The automaton was discovered in the Sultan’s summer palace in 1799 and sent to Britain. Now it’s one of the most interesting artifacts of the Victoria and Albert Museum.

The art of building purely mechanical automatons has dramatically declined with the arrival of electronics over the past century, but there are still a few craftsmen who keep the art form alive. [F… ...

Da Vinci and the Vitruvian Canon. While automatons (much like reading, writing, and bathing) took a hiatus during the Dark Ages, the 1200s saw a rebirth of interest in mechanical sciences.

Automatons have been around for thousands of years. Some of the first ones date back to ancient Greece. Archytas of Tarentum, who was friends with Plato, made a mechanical pigeon that was powered ...

The 200-year-old mechanical boy can write poems and draw pictures. Charles Penniman first saw him as a boy. Today, he is caretaker for the automaton ...

But by the late 18th century, museums of automata had brought mechanical wonders to much wider audiences. Throughout the 19th century, automata were often much less sophisticated, much less ...

So the JPL engineers are currently developing a concept they call the Hybrid Automaton Rover-Venus (HAR-V, or Har-vee) that would essentially be a wind-driven, wheeled mobility platform capable of ...

The mechanical automaton is constructed using rhodium-plated brass and stainless steel, with 18-karat white gold for the sapphire-eyed bird.

The 200-year-old mechanical boy can write poems and draw pictures. Charles Penniman first saw him as a boy. Today, he is caretaker for the automaton ...