----- Original Message ----- From: <jjlassen at chinastudygroup.org>
Ian,
Oh, thanks for that! Didn't know about it. Also related to weaving equipment, makes perfect sense.
Yes, it's earlier, but it doesn't count. Vaucanson didn't make the leap from automaton to machine, or if he did he didn't write anything about it:
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He didn't, but La Mettrie, one of his fans, did:
"Grant only that organized matter is endowed with a principle of motion, which alone differentiates it from the inorganic (and can one deny this in the face of the most incontestable observation?) and that among animals, as I have sufficiently proved, everything depends upon the diversity of this organization: these admissions suffice for guessing the riddle of substances and of man. It thus appears that there is but one type of organization in the universe, and that man is the most perfect example. He is to the ape, and to the most intelligent animals, as the planetary pendulum of Huyghens is to a watch of Julien Leroy. More instruments, more wheels and more springs were necessary to mark the movements of the planets than to mark or strike the hours; and Vaucanson, who needed more skill for making his flute player than for making his duck, would have needed still more to make a talking man, a mechanism no longer to be regarded as impossible, especially in the hands of another Prometheus." http://cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/LaMettrie/Machine/