York, 1989), 1:430-80, here 457
96. See also Doyon and Liaigre, "Méthodologie comparée," 298
97. On the plans for a model of the circulatory system, see Marie Jean Antoine Nicolas de Caritat, marquis de Condorcet, "Eloge de Vaucanson" (1782), in A. Condorcet O'Connor and M. F. Arago, eds., Oeuvres de Condorcet, (Paris, 1847), 2:655
98. Éliane Maingot, Les Automates (Paris, 1959), 18
99. Doyon and Liaigre, Vaucanson, 152-61
100. Strauss, Automata, 71-72
101. François Quesnay, Essai phisique sur l'oeconomie animale (Paris, 1736), 219-23
102. François Quesnay, Observations sur les effets de la saignée (Paris, 1730),iv-vi
103. See also François Quesnay, L'Art de guerir par la saignée (Paris, 1736)
104. and François Quesnay, Traité des effets et de l'Usage de la saignée (Paris, 1750)
105. The Traité is a later version of the Observations and of L'Art de guérir (1736)
106. See Doyon and Liaigre, "Méthodologie comparée," 297
107. This description appeared in conjunction with Le Cat's Traité de la saignée (1739) as its "experimental part." The machine was invented "to confirm by experience [Le Cat's] theory of Bleeding"; "Précis sur la Vie de Mr. Le Cat" (1768)
108. cited in Doyon and Liagre, "Méthodologie comparée, " 298-99
109. See also Denis Ballière de Laisement, Eloge de Monsieur Le Cat (Rouen, 1769), 53
110. Registre-Journal des Assemblées et Délibérations de l'Académie des sciences ... établie en 1744: 3 (manuscrit non classé de la Bibliothèque publique de Rouen)
111. cited in Doyon and Liaigre, "Méthodologie comparée," 300
112. Le Cornier de Cideville to Fontenelle, 15 December 1744, in Abbé Tougard, Documents concernant l'histoire littéraire du XVIIIe siècle (Rouen, 1912), 1:52-54, here 53
113. Claude Nicolas Le Cat, Traité des sensations et des passions en general, et des sens en particulier (Paris, 1767), 1:xi, xix-xxv, xxix-xxxi, 40-50, 60-61
114. Rodney A. Brooks, "Elephants Don't Play Chess," Robotics and Autonomous Systems 6 (1990): 3-15
115. "Intelligence Without Reason," MIT AI Lab Memo 1293, April 1991
116. "Intelligence Without Representation," Artificial Intelligence Journal 47 (1991): 139-59
117. and Rodney A. Brooks et al., "Alternate Essences of Intelligence," in Proceedings of the Fifteenth National Conference in Artificial Intelligence, American Association for Artificial Intelligence, Madison, Wisconsin, 1998, 961-76
118. For another example of the importance of embodiment to current AI researchers' conception of fundamental human capabilities such as conversation, see Justine Cassell, "Embodied Conversational Agents: Representation and Intelligence in User Interface," AI Magazine 22, no. 3 (Winter 2001): 67-83
119. and J. Cassell et al., "More Than Just a Pretty Face: Conversational Protocols and the Affordances of Embodiment," Knowledge-Based Systems 14 (2001): 55-64
120. Steven Levy, Artificial Life (New York, 1992), 19-20
121. Claude Bernard, Leçons sur les phénomènes de la vie, 2d ed. (Paris, 1885), 1:112-24
122. T. H. Huxley wrote, similarly, that "the living body is not only sustained and reproduced: it adjusts itself to external and internal changes"; T. H. Huxley, "On the Hypothesis That Animals Are Automata, and Its History" (1874), in Collected Essays (New York, 1894-98), 2:200
123. W. Grey Walter, "An Imitation of Life," Scientific American, May 1950, 42-63
124. William Grey Walter, The Living Brain (New York, 1953), chaps. 5 and 7
125. See also Owen Holland, "Grey Walter: The Pioneer of Real Artificial Life," in Christopher G. Langton and Katsunori Shimohara, eds., Artificial Life V (Cambridge, Mass., 1997), 34-41
126. Norbert Weiner, Cybernetics, or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (Cambridge, Mass., 1948), 11-12
127. Otto Mayr, The Origins of Feedback Control (Cambridge, Mass., 1970)
128. An exception is the French physiologist Etienne-Jules Marey, who is best known for his photographic study of animal motion during the 1880s and '90s. A couple of decades earlier, Marey built artificial insects and birds to study the "mechanical conditions" of flight; Etienne-Jules Marey, "Mécanisme du vol chez les insectes," Revue des cours scientifiques de la France et de l'étranger no. 16 (20 March 1869): 253-56
129. Victor Tatin, "Expériences sur le vol mécanique," in Etienne-Jules Marey Physiologie expérimentale. Travaux du laboratoire de M. Marey (Paris, 1876-80), 2:86-108
130. Marey also describes using artificial bird and insect wings in his Animal Mechanism (New York, 1873)
131. On Marey's artificial insect, see also Michel Frizot, ed., E. J. Marey. 1830/1904 La Photographie du Mouvement (Paris, 1977), 96-98
132. Further, Marey built an artificial heart to study the circulation of the blood, described in Etienne-Jules Marey, La Circulation du sang à l'état physiologique et dans les maladies (Paris, 1881)
133. On Marey's completion of Vaucanson's project, see Hankins and Silverman, Instruments and the Imagination, 185-86
134. Finally, on Marey's study of the mechanics of the body in general, see Rabinbach, The Human Motor, chap. 4. Marey's move from mechanical simulation to photography during the 1880s suggests that his central interest was in using machinery to analyze natural life rather than to produce artificial life
135. Hermann von Helmholtz, "On the Interaction of Natural Forces" (1854), in Popular Lectures on Scientific Subjects, trans. E. Atkinson (New York, 1873), 155
136. Robert Willis, An Attempt to Analyse the Automaton Chess Player, of Mr. de Kempelen (London, 1821)
137. Robert-Houdin, Memoirs, 103-7. Robert-Houdin referred to the artificial man of Reyselius. See note 9
138. Quesnay Traité des effets de la saignée, 17-18