In 1739, Jacques de Vaucanson built a mechanical duck which ended up being called, “The Duck”. The Duck could do many things: flap its wings, muddle in the water with its beak, quack, eat, drink, digest its food, and excrete the food. Each wing of the duck supposedly had over 400 moving parts. Over all, The Duck had over 1,000 moving parts located within its body and inside the base on which it stood. The moving parts were powered by a weight system. In order to build The Duck, Jacques de Vaucanson needed to be very precise which led him to create a precision lathe which was used to cut threads. In addition to the precision lathe, Vaucanson was the first person to use a rubber hose. Rubber hoses were used for The Duck’s digestive canal. Inside The Duck’s digestive system, there were chemicals that would “digest” the food before it was excreted.
If it is true that this duck contained the first rubber hoses inside of it, I would say that the rubber hoses were the biggest contribution to robots in general. The concept having hoses inside of robots that can transport liquids around inside of it is still used today. Robots that use hydraulics today use the same idea of having liquids run through tubing although in today’s cases the liquids running through the tubes help the robot move as opposed to The Duck, whose tubing only transported the food through the “digestive system”.
A suggestion I would have for improving The Duck would be to eliminate the platform that it stood on. By removing the platform, it would be possible to make the duck be able to roam around on its own. Maybe if the duck was able to roam around on its own, it could also be made so that if it walked into a body of water it would be able to swim in it until it reached land again and then be able to continue roaming around on foot.
Sources:
http://www.swarthmore.edu/Humanities/pschmid1/essays/pynchon/vaucanson.html
http://music.calarts.edu/~sroberts/articles/DeVaucanson.duck.html
http://books.guardian.co.uk/extracts/story/0,,650977,00.html
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