Mechanical, but almost living bird Jacques de Vaucanson (6 photos + 1 video)

If a person is talented, then he will be able to demonstrate talent in any conditions.





And Jacques de Vaucanson clearly showed this by his example. The French inventor was born in 1709 in Grenoble and was the tenth son in a poor family of a master glover. No prospects for the boy it was shining, and at the insistence of his father he went to the school of monks. But since childhood For years, Jacques demonstrated traction and ability to mechanics. At the age of everything 10 years on my own assembled a watch - an exact copy of the mechanism from the city town hall.



But just cramming boring church books is not for the future monk. wanted. In addition, the church denied science and technology, to which Jacques so gravitated. In parallel, he independently studied anatomy, mechanics, physics. And for one trick, I collected realistic moving automaton puppets.

The holy fathers were angry. And they expelled Jacques from the order. The one not became especially upset and left for the capital, where he gathered his real amazing creation - a musician who played the flute a dozen melodies. Then a tambourine player appeared.



In 1738, an exhibition was held in Paris, at which presents an amazing creation of the master - a mechanical duck. The bird, mounted on a pedestal, quacked, drank water, pecked grain, raised and lowered its wings. But the miracle was the fact that food and water was digested by an incredible creature: waste came out of the duck life is already in a different color. It is clear that this process digestion did not occur. Just the products were stored in one compartment, and the "excrement" was fed from another. But the mechanic did not lose hopes to create a device with a real digestive tract.



The mechanism, as in the case of other creations of the master, was hidden in a stand. The bird made a splash. And duck along with other exhibits were purchased by the rich of Lyons and transported to London.

Then a wonderful exhibit ended up in the Krakow Museum, from where disappeared in an unknown direction after the fire. Watchmaker Jacques Frederic Vedoni in 1998 created a copy of a mechanical duck. But after her transition to private hands, the fate of the copy also remained unknown.



But the failed monk became famous not only for automatons. Jacques de Vaucanson, when he was in his early 30s, was appointed to the post chief inspector of French silk manufactories. And, of course, actively applied his talent to improve technology. In particular, he owns the development of the Vaucanson chain - a special type of chain for weaving machines. The workers were not enthusiastic about the innovations and mechanization. After all, they diligently kept the secrets of manual creation patterns. To which Vaucanson only grunted skeptically and stated that with such nonsense and the donkey will cope. And he really made an automaton in the form weaver donkey. Who wove himself a quietly super-secret floral drawing.



So a boy from a poor family became a member of the Academy of Sciences in Paris and went down in history as an innovator who was ahead of his time.