Historica Automaton (12/29/25)

Robots and automata have been with humans in one form or another for thousands of years. From ancient Egyptian illusionary statutes to Ancient Greek steam or air powered birds, even programmable carts and theatrical figures, up to near-modern mechanisms like the Digesting Duck in 1739 France, the 1770 Austrian chess robot, the 1773 Silver Swan in England, the 1795 Tipu’s Tiger of India and the many robots of far east Asia. As early as the 8th century BC, the Chinese were using wooden mechanisms for burial objects, centuries before the Greek myth of a giant mechanical Talos. Long before European machines that are ha...