The Silver Swan sits on a stream made of twisted glass rods and within a clear glass box. It preens and stares intently into its fabricated pond before swallowing up a little silver fish. When Mark ...

We usually think of robots as an achievement of the modern era. But this remarkable machine is proof that the resourceful inventors of the 19th Century had the technology to create their own automata.

In my novel, The Second Sight of Zachary Cloudesley, set in the mid-18th century, Zachary’s father makes remarkable automata, simulations of people and animals driven by clockwork and programmed by ...

The height of interest in automata was from the 1880s to the 1920s. One of the key forms of automata from this time was the figures dancing on French music boxes. Did you know with a Digital ...

For a moment, suspend your worldview and adopt Descartes’s mechanistic interpretation that living beings are essentially complex machines: a collection of inherently unrelated parts that move and ...

Simon Schaffer presented Mechanical Marvels: Clockwork Dreams Credit: Photo: BBC BBC Four’s documentary Mechanical Marvels: Clockwork Dreams was, in itself, a marvel. Presented by the pugnacious ...

The developers behind “Bitcraft: Age of Automata” want you to build the world from the ground up. Villages, towns, cities, nations and empires are all in players hands. That’s how Clockwork Labs ...

MOVIE legend Martin Scorsese hired a Scot to offer advice on his new blockbuster - because of his love of clockwork. Michael Start is an expert on "all things automata" and he acted as a consultant on ...