Android Artists (1785 and 1903)

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 2777

This is a very short post on a much more involved issue, but for right now I just want to scribble out this note in the sand.

While looking for the Wright Brothers not-appearing in the Scientific American in 1903 and 1904 and 1905 and 1906 and 1907 I found in the May 3, 1903 issue  "The Jacquet-Droz Androids". It was seeing the word "androids" that was so unusual--usually when you see references to the great machines built by Pierre and Henri-Louis  Jacquet-Dros¹ you nearly always seem the inventions as "automatons²" or "automata". This time, it was "android". 

"Android³" as it turns out is pretty old as a word, though I do not know how common its usage was, though just weighing that against decades of reading it seems to my experience not to pop up very much at all before WWI.  

This gets us to the truncated history part. The Jacquet-Droz machines were built during a relatively short period, 1768-1774 or so. One of the machines was called "The Draughtsman", which had the capacity to render at least several different drawings. This would make them among the earliest machines to ever produce art. The "android"--which was about half-life size and quite human-like--sits at a small desk and renders its creations, looking like a mechanical artist. In fact the machine had a very sophisticated cam-based memory, which to some extent meant that the machine was "programmed", and so becomes the first (?) computer-generated artworks⁴. 

What distinguishes this article in Scientific American further is that it reproduces the artwork of "The Draughtsman".  The question here then is when are these android drawings first reproduced? There were many exhibitions of the Jacquet-Droz creations over the years, and the popular portrayal so far as I can recall has been the machine itself and then a small reveal of the mechanism. Were the drawings reproduced in the 18th century? Right now, I just don't know. I did do a search under "Jacquet-Droz" in Gallica over thousands of publications and at first blush there (1) seems to be not many hits and (2) none that I have seen have any illustrations. Also even though the machines of Jacuet-Droz and, say, Maillardet's writing/drawing machine (le Jeune artiste") were popular in the late 18th and early 19th c, they seem to not have been so afterwards. One source says that Maillardet falls completely off the RADAR in 1833 and resurfaces only in 1928.  

This all makes for an intriguing question. Right now though all I can really say is that the end-date for the range of possible first-publication dates for Jacquet-Droz is 1903.

Notes:

1.  "Constructed between 1768 and 1774 by Pierre Jaquet-Droz, his son Henri-Louis (1752-1791), and Jean-Frédéric Leschot (1746-1824), the automata include The Writer (made of 6000 pieces), The Musician (2500 pieces), and The Draughtsman (2000 pieces). Pierre Jaquet-Droz (French: [ʒakɛ dʁo]; 1721–1790) was a watchmaker of the late eighteenth century. He lived in Paris, London, and Geneva, where he designed and built animated dolls, or automata, to help his firm sell watches and mechanical birds."--Wikipedia

2.  From the Oxford English Dictionary: "Automatons. A moving device having a concealed mechanism, so it appears to operate spontaneously. Frequently (and in earliest use) in figurative and similative contexts. Now chiefly hist.Originally denoting various functional instruments including clocks, watches, etc., as well as moving mechanical devices made in imitation of human beings; later (from the early 19th cent.) usually restricted to figures simulating the action of living beings and widely regarded as toys or curiosities, as clockwork statues or animals, images striking the hours on timepieces, etc."

• 1616   W. Cornwallis Essayes Certaine Paradoxes sig. G3   The soule doth quicken and giue life to the body, the body like an Automaton, doth moue and carry it selfe and the soule.
• 1660   H. More Explan. Grand Myst. Godliness ii. iii. 37   God will not let the great Automaton of the Universe be so imperfect.
• 1742   J. T. Desaguliers tr. M. Vaucauson (title)    An Account of the Mechanism of an Automaton or Image Playing on the German Flute.
• 1784   P. Thicknesse Speaking Figure 5   That an Automaton can be made to move the Chessmen properly, as a sagacious player,..is..utterly impossible.
• 1790   J. Imison School of Arts (ed. 2) 284   Those automata..do by little interstices, or strokes, measure out long portions of time.
• 1815   Scott Guy Mannering I. xx. 315   Sprawling out his leg, and bending his back like an automaton.
• 1821   New Monthly Mag. 1 443   Archytas' flying dove..is another of the ancient automata... It was made of wood

3.  Citations of "android" in the Oxford English Dictionary:

• 1728   E. Chambers Cycl. (at cited word),   Albertus Magnus, is recorded as having made an Androides.
• 1819   Pantologia (new ed.) (at cited word),   M. de Kempelen..constructed an androides capable of playing at chess.
• 1847   J. Craig New Universal Dict.   Android
• 1951   C. D. Simak Time & Again (1956) i. 1   Human gossip as well as android and robot gossip.
• 1958   Spectator 19 Sept. 379/1   Today SF must be more than a blood-and-sex day~dream spattered with words like androids (robots made of flesh and bone).

4.  Another long history is that of computer generated art. Suffice to say here that the very earliest period of this genre begins probably with Ben Laposky's "Oscillons" in 1952 where he manipulated electronic waves in an oscilloscope to produce interesting and complex figures.