On the prehistory of programmable machines: musical automata, looms, calculators
Introduction
In this paper, I will consider pre-twentieth century programmable mechanical devices and I will try to answer the question: “What were the earliest programmable machines and what was their development?” I will use the following definitions: “An automaton (Greek, `self-mover') is a mechanical device which (after releasing a brake) executes a function on its own and in a completely determined way” [19, p. 131]. Moreover, “A programmable machine is an automaton that can execute (significantly) different functions depending on the information stored on one or more material information carriers, that are part of the automaton”. A restriction to pre-twentieth century developments makes life conceptually easy. For example, we do not have to answer the question in what sense devices like software robots or agents are automata.
Section snippets
Heron's automatic theatre
The Greek inventor Daedalus is the prototype of a mechanical genius. He is well known because of the wings that he allegedly designed for his son Icarus. It is, however, also reported that he built moving statues. The wings as a working design, undoubtedly, belong to the realm of fiction, but it is said that he used mercury to change the centre of gravity of a statue and make it move, which does not sound impossible. There are also reports of the existence in Antiquity of heads that spoke. Also
The Banu Musa's automatic flute player
Heron's automatic theatre was an automaton, but it was not, in my sense of the word, programmable. The earliest known design of a programmable machine is the automatic flute player that was described in the 9th century by the brothers Musa in Baghdad, at the time a major centre of knowledge. The Banu Musa's work was influenced by their Hellenistic predecessors, but it contains notable advances on the Greek work. They ingeniously used small variations in air and water pressure and they used
Clocks and carillons
During the early Renaissance developments accelerated. We find the earliest description of an, in principle, programmable music automaton in a manuscript from Catalonia in Spain, dating from about 1300. It is a carillon of bells on top of a waterclock (clepsydra). The drawing is not very clear. It shows a carillon consisting of five bells and a wheel carrying ball-headed pins (Fig. 2). There is also music for the carillon in the manuscript, from which it follows that the number of bells must
The first programmable looms
Although much more could be said about the further development of music automata in the 17th and 18th century, I will now turn to the history of weaving, basing myself largely on Van Gorp's work [11]. A loom must provide for “shedding”: raising and lowering the “warp” threads so as to form a space through which the “weft” may be passed. The warp threads are raised and lowered by means of “healds”. In a “handloom” healds usually consist of a number of strings, which are secured above and below
From De Vaucanson to Jacquard
Jacques de Vaucanson (1709–1782) exhibited in 1738 an automaton that made his designer immediately famous. De Vaucanson is only one of several great 18th century builders of automata. De Vaucanson's automaton was a mechanical flute player, that played so well that the audiences refused to believe that it was an automaton. In the same year De Vaucanson exhibited a mechanical duck that ate, drank and evacuated the digested food afterwards and a mechanical shepherd, which played tunes on a
Mechanical calculators
The first mechanical calculators were built in the first half of the 17th century. Wilhelm Schickard (1592–1635), professor for Biblical languages, mathematics and astronomy, constructed the first machine (Fig. 8). It consisted of an adder in the form of a rectangular box with on top of it an adaption of the so-called Napier-bones (which are merely a handy representation of the tables of multiplication). The adder contained a series of number wheels, each with 10 clearly distinguished
The nineteenth century
The Jacquardloom became very popular and with it the idea of control by means of punched cards spread over Europe. The first to use it outside the textile industry was Charles Babbage (1792–1871), the designer of the first programmable calculating machine. Babbage first conceived of the Analytical Engine in 1833 and by mid-1836 a workable design had evolved. Fig. 9 gives an impression of the general plan of the huge machine that Babbage had in mind. In the drawing Fig. 8, most of the circles
Conclusions
(1) The earliest programmable machines were musical automata. Next came the programmable drawloom. The first designs of programmable drawlooms are from the 18th century. It is remarkable that the main predecessor of the Jacquardloom was designed by De Vaucanson, the well-known 18th century builder of music automata. Following the success of the Jacquardloom the idea of a programme in the form of punched cards was used by Babbage in the 1830s in his design of the first programmable computer.
Further reading
See [2].
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to the Dutch Textile Museum in Tilburg and the National Museum “Van Speelklok tot Pierement” (devoted to music automata) in Utrecht for their assistance and to Riekus Kok for reading an earlier version of this paper.
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