Interesting Snippets

The doll is about 18 inches high. … . She was created in 1784, just before the Revolution, by a German clockmaker named Peter Kintzing and a French cabinetmaker named David Roentgen, and one year later she was presented as a gift to Marie Antoinette.
The Keeper’s fingers turn a key, and the doll begins to strike the dulcimer’s strings with two tiny hammers she holds in her long, delicate hands. This is not a music box, you understand; there is no rotating drum in sight, no clockwork brass teeth. Virtually all automates are powered by some kind of wind-up engine. In this case, a spring motor hidden under the stool sets in motion an astonishingly complicated system of cams and levers, so that the dulcimer player’s hands actually raise and lower the hammers and visibly tap the individual strings of the instrument. The doll periodically turns her head to regard, with a smile, her audience. Her chest seems to rise and fall. She actually plays her music, her admirers sigh, just like a real person.
But there are always a few who watch her performance not with admiration but with panicky unease. Once in a while, seized perhaps by the same spooky feeling that made early audiences flee movie theaters, someone will jump abruptly to his feet and hurry out. Such a person, I have had it explained to me, is probably experiencing what Freud called the feeling of the “Uncanny”—the terrifying sensation that arises when something cold and inanimate starts, mysteriously, to move and stir before us—when, say, a doll comes to life.
Automates of various kinds have been around since antiquity, as toys or curiosities. But in the middle of the 19th century, in one of the odder artistic enthusiasms the French are famously prone to, a positive mania for automates like the dulcimer player swept the country.