A nineteenth-century artistic rendition of an automaton baby doll. [3] |
'The Steam Concert', caricature of modern music from 'Un Autre Monde' (1844). [7] |
See main: Neumann automaton theoryIn 1948, American chemical engineer John Neumann famously put forward his thermodynamic-based electrical-chemical automaton theory, in which he envisaged a robot or automaton, made of wires, electrical motors, batteries, etc., constructed in such a way that when floating on a lake stoked with component parts, it will reproduce itself (self-replicate), albeit one that could be made to work only if a source of free energy is available. [2]
“I am an automaton endowed with power of movement, which merely responds to external stimuli beating upon my sense organs.”— Nikola Tesla (1900), “The Problem of Increasing Human Energy”