Post by Catsmate on Nov 23, 2015 13:12:33 GMT
“Without the duck of Vaucanson, you would have nothing to remind you of the glory of France".
Voltaire
Voltaire
- It’s said that as a child, he once so studied and memorised a clock that he was able to recreate it’s mechanism exactly.
- Presumably he’d already amassed a reputation by previous work, certainly having his own workshop and sufficient reputation as a craftsman at 18 was unusual.
As one of the governors of the Order of Minims was to visit Lyon, de Vaucanson decided to create a number of automata (the term ‘android’ was coined in 1728) to serve a meal to the visitor and other notables, and clear afterwards. The creations were so realistic that they rather disturbed the visitors; one official described them, and de Vaucanson’s interest in such things, as profane. His work and workshop were ordered to be destroyed.
Pleading ill heath, de Vaucanson fled home to Grenoble where he persuaded the bishop to nullify his novitiate. Freed from the Minimes he travelled to Paris.
There now appears a significant hole in his biography; no-one has been able to establish exactly what happened for the next few years. It’s believed he studied anatomy under the brilliant and innovative surgeon Claude-Nicolas Le Cat (wiki) though the exact details of their relationship are unknown). He travelled around France, spending time in Grenoble, Lyon, Tours, Reims, Rouen and Paris.
Around 1736 he was active in Paris, and had access to substantial funds as evinced by his clothing and lifestyle. The following year he received one of his first major commissions The Flute Player. This was a life-sized human figure, resembling a shepherd, that played the tabor and flute with a repertoire of twelve songs. Early in 1738 (11 February) the automaton was publicly exhibited at the Académie des Sciences (with a three livres entry fee to keep out the riffraff).
- Curiously while de Vaucanson was working on the idea for his automaton he fell ill and was incapacitated for four months. He claimed that in his fever he dreamed of many strange things, one of them an artificial figure that could play the flute. He based the design of the automaton on a marble statue by Antoine Coysevox in the Tuileries Gardens.
At the time there was a Europe wide fad for such mechanical devices; however de Vaucanson’s creations were recognised as being vastly superior to most such toys, utterly revolutionary in their lifelike appearance and mechanical sophistication.
The Flute Player featured nine bellows attached to three separate pipes leading into the figure’s chest. Each set of bellows was attached to a different weight, to control the air-flow, with all the tubes gathered into a single trachea analogue which continued through the figure’s throat, into it’s mouth. The lips, which operated on the hole of the flute, could open and close, and even move backwards or forwards. Inside the mouth was a movable metal tongue, which controlled the air-flow. A sophisticated piece of engineering.
- In fact de Vaucanson had to develop flexible rubber tubing in order to achieve it. Something that proved immensely useful for other purposes.
The Flute Player was followed in 1739 by his two other great creations, the Tambourine Player and the Digesting Duck. The latter is considered de Vaucanson’s masterwork, a mechanical duck composed of thousands of parts that could eat grain from a visitor's hand and (apparently) digest and excrete. The latter functions were in fact faked.
By 1741 de Vaucanson seemed to have grown weary of his automata and sold them to a trio of businessmen from Lyon who took them on a tour of Europe, exhibiting them in various cities.
The ended up on Nuremberg and disappeared from sight until 1783 when they were rescued from an attic by Gottfried Beireis, physician and chemist (and reputed alchemist). After his death they automata again disappeared until the 1820s, appeared briefly at the 1844 Exposition Universelle (where it was repaired and examined by the famous illusionist Jean-Eugène Robert-Houdin, wiki), disappeared again and was believed to have been destroyed in a museum fire in Krakow in 1879.
However de Vaucanson had long since embarked on a different career; so impressed by his automata Louis XV arranged for him to be commissioned as inspector of the French silk industry with a remit to increase production (and break the power of the workers in that industry). In this he failed. While the automatic looms he designed (fifty years before Jacquard’s programmable loom revolutionised the textile industry) worked well they were violently opposed by the silk workers. In Lyon de Vaucanson was attacked several times and pelted with stones, eventually having to flee the city at night disguised as a friar.
- Several historians consider the failure to embrace the new technology at this time to have stalled industrialisation in France, causing the country to lag behind Britain.
In 1746 he was admitted to the Académie des Sciences (adding the ‘de’ to his name). He continued working on various automation devices and ideas, including a range of machine tools. He died in 1782 without seeing most of his ideas realised. However in 1805 Joseph Marie Jacquard would redesign de Vaucanson’s loom as the basic of the famous programmable loom that bore his name.
Game use.
Well he sought to create life from inanimate materials, almost changed the course of the Industrial Revolution and had prophetic dreams, that should be a good start.
1. Voltaire called de Vaucanson a "new Prometheus" (shades of Mary Shelley and Frankenstein). Like Prometheus he seemingly had the power, to create life and fashion men out of new materials. So maybe he did. In the Whoniverse he could have had access to anachronistic technology and knowledge, from a time traveller or alien, that allowed him to truly create new life. And what was the source of his obsession with creating artificial life?
2. What happened in the gap period in his life, from around 1729 to 1736? Was de Vaucanson travelling? And if so, was it on Earth or somewhere else entirely? Is this linked to his mysterious illness and odd dreams?
3. What was the source of the monies that paid for his lifestyle in Paris in the 1730s? Had he stumbled over some device or cache that funded him? Was that the source of his abilities?
4. There is another person with mysterious abilities, seemingly inexplicable funds, and a gap in his life in this period. Had de Vaucanson met one Comte de Saint-Germain? If so what did the pair get up to during those years?
5. De Vaucanson could be dropped into the background of a scenario set in the late 1720s or 1730s; perhaps the PCs witness a public demonstration of one of his creations. How do they react?
6. A time traveller with an interest in meddling with established history might be interested in de Vaucanson's work on a programmable loom. Could the Meddling Monk be in Lyon trying to jump-start France's Industrial Revolution?
6a. Bonus points for having the Rani there too, taking advantage of the disturbances and rioting to harvest humans for her latest project.
7. Then there's Gottfried Christoph Beireis. An interesting man (he made a fortune making cinnabar for use as a dye) who dabbled in alchemy. That's the third alchemist in the story, was he trying to steal the real secret of de Vaucanson's inventions?
8. Finally there's the unknown fate of his automata. Was the fire in Krakow actually cover for the Duck being removed by a time traveller? What this done to rescue an important milestone in human mechanics, to prevent the real secret of the duck being exposed, or to sell it to a collector? Then there are the Flute Player and Tambourine Player which seem to have disappeared from history. Perhaps they're in the collection of someone from the twenty eighth century Earth Empire, via the Alexandrian Society? Or decorations in the Hourglass Club?
Comments, suggestions and further ideas welcome.
