This is Legonardo, an automaton capable of drawing portraits. Obviously, it doesn’t have the complex clockwork used by automatons of old, like its Swiss counterpart made by Pierre Jacquet-Droz and ...

What kind of a book do we have in “Miracles and Machines: A Sixteenth-Century Automaton and Its Legend”? It includes an account of the 16th-century Spanish prince Don Carlos falling down a flight of ...

A clockwork automaton built 240 years ago was the first in the world to engineer the act of writing. Designed to look like a small boy, The Writer was created by Swiss-born watchmaker Pierre ...

The Silver Swan is the only one in the worldThe Silver Swan, made by James Cox in London in about 1773, is a life-size clockwork automaton that imitates the behaviour of a real swan. Cox was a showman ...

PHILADELPHIA - What makes an automaton tick? For the one at the Franklin Institute here: a couple of hefty spring motors. A mechanized doll built more than two centuries ago by the Swiss watchmaker ...