photo & copy; Alex Gonzalez for http://openphoto.net CC:Attribution

I was watching an extremely interesting tv show the other day on the History Channel. It was about the life of Leonardo da Vinci. I think everyone on this planet knows what a great genius he was, but I never realized that he had actually built robots. Oh I don't mean sketching notes in his ever present note book and drawing pictures of parts, I mean actually assembling robots. Leonardo took a suit of armor and using a sort of clock work mechanism with pulleys and ropes, he was able to make the armor stand up from a sitting positing and move it's arms. The purpose of this robot was for a pageant for the Duke of Milan. Can you imagine what an effect this had on people in 1495? To tell you the truth, I am surprised that they didn't burn him at the stake.The suit of armor was not the only robot he designed. He also designed a self propelled cart. Whether he actually built the cart is in question but the cart was reconstructed from his plans and worked flawlessly. The cart traveled across a room powered by cogs and clock type springs.

Before Leonardo's robot knight there had been figures that moved. These were created by the ancient Greeks. Ctesibus seems to have produced the first moving figures while Hero made several automata and used them in the theater. After him, Vitruvius developed automations and developed a standard of proportions for building them. The ancient Greeks were really into automation and we keep finding more and more evidence of this. They even had a sort of robot god named Talos of which many tales were told. His likeness even appears on some coins. Beyond that, they had built automation into some of their temples. For example when an offering was made birds might chirp. Of course these birds weren't real but they sounded real and that was all that mattered. Door were set to open and close on the lighting of fires in the temple and even the conditions inside the temples were controlled. Fog could be released under certain circumstances and lighting controlled. Many of the things inside these temples were controlled by cleaver air and water pumps which were far ahead of their time.

In 1206 the famous Arab engineer Al-Jazari tells of an old machine that he inspected which contained a musical automaton that was powered by a vertical water wheel. In the 11th century a book was published entitled "The Book of Secrets about the Resulte of Thoughts" by Al-Muradi of Andalusia. It contained many thoughts on using and building clocks and automata. There are 31 models of automata described in the book and 19 models of clocks. Keep in mind that the types of clocks we are talking about would be water clocks, therefore the automata would be controlled by water. The Arabs were the first to use a crankshaft and were over 500 years ahead of the west in it's discovery. The float valve was also used and this didn't appear in Europe until the 18th century.

In 1865 a robot named Steam Man was constructed. It was big, being over 10 feet tall. It was built by Johnny Brainerd, a teenager who was struck with dwarfism. The robot's chest contained the boiler. It was said to look very natural when walking but no so when running. It had lines hooked up to it that controlled whether it went right or left. It seems to have been hooked up to a wagon in the area that the horse would have been in. Later versions of the Steam Man were made by another group of inventors from the Reade family. They built Steam Man Mark II and Steam Man Mark III.

In 1893 a robot was constructed named Boilerplate. It was said to have been put on display at the the 1893 Columbian Exposition. It was constructed by Professor Archibald Campion. He built it with the idea in mind of creating a mechanical soldier. As crazy as this sounds, Boilerplate was sent on an expedition to Antarctica and later circumnavigated the globe. It is said that this robot was able to carry out several military functions, but it seemed that no one was really interested in a robot at the time. Boilerplate was forgotten. Perhaps if we had paid more attention to this robot, we would be far more advanced today in robotics. Some say that Boilerplate was only a hoax and given the state of Victorian technology this could also be true.

A dapper robot with the complexion of a human wearing an impeccable suit which even contained a handkerchief neatly folded in the left breast pocket, was invented in 1900 by Louis Philip Perew. While it was the most human looking robot ever constructed, it was huge. It's height was somewhere about 7 feet 5 inches high. It was said that the robot could walk, run, move it's eyes and imitate many other actions of a human. As with Steam Man, the robot could pull a wagon. It was said that during a demonstration of it's walking ability a log was placed in its path and when it came to it, it stopped, rolled it's eyes and picked up it's foot and put it on the log and used the other foot to step over it.

Well it seems that there was a lot going on in robotics way before any of us suspected. Here is a science that we thought was pretty new, yet is seems to go back way more than 2,000 years. Who knows, maybe some archeologist will find evidence of even older robotic systems in some ancient society?