No, this is not Prince Charles moments after he has realised that the media is teh evil. It is popularly described as Japan’s first robot. Or rather, a non-functioning replica of same.

I found the link at Old is the New New. Rob MacDougall may not post often, but he ploughs a furrow in a paddock of delights, to harvest a crop which is close to my heart. Here he combines two wonderful and pathetic factoids in the one zany flow. Handy, dandy, it has the logical flow of the management of information which leads to proto-robots which takes us ultimately to these machines, which we all share as we prowl the world from our keyboards.

The story about the US army and the evolution of card indexes is true, by the way. It gets an offhand mention in Wikipedia, while I think it is quite the most important story about the post assassination history of Ford’s Theatre.

But what do we know about the robot behind the replica?

The rest of the modern exhibit looks like this -

As No Fear of the Future says,

‘The robot, Gakutensoku (or “learning from natural law”), was 7′8″ tall, painted gold, could open and close its eyes, could smile, could puff out its cheeks, and at the beginning of each performance would touch its mace to its head and then begin to write.”

It was apparently built in 1928 by Makoto Nishimura, who is quoted as saying “If one considers humans as the children of nature, artificial humans created by the hand of man are thus nature’s grandchildren”. He seems to have been a biologist, (father of actor Akira Nishimura), who designed it to represent what science should be like – the Nature whose rules we are supposed to learn from is represented by the golden skin and crown of leaves.

It ran on compressed air through rubber pipes. Made to celebrate the accession of Hirohito, it was exhibited in Kyoto, “and then sent on tour to Germany. When it disappeared.”

In those days, it looked like this -

The current version, with an added collar and crazier eyes, is at the Osaka Science Museum. Indeed, the wide shot statue looks crappier than the close up, so my guess is that there are many replicas in Japan. The relevant websites are in Japanese, so I can’t really tell.

But I do know it ain’t no robot – it is an automaton, part of a Japanese tradition that already stretched back 170 years.

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 6th, 2008 at 2:57 pm and is filed under history, science. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.